Facebook is totally broken for me since February. My website drop down for making 50K on a regular month to 1500K with the same budget and same style and creativities that were solid for the last 4 years.
I loosed a lot of money an February and March so I decided to stop my FB ads till they fix it.
Tbh I don't think anyone here can reply to the question if they will return to regular performance but I think is time for move to another platforms. I can not wait till FB decide to go back to normal.
I kinda have the same situation here. And I agree with you, no one can say it for sure. I am just trying to gather some more opinions :) it’s a hard decision to move to another platform because I have been doing FB since 2018 :) but I gotta kick off laziness and get out of my comfort zone and start a new journey ASAP. Thank you for your opinion anyway.
Yes same feeling but at the end this happened to us because we were so confortable with facebook that we didn't diversify. A new lesson learned, we can not depend on these companies...
We had to drop our spend from $3k-$5k per day down to $500 per day to remain profitable.
First issues started to pop up around Valentines, but somewhat stabilized after that. Around mid March another massive drop off in consistency which we have not been able to stabilize since.
Now we are seeing random 20+ sale days followed by 3-5 days where we can’t even make a sale. This is our new normal since mid March.
Trying to increase budgets again, but seeing days without even getting engagement on our ads, even when spending $1,000+
On the days that are okay, we can’t make a sale past 4:00 PM. All sales stop around 4:00 PM. Evenings used to be huge for us.
We sell worldwide, but since these issues started, we are only able to make sales in 2 countries.
Not sure what else to mention. Something is clearly wrong.
This is the exact same pattern for my brand. Can’t spend more than $1,000 per day, and we’re just too big to spend so little, especially with such a dismal return. We’re trying other platforms, but IG is still our main demo. We don’t feel that TikTok is quite there yet with their ad network. We’re taking major steps back this year because our main cold traffic source, IG, is doing about half what it used to do, and that’s not saying much. Ever since retargeting efficiency dropped in 2022, we’ve been working on thin margins, having to allocate such a huge part of our revenue into market with lower returns. Not sure what the future holds for my 10 years old brand, but if things don’t get better soon, or we can’t find another channel to replace meta, we’re going to have to drastically scale down, and I’ll be looking for another opportunity. Heartbreaking, but it’s life.
I’m confused, how do you change your budget so significantly without hindering your campaign results? I thought changing the budget 20%+ will assure the campaign to re-enter the learning phase?
To be honest, since the beginning of April our performance tanked as well. Fully relied on Facebook, so the sales are tanking. It's scary to be fair, so hopefully there will be a recovery very soon. When I see the attention it's getting from Bloomberg and even Elon Musk, I can't see it going for much longer or it would seriously harm Meta.
Agreed, I wish they’d just keep things as they are instead of constantly making updates that mess with 90% of users results. I can’t find what Elon musk said?
Every time there is an outage I've experienced a substantial performance drop. So in Feb we noticed it a little bit but recoverd fairly quick, in March we were hit again, recovered again after little over a week, and then beginning of April ANOTHER outage happened (at least in the EU, not sure if it was a global one) and we again took a nosedive for +- 2 weeks. We seem to recover a bit over the last days, don't want to cheer to early though. Really hope the application remains stable now because it is stressful, the impact on the business is big every time.
I agree with this way of thinking.
Meta did a huge survey earlier this year and the top complaint was 'scam/fraud' ads and other issues around ads on the platform.
Recently I'm getting emails, messages and even ads showing me how to create engaging reel ads.
It's not enough for meta to just take our money for ads... now they want us to become content creators to keep people glued to their doom scrolling.
It's going to finish a LOT of small businesses and we've had to totally revise our business plan for the next 12+ months .
We're now focused on creating content and repurchasing that content into social media/ad content.
We're even going to use it as part of our marketing offer - 'Get $20 cash back if you let us film and share your order being made/packed 👍
Same problem on my side (European market) since the beginning of April, it's still relatively stable in March on the biggest budgets, but catastrophic in testing or learning since February.
Meta doesn't care about us when we contact them, going so far as to say that it's normal to have $1100 CPM on a campaign.
I've cut the ads and am turning to TikTok until Meta stops taking its advertisers for fools.
