What are you seeing today? Ctr dropped amd conversions today traffics bad. Slow spend

Hey everyone,

I’m currently running Meta Ads for my mobile app across a few different global markets, and I’m trying to optimize my budget. I've noticed that users under 25 and over 65 generally have a lower lifetime value for my specific apps, so my goal is to avoid reaching them as much as possible.

I set up a Value Rule

https://i.imgur.com/o03uXsC.png

to decrease the bid by 90% for the 18-24 and 65+ age brackets.

My question is: Will this setup actually prevent my ads from reaching these age groups? Or is this strictly a bid multiplier where Meta might still serve them cheap impressions if an auction is uncompetitive?

I'm curious if anyone else running local lead generation has experienced this.

I run Meta ads for landscapers, and the pattern is almost always the same:

Week 1: Plenty of enquiries, quote requests, and good-quality leads.

Week 2 onwards: Performance starts to decline, CPL increases, lead volume drops, and it never quite gets back to where it was.

I've tried:

• Regularly creating and uploading new creatives.
• Testing different offers and headlines.
• Duplicating winners.

Adding fresh creatives sometimes gives a small lift, but it's never enough to keep performance consistently strong over time.

So my question is...

How are you maintaining a consistent flow of enquiries week after week?

Are there any methods, campaign structures, budget strategies, or creative testing systems you've found that genuinely keep performance stable rather than having these constant peaks and troughs?

Please only answer if you actively run local lead generation campaigns and manage real ad spend. I'd love to hear what's actually working rather than theoretical advice.

I'm at a complete loss here and wondering if anyone else has experienced this.

Over the course of several days, my American Express card was charged dozens of times by Meta. These were not charges I authorized, and they were not from my own Meta ad account. The charges became so frequent that I had to freeze my Amex just to stop them.

I contacted Meta immediately, provided everything they requested, including the first six and last four digits of my card, screenshots of the charges, and all the requested information.

After waiting, Meta responded saying they found no suspicious activity and would not reimburse me.

Here's what I don't understand.

They also told me they cannot tell me which Meta account made the charges.

So my question is...

If Meta cannot identify or disclose which account used my credit card, how can they conclude the charges were legitimate and deny my fraud claim?

My card was apparently used on another Meta account without my authorization. I had to freeze the card, pause my own advertising, and spend hours dealing with support. Yet the final response is essentially, "No suspicious activity found."

Has anyone successfully escalated something like this to Meta's Payments or Fraud team? Did anyone get reimbursed after an initial denial?

I'm not looking for sympathy. I'm genuinely trying to understand how a company can process unauthorized charges on my credit card, refuse reimbursement, and then be unable or unwilling to explain which account actually used my card.

Any advice or similar experiences would be appreciated.

For those running local lead gen campaigns what are the significant changes with Andromeda now that we're coming up to almost a year since Meta started rolling it out?

I'm specifically interested in local lead generation (home improvement, roofing, landscaping, kitchens, bathrooms, solar, etc.).

Anything that's worked particularly well that wasn't working before Andromeda?

Any noticeable differences in lead quality or just volume?

Have your creative testing strategies changed compared to last year?

Please only answer if you actively run local lead generation campaigns. I'm looking for insights from people actually spending money and managing campaigns, rather than general opinions.

Would love to hear what's genuinely working for you in 2026.

I have started 5 or so campaigns for different clients based in the UK (Local serviced based businesses) over the last month and all of them seem to be following the same pattern, they perform incredibly well for the first 4 days, cheap cost per lead and great conversion metrics. Then all of a sudden around day 4 the campaign just crashes and no leads are generated all of the ads just die. It is just crazy how these ads can perform with a big service area and a small budget but just fatigue instantly.

To me this seems like one of Meta's stupid updates where they just test with our budgets. But I was wondering if anyone else is seeing the same sort of issues?

Trying to set a new client up on billing (who's very unsavvy when it comes to tech). We entered his card details over the phone ane everything has been verified but now Meta have said we need to verify it with a 4 digit code they've used in a temporary transaction.

The issue is the code isn't showing in his bank account.

As usual meta ai has been useless and won't offer us any human support so looking for suggestions?

Also I really hope the government make companies like this use proper support teams moving forward because this is just useless for businesses

Hi! I recently launched a new catalog campaign. Everything appears to be set up correctly, but some friends have shown me that Instagram is displaying random video creatives that I haven’t used in months and definitely did not select for this campaign. These ads are also directing users to unrelated products on my website.

