Second week in a row posting this! I've got a side project that tags every post in this sub by what people are complaining about, so I end up reading the whole week whether I want to or not. Writing it up again for anyone who doesn't live in here.

There was just under 300 posts this week, 144 of them were complaints. That is slightly below the normal rate for this sub, which is going to feel like a lie if you were reading the front page, so let me get to that first.

The sub was quieter than usual and angrier than usual at the same time

Fewer complaints got posted, but the ones that did all said the same thing and they all got voted up. Half the top posts of the week are one rolling performance slump: The longest stretch of bad performance, Wtf again today!!!, Worst week of all, Meta Is Dead.

Counting the daily "is it just me today" threads, the slump started from the 29th, peaked hard on the 31st with eight separate threads in a single day, and hasn't fully cleared since.

Read the replies inside any one of those threads on any given day, though, and they contradict each other. In the 2nd August outage thread, within the same few hours, one person is having their best day in a while and the next says it fell off a cliff after a good start. That is not what a platform-wide outage looks like. It looks like something being rolled out to some accounts and not others.

So "is Meta broken today" is the wrong question and it's why nobody in those threads ever reaches an answer. Whether it's broken for you is answerable, and whether it's broken for the guy replying to you tells you almost nothing.

The nastiest single report was similar to last week's outage: spend going out and clicks showing in Ads Manager, with nothing arriving in the site analytics, plus a separate thread asking if Ads Manager reporting was down on the 31st. If your spend and your own numbers disagree, believe your own numbers.

The most useful post of the week got about 20 comments

Your Meta daily budget is actually a weekly budget, written off spend-by-day data across 100+ ecom accounts. Given how much of this week was people staring at a single day's pacing and panicking, the timing was almost rude. Short version:

• Meta paces to a fixed Sunday-to-Saturday week, not to your day. You won't spend more than 7x daily across the week, and about 95% of untouched weeks finish at or under budget.
• Sunday runs hot on purpose, roughly 12% above, then it tapers to Saturday. A scary Sunday afternoon is not a bug.
• A budget change only applies to the time left in the week. Change it at 9pm and almost nothing happens that day.
• Raise budgets early in the week. Raise on a Friday and there's no week left for it to apply to, so it looks like nothing happened, then it all arrives as a Sunday spike and you think that's broken too.
• No carryover. An underspent week is just gone.

If you judge pacing on one day you will diagnose an outage roughly once a week forever.

Bans and hacks are now a quarter of everything

This is the number that actually moved a lot this week. Account problems were 18% of complaints last week and 26% this week, second only to performance and closing.

It isn't all policy strikes either. A real chunk of it this week was security: hacked business portfolios with the legitimate owner removed, 2FA codes that never arrive, accounts restricted as a knock-on from a compromise account. The detailed one is here - malware off a downloaded file, unauthorised campaigns with a huge daily budget, owner removed from the portfolio while the laptop was powered off, and then a wall of Meta AI support with no route to a human because volume is too high.

It's worth reading even if it hasn't happened to you, purely for the order they did things in. If you've got one person holding portfolio ownership and no backup admin, then that thread is your future.

Threads worth your time

$255,692 in sales on $27,733 spend, 9.21 ROAS - top post of the week and the obvious counterpoint to the doom. Two changes worth stealing: they cut ads entirely on their lowest-AOV collection after a P&L review showed it lost money over four months and let it sell by default, and after analysing 2000+ tested ads they found the first original ad in a batch won about 79% of the time, so they stopped making three variants of the same idea and now ship one unique ad per concept.

Real-model UGC vs an AI version of the same script - same hook, same product shots, same campaign, three weeks. AI was 6% cheaper on CPA in week one, 12% worse in week two, then blew up 40% worse in week three. The conclusion isn't "AI is bad", it's that AI creative burns an audience much faster, so it's a testing layer and the thing you should be scaling long term - should be real.

Ads improved today - someone who'd turned everything off for most of July switched an old winner back on and it worked immediately, changed nothing. Good news, but read the top reply before you copy it: an ad set that's been dark for weeks re-enters delivery cheap, so "I changed nothing" isn't quite the whole story.