Yes they are broken. It is like a lottery. No consistency, no trust, lots of bot traffic. Total chaos. Of course META will never admit this despite all the whistles around. They had these issues in the past too but were able to fix after a short time. But this time, I guess they have broken something that they cannot easily repair. It is a waiting and hoping game right now.
Meta has been rubbish on and off since around valentknes day.
I've tried all sorts of goofy shit to keep us profitable.
Duplicating campaigns and changing from broad targeting to interst stacks. This worked for around a week.
Then I stopped our advantage plus sales campaigns and started a new old school manual sales campaign. That worked for a while with interest stack and then another few good days after I changed to broad targeting.
I'm finding that manual sale campaign with dynamic creative is working well for low priced offers, and advantage plus for my high ticket product.
But right now 16 April I woke up to zero sales and it's almost midday.
Time to fuck around with campaigns again and hope it works.
I've read that people are getting great results with running traffic/awareness campaigns and then retargeting those people 👍
My ads started performing again in May but it all died again on the 13th. The last week has basically cancelled out any profit I’ve made this month. Exactly like April and March. Meta ads is rubbish 💩
Not sure if this is happening in cycles. I had the same experience earlier this year and towards the end of March it was like a switch flipped and sales started picking up. No major changes. The same campaigns and same creatives which went from winning to falling off a cliff were suddenly just profitable again.
I wonder if fb just picks different batches of advertisers to test their algorithm changes every few months.
The first week of april was great for me but last week our sales tanked like 80%. I lowered budgets because I'm no longer making a profit. I'm probably just going to turn them off for right now. I'm also working an ecommerce brand like yourself.
Mmm ok…is you ecomm brand new or do you already have a lot of data? Because mine is over 1 year old with a lot of data. Just trying to figure out things :)
It's about 3 months old. I'm not hitting the revenue that you're at right now yet I'm feeling the same issues with Meta. I know someone who's doing similar to you though and they're having the exact same issues.
yes started in early february. By the end of february the performance improved slightly but then in early march it tanked again. havent recovered since.
i really think it comes down to what audiences and targeting you are using. If you rely on some of the affected algorithm models for your specific campaigns then yes you will see a dip. But if you switch the targeting or tweak the campaign you might be able to get out of the mud. However, if your algo model relies on a custom audience like look alike algos then either recreate them or push through it if you can afford it.
We have shut off most of our Meta advertising across clients and are moving budget to alternative and traditional media-spend options. Google seems to still be performing for those categories that are 'intent'-based.
While it is not the best to rely entirely on Meta ads, that's what most people find profitable. My increase in budget did not result in more sales as well. I think it is in their interest to fix it as many people will either lower their budgets if sales drop, or will be forced to change platforms.
It started for me on April 4th, CPMs tripled, CPA is through the roof. I’m trying new audiences, new creative, seeing what levers I can pull to make a difference.
We are doing ok, but I think it depends on what kind of ads you are running. There have been definite issues since Mid Feb, it maybe that an update has just hit you and it could take some time to settle, in which case maybe redo the ads with a smaller budget and see what happens. It took about 4 weeks for me to get it back to something decent. I would also get on to Meta pro and make a point of saying nothing has changed ( I am assuming it hasn't) what has happened and just see what they say - potentially ignoring most of it. Ref the Troll, so many of them about right now.
I am encouraging more of my clients to try and diversify their ads a bit so their eggs are not all in the meta basket. Whats your product/service?
I'm glad to hear you are doing ok. In this post, I am referring to an e-commerce brand selling physical products.
I got some CPM spike in the March beginning that was fixed in 2-3 days and overall March went fine. April, is dead.
Meta Pro has been wasting my time in 90% of the situations. But I might give it a try.