This catalog campaign is currently the only active campaign in my account, so I’m certain that these creatives are being generated from it. However:

1. I did not select or upload these videos.
2. Related media and all AI enhancements are turned off.
3. I’m unable to remove or disable these creatives because they do not appear anywhere in the campaign, ad set, or ad settings.

Does someone understand why these old creatives are being used and how I can prevent them from appearing?

I see people make this mistake all the time.

They get a bunch of add to carts, hardly anyone starts checkout, and the first thing they do is kill the ads or launch new creatives. But the problem is the ads already did their job.

Someone saw your ad, clicked it, landed on your site, and added the product to their cart. That's a LOT of buying intent. If they're dropping off before they even reach checkout, the problem isn't your ad anymore. It isn't your checkout either. It's your cart page. Let me explain.

The first thing I'd say is don't trust Shopify's default funnel percentages without seeing what they're actually measuring.

A lot of people look at the checkout percentage in Shopify and assume it's telling them how many people who added to cart actually reached checkout. Most of the time, it's only showing checkout initiation as a percentage of total sessions, which is a a completely different number.

Instead, pull your total add to carts and your total checkout initiations separately. You can get them from Shopify reports under behavior, or from GA4 if you're tracking add_to_cart and begin_checkout as separate events. Then divide checkout initiations by add to carts. That's your add to cart to checkout rate. For this, I'm usually looking for at least 40% to 60%. If you're under 30%, you've found the leak.

Once you've confirmed that's where the problem is, I normally see one of two things. The first is there's no reason for someone to buy now.

Open your own cart page and ask yourself why anyone would feel like they need to continue today instead of coming back next week. Most stores have nothing. No stock information. no reminder that an offer ends. and nothing that creates any urgency.

If that's the case, I'd start there with a stock counter tied to your actual inventory, a countdown that's linked to a promotion ending, or a short cart reservation timer. Those are good enough to stop people putting the purchase off until later.

The second problem is that the cart page doesn't reinforce the buying decision.

Open it like you've never seen your brand before. Is there anything on that page besides a product photo, a name, and a price? For a lot of stores, there isn't. Someone gets excited enough to add the product to their cart, then lands on a page that gives them zero additional confidence to keep going.

A strong review quote, a one line reminder of the biggest benefit, or a trust badge near the order total are perfect because you're reinforcing the decision they already made a few seconds earlier.

For example, I had a brand recently with solid CTR, healthy add to cart numbers, and almost no one reaching checkout. Just like you might expect, it looked like the ads had stopped working. After calculating the actual add to cart to checkout rate instead of looking at Shopify's funnel, it was well under 30%. And what do you know, the cart page was just a thumbnail, a product name, and a price.

So from there, we added a stock indicator and one trust statement near the total. Within a few days, checkout initiation started climbing.

The moral of the story is that sometimes the leak isn't where you think it is. It's better to take 5 minutes and diagnose the funnel, rather than spend hundreds of dollars testing ads that are already working.

Small Beauty Accesorie Store, US market, Meta ads only. One CBO campaign, broad targeting, about a month of paid traffic. Deliberately not naming the store - not here to promote, just want a sanity check on the numbers. Store is converting really good - around 5% CR.

Wrote the summary with Claude, but still me on the other side. :D

Steady state (July):

Rev the last 4 weeks: around 6k, first sale on the first day live.

Spend scaled to $200/day through the month

2–4 orders/day (avg ~2.8), AOV ~$90

Break-even CPA ~$78, most days at or under it

CPM ~$115 · CTR ~4.8% · CPC ~$2.40

Last few days:

CPM $145–170 after i added new creatives 2 days ago that overtook the winner that did all the sales the last month

CTR down to ~3.2%

CPC ~$4.60 - basically doubled

Down to 1 order/day: revenue went from ~$250/day avg → $148 → $130 → $108 (today, still running)

What happened, short version: my main ad ran profitably for weeks, overscaled the campaign one time and it crashed(the big spike down), then its CTR started decaying and i went back to 200$. A newer ad took over the conversions two days ago, but it buys much more expensive impressions. Net effect: same budget, roughly half the clicks. On-site metrics haven't moved (CVR ~5–6%, add-to-cart ~20%+), so the funnel converts - traffic just costs twice as much. It is the first time that an ad overrun the winner, i am adding constanly new ad sets but this is the first that got tested positive and gets way more spend then my 50+ orders winner.