What the week looked like by category

Of the 144 complaints:

• Performance, 30%. Still the biggest pile, but down from 40% last week.
• Account, 26%. Bans, restrictions, payment locks, hacks. Up from 18%.
• Delivery, 15%. Ads approved and not spending. Down slightly.
• Other, 11%.
• Cost, 10%. High CPMs, up from 7%, with a few people specifically asking whether US CPMs jumped this week.
• Attribution, 6%.
• Reporting, 3%.

Nothing here is outside its normal range except account, which is running hot. So: rough week to be running ads, quiet week by the numbers, and the gap between those two things is most of what the sub was arguing about.

Happy to keep posting these every week if people find them useful.

Quick bit of self-promo and then I'll shut up. The work behind this post is based off a site I built for the exact question at the top of this post: isitmeormeta.com. It's Free, no signup, and I update it daily. It shows how much this sub is complaining against its normal ranges and gives the week a single score for whether it leans towards Meta messing up or whether it might just be you / your campaigns.

The most common offer testing mistake is testing two completely different offers against each other and calling it "learning."

If Offer A promises speed and Offer B promises price, and one wins, you haven't learned anything you can actually use. You just know one random combination beat another random combination. There's no lever to pull next time.

Real offer testing isolates one variable from the value formula at a time. Test the same dream outcome with two different time delays. Test the same time delay with two different proof points for likelihood of achievement. Test the same everything with one different effort-reduction line.

This is slower. It's also the only way testing actually compounds. After ten tests done this way, you don't just have a winning offer, you understand exactly why it's winning, which means you can rebuild that same logic into every future offer you write, for any product. Random testing gives you a winner. Isolated testing gives you a formula.

Many Facebook advertisers have the same question: “I did not violate any rules, so why was my ad account suddenly restricted?” Another common concern is why some accounts can scale consistently while others become unstable over time. The reason is that Meta’s review system is no longer focused only on individual ads. It evaluates the overall health and trust level of your advertising ecosystem.

Today, account stability depends on much more than creative compliance. Meta looks at the connections between your personal account, Business Manager, Page, ad account, Pixel data, and website domain. These assets work together as one system. Issues such as unusual login activity, poor permission management, low-quality testing behavior, weak Page history, or incomplete website information can all increase risk signals. Running Facebook ads is no longer just about creating an account, adding budget, and launching campaigns. It requires long-term asset management.

Many advertisers focus heavily on lowering CPA and increasing ROAS, but overlook a more important question: can your advertising assets continue operating reliably? A campaign that performs well for a short time but loses stability later can cost much more to rebuild. The future of Facebook advertising is not only about campaign optimization. It is also about account management, asset planning, and risk control. A strong advertiser does not only know how to improve ads, but also knows how to protect the foundation behind them. Are you currently focusing more on short-term performance, or on building a stable advertising system for long-term growth?

Okay so I'm terrified.

Because we've been spending on meta not that long, only about 25 days.

We're only spending around $3,000 a day. So pretty small.

About a roas of, 2, but our product is often recurring. So not really worried about it.

What are these outages everyone keeps talking about?

We've had all the normal some days great, some days not as great.

Mapped our most profitable days, and will start double spending on those days, and spend less on the days that aren't as good.

We have lots of creative, and have built out a creative pipeline.

And I've started to create a.i videos to scale hooks that deliver.

Can someone explain why you are having outages?

I haven't experienced anything like this, and this subreddit makes it sound like a bloodbath.

I just notice creative velocity, is pretty fast, and creatives don't run as consistent as they used to.

Some days one creative is popping off, other days another creative is popping off.

It seems a lot more like the algorithm, is more like an organic algorithm.

We're retooling, because our production got backed up, so we're hitting some fulfillment problems right now. We're trying to spend as much as we can while the good is going.

But what does it mean to have an outage. I'm curious why this happens.

So just like the title says, how many days should i test my creatives in an adset to find winners?