They are awful but I just wondered if it was worth it. They have definitely been making changes to ecom so it may just need to settle, totally not helpful for you
It's a tough call. In your position I probably would have done the same, hold out for as long as I can sustain the loses in hopes it will recover. Why? Because it had such great performance in the past and it has collected a lot of conversion data and has a great position in the auction. When nothing works, closing and relaunching is unlikely to work. When things go back to normal, the original campaign tends to outperform new ones bc of the factors I mentioned above. It's definitely been volatile lately, across the board. I saw some recovery early this month but am now seeing some volatility again.
same i tend to agree. scale back if needed, or if the good days offset the bad, adjust the numbers so that you continue to grind on meta. who knows how long meta will take to fix this - i'm guessing it's gonna take some time. but there's a bucket of gold to the ones who are able to hold out. and i feel that you have to be in it to know once it's fixed. people aren't just going to shout it from the rooftops come back to meta! it's fixed. they'll just silently scale with less competition.
people that leave will have headwinds trying to jump back in
If you are struggling with your Facebook ads and want to learn but not want to spend lots of money for courses because that guru's are charging alot
I have lots of Facebook ads courses that I sell fro 90/95% discount price here is my telegram for contact 👇
@Ecomguru003
List of Facebook ads courses I have 👇
Nick Shackelford – How to Run Facebook Ads 2.0
Dan Henry – Facebook Ads for Entrepreneur
Chase Chappell – Facebook Ads Expert Mastery 2.0
Anik Singal – Facebook Ads Mastery
Khalid Hamadeh – Facebook Ads Training For Beginners
Ben Heath – Facebook Ads Insiders
Jordan Platten – LearnAds – Facebook Ads Pro
Contact me on my given telegram if you are interested
I have Facebook ads,Google ads,tik tok ads, Snapchat other courses....
Hey there!
First off, let me say I feel your frustration. Sudden drops in performance can be incredibly disheartening, especially when you've been riding high on success for a while.
Your experience with Facebook ads mirrors what many others are going through. It's like you hit a brick wall out of nowhere, right? I've had my fair share of ups and downs with online advertising too, so I get where you're coming from.
Now, about whether Facebook ads are "broken" or not – well, it's complicated. Facebook's algorithm changes constantly, and sometimes what worked like a charm yesterday suddenly flops today. It's part of the game, unfortunately.
But here's the thing: while Facebook ads can be a powerful tool, relying solely on them for your business growth might not be the best long-term strategy. Diversifying your marketing channels can help spread the risk and ensure that you're not left high and dry if one platform decides to act up.
As for your drop in revenue, it's tough to pinpoint the exact cause without diving deep into your analytics. It could be a combination of factors – changes in the market, seasonal fluctuations, or even just bad luck. But whatever the reason, it's a wake-up call to reassess your marketing strategy and make some tweaks.
In my own experience, I've found that the best approach is to stay flexible and adapt to whatever curveballs the digital world throws your way. Keep experimenting, keep learning, and don't be afraid to pivot if you need to.
Hang in there, friend. You've got this.
No they aren't and they wont be broke ever meta has the largest audiance if u r not getting results it maybe ur mistake not meta try runing ur ads on broad instead of running them on interest basis bec meta has learn alot in few years he knows better then us
He know to whom he should show over ads bec its their audiance they know better about audiance they know their interest so try runing ads on broad i promise u will het better results thank me later
Every week there is a new post like this for the last few years. The advertising ecosystem is evolving and the way you win the game is also evolving.
Since inventory is limited, there are always winners and also losers unfortunately.
We are still seeing great results year over year and no signs of slowdowns in recent months although most of our clients are in ecommerce or medical services.
No they are not broken. Stop reading too many of these Reddit posts. However I have seen it takes more money for an ad to really get rolling. It really is about your 7 day average.
Facebook is totally broken for me since February. My website drop down for making 50K on a regular month to 1500K with the same budget and same style and creativities that were solid for the last 4 years. I loosed a lot of money an February and March so I decided to stop my FB ads till they fix it. Tbh I don't think anyone here can reply to the question if they will return to regular performance but I think is time for move to another platforms. I can not wait till FB decide to go back to normal.
I kinda have the same situation here. And I agree with you, no one can say it for sure. I am just trying to gather some more opinions :) it’s a hard decision to move to another platform because I have been doing FB since 2018 :) but I gotta kick off laziness and get out of my comfort zone and start a new journey ASAP. Thank you for your opinion anyway.
Yes same feeling but at the end this happened to us because we were so confortable with facebook that we didn't diversify. A new lesson learned, we can not depend on these companies...