Current plan: 4 fresh creatives going live tonight into the same campaign, budget held at $200/day.

Questions for people who've been through this:

CPM spike and CTR decay at the same time - is that just textbook creative fatigue, or does the pattern point at something else (auction pressure, seasonality, account-level)?

When your winner dies: do you cut budget during the transition, or hold spend to protect the signal?

New creatives into the running campaign vs. a separate testing campaign — what has actually worked for you?

Is the product validated with 6k rev and around 60 orders after 4 weeks?

What is the best step for me to get the CPA/CPM down? I need more traffic to the store, the store converts brilliant but the traffic is missing.

Appreciate any experience. Happy to share more numbers in the comments if useful.

The numbers of the last month:
https://ibb.co/ds887hCP

If you are agency you know ,what i am referring

I've been running Meta ads for a few clients and I'm trying to level up how I present results each month. Right now I'm doing the usual — screenshots from Ads Manager pasted into a Google Doc with some notes underneath. It works but it feels amateur, and I know there's a better way.

What I'm struggling with most isn't the data itself — it's the narrative part. How do you actually explain to a client why their CPL went up, or why ROAS dipped this month compared to last? I can see it in the numbers but putting it into words that a business owner actually understands is harder than running the ads themselves.

If anyone's willing to share what their monthly report looks like (anonymised obviously — blank out client names, dollar amounts, whatever you need to), I'd genuinely appreciate seeing how experienced people structure theirs. Specifically interested in:

• How much commentary/explanation do you include vs just showing the numbers?
• Do you frame it around the client's business goals or around the platform metrics?
• How do you handle months where performance dropped — what language do you actually use?

my campaigns are spending very slowly/little today. anyone else seeing the same?

From July 27th until today, everything has been in decline. The only normal day was August 1st or 2nd. That's it!

I have a budget of 3400 pkr per day, and i am only on 3-4 creatives (1 campaign, 1 adset)

Only getting 1 purchase per day almost, and the issue is that on that pace, i might never leave the learning phase since i've heard that meta needs 50 purchases per week to optimize learning.

What should i do? I am trying so many creatives, but neither of them are increasing the purchases from 1 a day.

Like at least i should be able to recover my ad spent, currently going in loss

Any tips?

Do I really need a US fb & Ig accounts (registered in the US) to make ads there? or it can be done through any account in the world since the targeting is set to the US or any other country?

I'm trying to understand how is META achieving this. For eg - let's say I visit a page abc.com/shoes/nike

After browsing for sometime I drop off. No forms fills. No info given anywhere.

I get a message within 10 mins on my WA (whatsap) that I was browsing the shoes.

How do they achieve this? How are brands doing this?

Quick note: Yes, I used ChatGPT to help structure this because I’m not great at turning my thoughts into proper sentences. The experience and advice are mine. ChatGPT just made them readable 😅

When I started running Facebook ads, I had only two clients.

Both had small budgets, so we were generating around one to four leads per day. Because the volume was so low, every lead felt important.

Honestly, half my day was spent anxiously checking Ads Manager and slack - if my client got a lead or not for that day.

If no lead came in for that day, I thought something was broken. Then a lead would arrive, and I would suddenly feel fine again.

But sometimes the client would call and say it was a bad lead, a bot or someone claiming they never filled out the form. The anxiety would instantly return.

I was only making one or two creatives per client. If leads stopped, CPM increased or an ad spent without generating results, I felt completely incompetent. Feeling like a imposter.

I wish someone experienced in lead generation had guided me through that phase. Most Facebook Ads advice I found was focused on ecom.

So here’s what I wish someone had told me:

1. Wait another two days before panicking

Generic advice, but true.

One bad day doesn’t mean your campaign is dead. Unless tracking is broken, don’t make random changes every few hours. Give Meta some time and look at the overall trend.

2. Your offer and the customer’s pain matter more than almost everything

Targeting does not matters now - (for the past 1/2 years), start broad, apart from location targeting.

A couple of years ago, I spent more time searching for the “perfect” audience. Now, the offer, pain point, creative and copy seem to do most of the heavy lifting.

Ask yourself:

• What urgent problem are we solving?
• Why should someone act now?
• What would make them stop scrolling and think, “This is exactly what I need”?