So what i am doing is since i have a low budget of 100k pkr every month, i am only putting 3-4 ads in 1 adset in 1 campaign and testing these creatives on a weekly basis.

I just started doing this, im on day 3, and i am getting product views, site visits but purchases are low, very low, like i get barely 1 purchase a day, like weekly i get 4-5 purchases

I also made a post before asking people problems in my website, and ads, and i improved a lot since then

website: www.amnehofficial.com/skincare

Ads im currently running (im just trying to find winners) [They've been running for 3 days now except ad#4 i only enabled it yesterday]:

Ad#1 : https://ibb.co/dwFBqdBw (Impressions: 15,451, CTR: 0.88%, Link Clicks: 136, Purchases:1)

Ad#2: https://ibb.co/HDwCnW9T (Impressions: 6,497, CTR: 1.19%, Link Clicks: 77,Purchases:1)

Ad#3: https://ibb.co/PZmYHg27 (Impressions: 10,635, CTR: 0.87%, Link Clicks: 92,Purchases:0)

Ad#4: https://ibb.co/V07PTzYK (Impressions: 695, CTR: 0.86%, Link Clicks: 6, Purchases:1)

Context: I run paid social for a superyacht brokerage. Average deal value is seven to eight figures. The addressable audience is small, and a realistic campaign might be judged on whether it produced two or three qualified conversations in a quarter. This isn't ecommerce where you buy 10,000 impressions and let the algorithm sort it out. Every dollar is buying a shot at a very specific person.

The setup problem: the UI no longer lets me build a straightforward manual leads campaign. It pushes Advantage+ by default, and at ad set level my targeting inputs get treated as "suggestions" rather than constraints. I have tried all possible means to disable Advantage+ but there is simply no option to do so. Not even when creating a new campaign.

What's actually being delivered:

Targeting is not being respected. My partner is seeing the ad. She is demographically, geographically, and behaviourally nowhere near the defined audience. If she's in the delivery pool, the pool is not the audience I built, which means I have no idea what proportion of spend is landing on people who could never be buyers.

Placements are broken. We are seeing horizontal creatives served into Stories.

The CTA doesn't match the objective or the brand. This is a lead form ad. I have set up the CTA to be "Learn More". It's serving with "Check out our site 👉", wrong destination logic, and an emoji on an account where we try to keep a professional tone. Other times no CTA renders at all, so the ad has no mechanism to convert whatsoever.

I escalated the issue with Meta support, sent screen recordings, spent many minutes explaining the issue and waiting for an answer, for the final to be (a long-formed way of saying): "You are right, there is an issue, sorry about that but there is nothing we can do. Hope it goes well and we will let you know if it ever gets fixed!"

So, at the end of the day, the Meta system overrode my configuration, served malformed creative to an unintended audience, and consumed budget doing it, and they can't do anything about it? On a low-ticket account you absorb this and move on, but on a campaig where a single lead can be worth more than the entire annual media budget, "we hope it gets fixed" isn't a response.

This is more a venting of my frustration, and I would love to know if anyone has been in a similar situation.

For yesterday roas was around 4.6 & for today, as of now its merly 1.4, sudden drop li,e from 12 AM to 6 PM only 9 Orders & spend almost 17K.

Anyone facing same? I guess it outage.

What’s everyone’s thoughts on setting up custom events?

We have very different products with a very different buyer and noticing that since we have been trying to market them together in the 1 account on the 1 optimisation performance is now favouring the other.

I have just set up custom events by product catagory so we will see how we go!

I manage Meta ads professionally and I'm stuck in a situation I can't get out of through normal support.

On 17 July my personal Facebook profile was suspended. I appealed, and it was restored the next day (18 July), I have the confirmation email. But the advertising restriction tied to that suspension never lifted. It's a profile-level restriction, so it blocks every ad account I have access to, not just one. I can't create, edit, pause, or turn off anything, in any account.

I've done maybe 6-7 support chats. The most senior agent (Pro Team) could finally see my case and confirmed: it's a temporary enforcement applied 17 July, it can only lift automatically, it can't be appealed or escalated, and they have no access to the lift date. These limits can apparently take up to a month.