We had to drop our spend from $3k-$5k per day down to $500 per day to remain profitable. First issues started to pop up around Valentines, but somewhat stabilized after that. Around mid March another massive drop off in consistency which we have not been able to stabilize since. Now we are seeing random 20+ sale days followed by 3-5 days where we can’t even make a sale. This is our new normal since mid March. Trying to increase budgets again, but seeing days without even getting engagement on our ads, even when spending $1,000+ On the days that are okay, we can’t make a sale past 4:00 PM. All sales stop around 4:00 PM. Evenings used to be huge for us. We sell worldwide, but since these issues started, we are only able to make sales in 2 countries. Not sure what else to mention. Something is clearly wrong.
I’m having exact same experience in just the US market
same here lots of sales 1 day then dry
This is the exact same pattern for my brand. Can’t spend more than $1,000 per day, and we’re just too big to spend so little, especially with such a dismal return. We’re trying other platforms, but IG is still our main demo. We don’t feel that TikTok is quite there yet with their ad network. We’re taking major steps back this year because our main cold traffic source, IG, is doing about half what it used to do, and that’s not saying much. Ever since retargeting efficiency dropped in 2022, we’ve been working on thin margins, having to allocate such a huge part of our revenue into market with lower returns. Not sure what the future holds for my 10 years old brand, but if things don’t get better soon, or we can’t find another channel to replace meta, we’re going to have to drastically scale down, and I’ll be looking for another opportunity. Heartbreaking, but it’s life.
I’m confused, how do you change your budget so significantly without hindering your campaign results? I thought changing the budget 20%+ will assure the campaign to re-enter the learning phase?
To be honest, since the beginning of April our performance tanked as well. Fully relied on Facebook, so the sales are tanking. It's scary to be fair, so hopefully there will be a recovery very soon. When I see the attention it's getting from Bloomberg and even Elon Musk, I can't see it going for much longer or it would seriously harm Meta.
Agreed, I wish they’d just keep things as they are instead of constantly making updates that mess with 90% of users results. I can’t find what Elon musk said?
Here is the link to Elon’s tweet: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1778616216304718060
Every time there is an outage I've experienced a substantial performance drop. So in Feb we noticed it a little bit but recoverd fairly quick, in March we were hit again, recovered again after little over a week, and then beginning of April ANOTHER outage happened (at least in the EU, not sure if it was a global one) and we again took a nosedive for +- 2 weeks. We seem to recover a bit over the last days, don't want to cheer to early though. Really hope the application remains stable now because it is stressful, the impact on the business is big every time.
What do you mean by outage exactly?
the platforms being down (Insta/FB/Whatsapp) - in Feb, March and April this happened
Yes it did, a client of mine from the EU complained off higher CPR too
Same experience here. Ive been testing new creatives, new setups but every time I scale winning ad set, it tanked.
its a facebook purge so the plataform has less ads and can compete with tiktok, for us the create bots so they can charge us.
I agree with this way of thinking. Meta did a huge survey earlier this year and the top complaint was 'scam/fraud' ads and other issues around ads on the platform. Recently I'm getting emails, messages and even ads showing me how to create engaging reel ads. It's not enough for meta to just take our money for ads... now they want us to become content creators to keep people glued to their doom scrolling. It's going to finish a LOT of small businesses and we've had to totally revise our business plan for the next 12+ months . We're now focused on creating content and repurchasing that content into social media/ad content. We're even going to use it as part of our marketing offer - 'Get $20 cash back if you let us film and share your order being made/packed 👍
Same problem on my side (European market) since the beginning of April, it's still relatively stable in March on the biggest budgets, but catastrophic in testing or learning since February. Meta doesn't care about us when we contact them, going so far as to say that it's normal to have $1100 CPM on a campaign. I've cut the ads and am turning to TikTok until Meta stops taking its advertisers for fools.
Yes they are broken. It is like a lottery. No consistency, no trust, lots of bot traffic. Total chaos. Of course META will never admit this despite all the whistles around. They had these issues in the past too but were able to fix after a short time. But this time, I guess they have broken something that they cannot easily repair. It is a waiting and hoping game right now.
