u/iamdanp

Total bag?

I’ve got a b2b digital product that sells really well during the week, but sales die in the weekends. Im considering reducing spend on Friday afternoon and turning back up on Sunday evening. Meta’s budget scheduling tool only lets you increase spend (of course it does) and I don’t want to use a third party ad management tool. I will potentially use Claude to do basic budget increase/decreasing however.

My concern is that dropping budget for the weekend only will negatively impact the scaling I am doing for this business as I’m potentially re-starting learning every week. And I’m also aware that just there is some value in weekend traffic: it will start a sales cycle for those who buy mid week.

Has anyone had success in budget management like this? What is your advice?

Been running Meta ads for years and spent millions of dollars in that time. My approach has always been: if a new ad doesn't succeed in the first 24 hours - kill it. Only rarely had I seen an ad that started badly, improve and become a good ad. I used to take joy in telling big agency folk their 'wait for 2 weeks to see if it works' methodology was just them being lazy and ultimately killing the ROAS on clients spend.

As a result of this approach, I'm a tinkerer. Always playing around with ads until I find a structure and combo that works.

I started working on a new account for a business I co-own. Product is very good, it's unique and priced well, website converts at 5%, founders are industry-famous and highly respected. Problem is, ads weren't working. I spent 6 weeks and thousands of dollars testing everything I had in my bag of tricks and nothing was sticking. We'd see little moments of promise, followed be deathly silence.

Super frustrating as I previously would have given myself a 10/10 for knowing how this platform works. So I tried something I've never done before... I waited.

I set up all my ads in an Andromeda-friendly way (one campaign, one ad set, multiple ads that can work through the funnel), broad targeting and a reasonable daily budget. Day one was ok, day two-four: terrible. Traditionally I would have stopped spend on day two and found more creative, different structures etc, but I'd honestly run out of energy for more ideas, so I just let it keep going.

Then something wierd happened: all of a sudden on day 5 I got some sales, then more on day 6, and the last 3 days have been successive record days (off a small base, but meaningful). I've gone from 0.5x to 5x ROAS, which puts us in a 'very profitable' zone, so now I can scale - i just hope it's stable.

Anyways - for someone who has traded on my ability to out-optimise others, perhaps now patience is actually a key factor in making Meta ads work for us.

Facebook is cooked. There is so much evidence pointing towards the fact the algo is constraining performance to maximise spend from us as advertisers... the 'immediate sale after budget cut' above just happened now to me, but this has occurred on at least 20 (probably closer to 50) other occasions.

For another campaign I did last week, I got 3 sales from 9 landing page views and only 600 ad impressions in 2 days, then, despite this looking like an epic campaign, sales completely stopped.

Its becoming increasingly obvious Meta have coded the algo like a gambling site to get us to spend more - what I don't understand is why they have suddenly reduced the it return gives us, when the buyers are clearly there. It's bordering on fraud IMO... Has any one else experienced this?

I live in the part of the world where it's July already, and I've just had the best morning of sales I've had in months... could it possibly be the turnaround we've all been praying for!?

Context: I run an agency but am testing on one of my own eCommerce stores: I'm based in New Zealand and have Australia and New Zealand audience for this business. Testing with a $25 a day spend as a starting point.

- Super basic ads: like Facebook RHS ads. Small image and 50 character headline, 100 character description
- Targeting is an AI prompt: the ability to pinpoint the types of chats we want ads to show in is powerful and unique. Legit excited about this.
- For tracking: pixel is easy to install but manual (code in the header).
- Conversions can be tracked, but no customisation available and not sure how accurate this is yet
- Ads show up below the chat, above the input box.
- Ads need to be approved (been waiting for 2 hours so far and nothing yet) and advertiser needs to be verified with business credentials
- ChatGPT told me: "The most powerful part of ChatGPT ads is that they appear when someone is already mid-decision. Not passively scrolling, but actively trying to solve a problem, compare options, or figure out their next move."

For anyone freaking out about performance... brace yourself.

Every single month, without fail, my ads absolutely fall off a cliff in the last 48 hours. CPAs blow out, ROAS tanks, delivery goes weird. Doesn't matter what I do. It's like clockwork.

Been running accounts for years across multiple niches. It's not your creative. It's not your audience. It's just the end of month auction getting obliterated by brand advertisers burning their monthly budgets, or Facebook deciding to cash in even more, while delivering much less.

If you're already hurting, the next two days are going to be rough. Don't touch anything, don't panic-pause, just wait it out.

Anyone else tracking this pattern?

This subreddit is full of people losing their minds over performance. I get it.

But I reckon a lot of the problem isn't the ads or the algo: the job of advertising is to get people to your site, not complete the sale.

I'm not a big believer in creative volume solves all the problems. I had a couple of bad months and put my energy into CRO: Better offer. Tightened pricing. Full UX review of the site. Added Wetracked to get decent signals back to the pixel.

Changed very little in Meta. Same base ads for months. Results are strong and improving.

Is anyone else going down this path?

Has anyone else noticed performance completely craps itself in the last couple of days of the month, for otherwise high performing accounts and ads? Outside of Black Friday & Xmas, this has happened every month for over a couple of years now across a number of my own and my clients businesses