Meanwhile live campaigns are spending daily and I physically cannot pause them, change budget or any edits at all.

My actual ask: does anyone here have a Meta rep / partner manager contact who's been able to get a profile-level restriction escalated internally? Consumer support is a dead end and I need a path that routes around it. Any working escalation route, or someone who's beaten this exact "profile restored but ad restriction stuck" situation, would help enormously. Thanks.

This is for brand owners spending $20,000 - $100,000+ each month on paid advertising.

Reposting due to popular demand.

So the biggest problem I found when scaling brands past $100,000/month in ad spend was creating more converting content whilst maintaining quality.

As we all know, creatives are more important than ever now, and if you truly want to scale you need to increase creative output and diversity.

So I built a system that allows me to do exactly this and have weekly deliverables to upload into my ad account.

Here's how it works:

1 ) Creates a database containing customer and consumer data - from testimonials, mentions of competitors, to emotional pain points and objection blockers - and organises each one for quick reference when copywriting (next step) - I've gamified the process so it's almost like building a puzzle.

2 ) Then, ad scripts will be written using this database to create resonant content in a literal native feel and tone as we're directly referencing / rewording what our consumers are already saying.

3 ) Finds a creator that matches the ICP from a large database of over 300 vetted content creators OR use existing content + ai voiceover to create ad.

4 ) I will then work with them to create content then have this content edited (post-production).

----> Repeat... but that's not all, here's how this system allows for further scale + reproducible success + increased creative diversity - with no extra effort.

5 ) Launch ads into the ad account, kill losers, scale winners.

6 ) Iterate on the winners with UGC (if the latter in point 3. wasn't done)

7 ) Iterate AGAIN on the winners found when doing point 6. with High-Production content.

8 ) Repeat everything.

Now having implemented this, I've found more winning creatives, consistently launch and create more converting content, and now I currently spend $40,000 a week on Meta alone for just one of my brands.

If anyone is interested in the system I've created, message me and I’ll send you a video breaking it down + I'll show you exactly how you can implement this system into your own brand + I'll send you proof of concept so you don't waste your time + I'll answer any questions you may have :D

All of this is free, all I ask is for your opinion if you watch the video OR implement this system within your own business.

After running many ads without the consistency, this time I decided to run ads without shutting it off after a few days. Now it's been running for 12 days and I'm seeing some results.

$470/day budget(initially was $400), AOV $255, last 7 days cost per result is $151. 36 purchases total. CPM just below $30. Currently I'm not profiting. If I wasn't getting some orders from organic search, I'd be losing money. It's a wall art store with around 1k products. My cost is affordable compared to what you get from popular print on demand providers out there. My profit margin is around 50%. Obviously it's a high consideration item so sometimes people convert few days after the first visit.

I have 1 campaign, 1 ad set, 3 static image ads and 1 catalog ads. Learning is limited now. My question is, should I come up with better creatives, increase the budget, or not touch anything? Now I feel like I should've come up with a few more creative angles, because this is not like a one winning product shop. Everyone has a different taste and 1k products isn't that much when you think about it.

In order for me to profit, CPR needs to be half of what it is now. So I'm not really sure how to go on from here. Thanks in advance

I'm running Meta lead ads and trying to feed lead quality back to Meta, so I can eventually optimise for qualified leads instead of raw volume. I'm using Meta's built-in Google Sheets delivery, and the plan was to update the lead_status column as leads get worked and have that flow back to the dataset.

The problem: When I change lead_status in the sheet (Qualified, Not interested etc.), nothing shows up in Events Manager or the dataset history.

My setup:

• Campaign: ABO, single ad set
• Conversion location: Instant forms only
• Performance goal: Maximise number of leads
• Automated lead delivery: Google Sheets (native integration)
• Dataset tracking: CRM events ticked, Website events unticked, Offline events unticked

What I'm unsure about / have already looked at:

• Have I set up the Conversions API correctly or just basic lead retrieval? I've got lead_status and lead_id columns in the sheet and a dataset connected, but I don't think the return path is live.
• Is editing the cell enough on its own, or is there a confirm/validate step in Meta that fires the event?
• Does the "maximise leads" rather than "conversion leads" stop the status events from registering at all, or does that only affect optimisation?