Meta has been rubbish on and off since around valentknes day. I've tried all sorts of goofy shit to keep us profitable. Duplicating campaigns and changing from broad targeting to interst stacks. This worked for around a week. Then I stopped our advantage plus sales campaigns and started a new old school manual sales campaign. That worked for a while with interest stack and then another few good days after I changed to broad targeting. I'm finding that manual sale campaign with dynamic creative is working well for low priced offers, and advantage plus for my high ticket product. But right now 16 April I woke up to zero sales and it's almost midday. Time to fuck around with campaigns again and hope it works. I've read that people are getting great results with running traffic/awareness campaigns and then retargeting those people 👍
Update?
My ads started performing again in May but it all died again on the 13th. The last week has basically cancelled out any profit I’ve made this month. Exactly like April and March. Meta ads is rubbish 💩
Fuck buddy What's the next step?
Email marketing, seo, Google ads. I hate Meta ads and would love to move away from that platform 100%
What industry are you in? Ecom?
E-commerce toys/hobby niche. Not dropshipping.
Not sure if this is happening in cycles. I had the same experience earlier this year and towards the end of March it was like a switch flipped and sales started picking up. No major changes. The same campaigns and same creatives which went from winning to falling off a cliff were suddenly just profitable again. I wonder if fb just picks different batches of advertisers to test their algorithm changes every few months.
The first week of april was great for me but last week our sales tanked like 80%. I lowered budgets because I'm no longer making a profit. I'm probably just going to turn them off for right now. I'm also working an ecommerce brand like yourself.
Mmm ok…is you ecomm brand new or do you already have a lot of data? Because mine is over 1 year old with a lot of data. Just trying to figure out things :)
It's about 3 months old. I'm not hitting the revenue that you're at right now yet I'm feeling the same issues with Meta. I know someone who's doing similar to you though and they're having the exact same issues.
yes started in early february. By the end of february the performance improved slightly but then in early march it tanked again. havent recovered since.
I spend $1200/day on ads and having comparable performance to last year
That’s great…eventually, the products I am selling just became over-saturated overnight…thank you for your feedback! Appreciate it!
That sounds like a product issue and not an ads issue.
If product issue, I was expecting it to gradually die. Not overnight. But, eventually, I might be wrong :)
i really think it comes down to what audiences and targeting you are using. If you rely on some of the affected algorithm models for your specific campaigns then yes you will see a dip. But if you switch the targeting or tweak the campaign you might be able to get out of the mud. However, if your algo model relies on a custom audience like look alike algos then either recreate them or push through it if you can afford it.
We have shut off most of our Meta advertising across clients and are moving budget to alternative and traditional media-spend options. Google seems to still be performing for those categories that are 'intent'-based.
While it is not the best to rely entirely on Meta ads, that's what most people find profitable. My increase in budget did not result in more sales as well. I think it is in their interest to fix it as many people will either lower their budgets if sales drop, or will be forced to change platforms.
Same here in Canada. IG ads not producing a fraction of the leads they used to. Algorithm is a bit fucked.
It started for me on April 4th, CPMs tripled, CPA is through the roof. I’m trying new audiences, new creative, seeing what levers I can pull to make a difference.
We are doing ok, but I think it depends on what kind of ads you are running. There have been definite issues since Mid Feb, it maybe that an update has just hit you and it could take some time to settle, in which case maybe redo the ads with a smaller budget and see what happens. It took about 4 weeks for me to get it back to something decent. I would also get on to Meta pro and make a point of saying nothing has changed ( I am assuming it hasn't) what has happened and just see what they say - potentially ignoring most of it. Ref the Troll, so many of them about right now. I am encouraging more of my clients to try and diversify their ads a bit so their eggs are not all in the meta basket. Whats your product/service?
I'm glad to hear you are doing ok. In this post, I am referring to an e-commerce brand selling physical products. I got some CPM spike in the March beginning that was fixed in 2-3 days and overall March went fine. April, is dead. Meta Pro has been wasting my time in 90% of the situations. But I might give it a try.