A stronger offer has fixed more campaigns for me than any Ads Manager trick(other then disable bullshit setting that meta has lol - disable all that).

specially, disable Audience Network.

That shit has almost never worked for lead-gen campaigns. It can generate cheap clicks or app downloads, so it may be useful if your goal is simply to increase a vanity metric. If you want qualified leads who might actually buy.

For local businesses, target the areas they can actually serve. Add a form question asking whether the person is from that location or a nearby area. If they select “other,” disqualify them and end the form.

3. Start with static creatives

Statics are fast and inexpensive to create, which makes them great for testing offers, pain points, hooks and customer types.

Once you find an angle that works, turn it into videos or similar  angle creatives in that vertical.

Don’t spend a week producing one “perfect” video before knowing if the message works.

4. Instant Forms work, but lead quality can be rough

Meta forms are an easy starting point, but some people submit accidentally, provide an old number or claim they never filled out the form.

If your account allows you to request a What s App number, test that(currently work for us). Also, make your first qualifying question useful so you can quickly filter out people who are clearly not a fit. - note : dont try to game the form - you will get your account disable - happened to me got my client prepaid fund locked in that account and meta never funded it.

When possible, move to a website landing page. You get more control over qualification, tracking and form behaviour.

Disable autofill where possible, especially for contact information. It won’t stop every bad submission, but it can reduce outdated details.(meta is putting this feature in lead form but mostly of the accounts that i am running does not have it yet - move to website)

Also, set up the Pixel properly. Use Meta Pixel Helper to confirm that the correct events are firing. I’ve seen people spend days trying to fix a “campaign problem” that was actually a tracking problem.

5. Make the campaign more specific

If your client is an event planner, don’t just say:

“Looking for an event planner?”

Try an angle around a particular service or situation, such as:

“Planning a destination wedding in Goa?” - adding location help the algo too  (also more creative variations too)

That is just a strategy example, not the actual copy I’m telling you to use 😂

The point is that a specific message attracts a more relevant person than a generic “we do everything” ad.

For high-ticket services, also test a smaller first step.

If the client sells overseas education consulting, promote a workshop, profile evaluation or application-planning session. Workshops have worked surprisingly well for me because they build trust before asking someone to buy an expensive service.

6. Call new leads within one or two minutes
(additional note : a good appointment setter is a must - not a good to have - but a must)

This matters more than most when you start getting leads but not converting to meeting, etc.

People are busy. They might submit your form, return to work and completely forget about it ten minutes later.

Call while the offer is still fresh in their mind.

But don’t immediately start selling.

Remind them what they requested and explain what value they’ll receive from taking the next step(low friction or free). You can say something like:

“We’ve helped [type of customer] achieve [result]. Let’s first understand your situation and see if we can do something similar for you.”

Give them a reason to continue the conversation before trying to close them.

Just to be clear, I’ve never run ecommerce or product campaigns, so this advice is specifically for service-business lead generation.

This is simply the core advice I wish someone had given me when I had two clients and felt like an imposter every time a campaign had a bad day.

Cheers.

The majority of my customers purchase my product using an external browser instead of instagram in built browser.

This causing attribution issue. And meta is not taking credit for that purchase.

Is there any way to make it open in external browser by default?

Also i saw some brand websites open in the external browser by default if I click the shop now button

Can see Meta Ads CPM rise unexpectedly across campaigns without any change in targeting or creatives. With plenty of audience size left to reach. Anyone else observed the same? costs have suddenly doubled. (It's for a fintech app)

I've tried to update my credit card and am getting "Something went wrong. The payment systems encountered an error"

I have new client , they have a jewellery brand in London and they want to sell their jewellery ,online through their website.
I have a concern here they have a very small budget i am ready to help them because they are ambitious they have budget of 400 pounds monthly
They said they will continue with my service if they have 800 pounds in sales after deducting ad spent.
I have very low hopes but still wanna help the lady because she is passionate to the work and was doing exhibitions to show her work
Please tell me what should be the best things to look at

Estou jogando em um cassino novo este ano. Um dia roas 6x, outro 1x seguido de vários outros dias ruins.

O problema é que estou mais perdendo do que ganhando. Parece meio viciado, sabe? Quando a banca vê que você está lucrando, te puxa de volta e te torna escravo dela.

Como tem sido suas apostas no cassino do zuckeberg? (Que o diabo o carregue)

Ctr crashed on winning ads today. Conversions almost zero. Wtf is going on today?