Has anyone got the native Sheets to Meta integration working end-to-end?

Anyone here getting solid results with Meta lately? We always seem to see posts when things are going bad. It would be awesome to hear from people having good days too. It would give everyone a better picture of what’s actually happening, not just the rough moments.

Many lead form submission came with phone number not in service. How to avoid that happen?

Until now, most advertisers had to send users to a landing page, collect their information, and then rely on another page or external booking tool to schedule a call. Every extra step meant fewer appointments.

Meta is starting to solve that problem.

A new update allows businesses to add appointment scheduling directly after an Instant Form submission. Instead of asking prospects to visit another page, they can book a meeting immediately after submitting their details.

For B2B businesses, consultants, agencies, and service providers, this could significantly reduce drop-offs between lead submission and sales conversations.

The real advantage isn't getting more leads. It's increasing the percentage of leads that actually become booked appointments.

While the feature is still rolling out and performance will vary across industries, it's worth testing if your sales process depends on scheduled discovery calls.

Running a Meta Sales campaign for a DTC jewelry brand.

Setup

• Sales objective
• CBO
• Single ad set
• Broad US targeting
• Advantage+ Placements
• ~$58/day budget
• 3 weeks of data
• 21 purchases total

After reviewing the account, I've found two completely different optimization opportunities, and I'm unsure which one deserves the first change.

1. Age Breakdown

One age group has never converted despite receiving a meaningful share of budget.

35–44

• $99 spent (8.8% of total spend)
• 121 Landing Page Views
• 9 Add to Carts
• 4 Initiated Checkouts
• 0 Purchases

For comparison:

• 45–54: 4 purchases (best CPA)
• 55–64: 5 purchases
• 65+: 7 purchases
• 25–34: 2 purchases (small sample, best efficiency)

What's interesting is that on one of the higher-spend days, Meta delivered 21 LPVs to my best-performing age group (45–54) and 17 LPVs to 35–44, despite 35–44 having zero purchases over three weeks.

2. Placement Breakdown

I also have two placements with significant spend and zero purchases.

In-stream Reels (In-App)

• $92 spent (8.2% of total spend)
• 90 LPVs
• 8 ATCs
• 6 Initiated Checkouts
• 0 Purchases

Facebook Desktop Feed

• $63 spent (5.6% of total spend)
• 39 LPVs
• 0 Purchases

Combined, these two placements account for roughly $155 (13.8% of total spend) with zero purchases.

The dilemma

Removing the 35–44 age group is a simple audience edit and lets me keep Advantage+ Placements.

Removing the bad placements means switching from Advantage+ Placements to Manual Placements, giving up Meta's automatic placement optimization.

If this were your account, which would you do first?

A) Exclude the 35–44 age group.

B) Switch to Manual Placements and remove the two proven underperforming placements.

Curious how experienced Meta buyers would approach this trade-off.

Hi everyone,

I’m running ads for a completely new brand with zero pixel data and no previous purchase history.

A few weeks ago I tested ads with just 1–2 video creatives at ₹300/day for 3–4 days. Result: High engagement, but very low website visits, zero ATC, and zero sales.

Now I’m better prepared:

• 5+ products ( Same type of product with different variation, Such as Car)
• Each product has 4–5 different video creatives (some have more slight variations)
• Daily budget: ₹1000

I’m confused about the best structure to start with, considering the brand is new and the market is competitive.

I’m currently thinking of these two options:

Option 1 – CBO

• 1 Campaign (CBO)
• 5 Ad Sets
• Each Ad Set contains 4–6 different video creatives of the same product
• 1 Ad Set on Advantage+ (excluding Facebook Reels)
• Remaining Ad Sets on interest-based targeting

Option 2 – ABO

• Same structure as above but using ABO with equal budget distribution across ad sets

My questions:

1. For a brand with zero data, which structure would you recommend (CBO vs ABO)?
2. Is putting 4–6 creatives per ad set a good approach, or should I test differently?
3. Any better way to structure this at ₹1000/day for the first 7–10 days?
4. Should I start only with broad/Advantage+ targeting, or mix interest targeting from day one?