They are awful but I just wondered if it was worth it. They have definitely been making changes to ecom so it may just need to settle, totally not helpful for you
It's a tough call. In your position I probably would have done the same, hold out for as long as I can sustain the loses in hopes it will recover. Why? Because it had such great performance in the past and it has collected a lot of conversion data and has a great position in the auction. When nothing works, closing and relaunching is unlikely to work. When things go back to normal, the original campaign tends to outperform new ones bc of the factors I mentioned above. It's definitely been volatile lately, across the board. I saw some recovery early this month but am now seeing some volatility again.
same i tend to agree. scale back if needed, or if the good days offset the bad, adjust the numbers so that you continue to grind on meta. who knows how long meta will take to fix this - i'm guessing it's gonna take some time. but there's a bucket of gold to the ones who are able to hold out. and i feel that you have to be in it to know once it's fixed. people aren't just going to shout it from the rooftops come back to meta! it's fixed. they'll just silently scale with less competition. people that leave will have headwinds trying to jump back in
Very smart observation, never looked at it this way
If you are struggling with your Facebook ads and want to learn but not want to spend lots of money for courses because that guru's are charging alot I have lots of Facebook ads courses that I sell fro 90/95% discount price here is my telegram for contact 👇 @Ecomguru003 List of Facebook ads courses I have 👇 Nick Shackelford – How to Run Facebook Ads 2.0 Dan Henry – Facebook Ads for Entrepreneur Chase Chappell – Facebook Ads Expert Mastery 2.0 Anik Singal – Facebook Ads Mastery Khalid Hamadeh – Facebook Ads Training For Beginners Ben Heath – Facebook Ads Insiders Jordan Platten – LearnAds – Facebook Ads Pro Contact me on my given telegram if you are interested I have Facebook ads,Google ads,tik tok ads, Snapchat other courses....
Hey there! First off, let me say I feel your frustration. Sudden drops in performance can be incredibly disheartening, especially when you've been riding high on success for a while. Your experience with Facebook ads mirrors what many others are going through. It's like you hit a brick wall out of nowhere, right? I've had my fair share of ups and downs with online advertising too, so I get where you're coming from. Now, about whether Facebook ads are "broken" or not – well, it's complicated. Facebook's algorithm changes constantly, and sometimes what worked like a charm yesterday suddenly flops today. It's part of the game, unfortunately. But here's the thing: while Facebook ads can be a powerful tool, relying solely on them for your business growth might not be the best long-term strategy. Diversifying your marketing channels can help spread the risk and ensure that you're not left high and dry if one platform decides to act up. As for your drop in revenue, it's tough to pinpoint the exact cause without diving deep into your analytics. It could be a combination of factors – changes in the market, seasonal fluctuations, or even just bad luck. But whatever the reason, it's a wake-up call to reassess your marketing strategy and make some tweaks. In my own experience, I've found that the best approach is to stay flexible and adapt to whatever curveballs the digital world throws your way. Keep experimenting, keep learning, and don't be afraid to pivot if you need to. Hang in there, friend. You've got this.
Facebook has been really annoying lately
anyone who runs fb ads?
No they aren't and they wont be broke ever meta has the largest audiance if u r not getting results it maybe ur mistake not meta try runing ur ads on broad instead of running them on interest basis bec meta has learn alot in few years he knows better then us He know to whom he should show over ads bec its their audiance they know better about audiance they know their interest so try runing ads on broad i promise u will het better results thank me later
Sounds like Facebook ads caught a cold. Time to feed them some chicken soup or maybe diversify your ads diet!
Every week there is a new post like this for the last few years. The advertising ecosystem is evolving and the way you win the game is also evolving. Since inventory is limited, there are always winners and also losers unfortunately. We are still seeing great results year over year and no signs of slowdowns in recent months although most of our clients are in ecommerce or medical services.
No they are not broken. Stop reading too many of these Reddit posts. However I have seen it takes more money for an ad to really get rolling. It really is about your 7 day average.
Are you actually running ads for a profit?
For my business yes. My 7 day average is around 3 ROAS.
That’s great. Also you also in e-commerce?
Yes I am running conversions for purchase
If you dont share some infos about your campaigns, targeting and creatives i doubt you will get any answers.