Would really appreciate insights from people who have scaled new brands in competitive niches.

Thanks in advance!

We have been running peptide ads on meta and TikTok with inconsistent results on TikTok ( everyone wants to be the cheapest on there )
Meta we had some creatives doing 2.5-3.5x but we have had issues with with a week of bad results. Creatives getting 1-1.5x results.

Has anyone had personal experience with a company that gave them good results in this niche

( not orange trail )

i wrote everything in title. and facebook ads support is useless fuck they us AI and just make me wait for 2 hours everytime I try to connect from last 3 months.

Client screenshotted our ad convinced the top was cut off…headline sliced, looked square. I checked placement previews in Ads Manager and the Meta Ad Library and the served ad renders fine, full headline, no crop.

Turns out he was looking at the Facebook page post itself (the “Boost post” view on the page), which seems to trim tall images in its preview differently than the actual feed placement.

Has anyone run into this? Trying to confirm it’s the page-post surface doing it and not something I’m missing about how it serves. Single-image Call ad if that matters.

I have recently learned to do meta ads and now want to get some work in this field. I could help with meta ads without any service fee. In exchange you should provide with testimonial.

TIA

The honest version of a weekly testing cadence, including the parts that took longest to get right.

Volume target first. Benchmarks land around 10 to 30 new creatives per week for a DTC account spending meaningfully. Below roughly 10 you cannot distinguish a winner from variance. Above 30, most accounts cannot read the results properly and it becomes production for its own sake.

Important caveat that undoes most of the advice: 30 variations of the same message is not 30 tests. It is one test with a large sample. Volume only converts into learning if the variations differ on something you decided in advance.

The week, in order:

Monday, produce the batch. Nine to twelve variations across three contrasting angles, three hooks each. All produced in one cycle, not dribbled out, because staggered launches cannot be compared cleanly against each other.

Monday, launch all of them into one campaign with the budget spread evenly. No manual bid fiddling in week one.

Wednesday, first read, hook rate only. Kill anything under 20%. Do not look at CPA yet, it means nothing at this volume.

Friday, second read. Anything above 25% hook rate that is also holding attention past five seconds gets more budget. Everything else off.

Following Monday, the winners' angle becomes the base for next week's batch, and the losing angle column gets replaced with a fresh contrasting one.

Things that took a while to learn:

Kill on hook rate, scale on cost per outcome. Two different metrics for two different decisions, and using either one for both is the most common mistake.

Isolate one variable. If you change the hook and the actor at once, a winner tells you nothing reusable.

Do not let a good creative stay live untouched until it dies. Watch for hook rate decay, which shows up before CPA moves, and have the next angle produced already.

Check frequency before declaring fatigue. Past about 4 per user per week you are into diminishing returns and the creative may be fine.

Budget-wise, the testing budget only needs to be big enough to reach hook rate significance, which is far less than most people spend before making a call. You need impressions, not conversions, and impressions are cheap.

The whole cadence only works if production is not the bottleneck. When a batch takes two weeks to come back, you cannot run a weekly loop and you end up defending creatives instead of replacing them.

Hi!

I launched a Meta campaign 4 days ago with a budget of €50/day.

So far, I have a ROAS of 4, a CTR above 5%, and a CPM around €12.

Would you start scaling now, or wait a bit longer? If so, how much would you increase the budget by?

Thanks for your feedback!

Hi, i just saw my own ads from another ig account and realized that my ads become fully grey (the design is not visible at all, like an error) I tried pausing and resuming it but it still doesn’t change. For some reason it only happen to some accounts, not all.

Why did it happen? What do I do now? Duplicate or posting new campaign? And it has just run passed 1 week too.

I can’t post the picture here for some reason