u/jujuzeking

Hey guys, still fairly new to TikTok ads and trying to understand what happened here.

I’m running iOS app campaigns optimized for an in-app purchase event. Target CPA is around $25.

I had a few ads/ad groups finally showing positive signal. Some days looked genuinely promising: purchases coming in around target CPA, some creatives looking breakeven/profitable, and CPI in the $2-$3 range.

Then I did what everyone says to do: I cut the ads that had spent around $50+ without producing purchases and kept the ads that had actually produced results.

After that, performance completely fell apart.

No major budget increase. But since pruning:

• CPI jumped from roughly $2-$3 to $9-$11+, sometimes much higher
• CPM/CPC got worse
• Purchases basically stopped
• Spend concentrated into the previous “winner”
• The exact same ads that had been producing purchases suddenly stopped converting

In one scaling ad group, after pruning, I only had one ad left and it basically stopped spending. I then added a batch of new creatives because I thought maybe the issue was too much concentration, but TikTok barely spent on the new ads and kept pushing spend into the old winner.

So now I’m confused. Did I prune too aggressively and trigger relearning / destabilize the ad group? Is this just normal AEO volatility with too few purchase events? Or is TikTok’s “winner” not actually repeatable even if it had profitable days?

I’m not asking whether creative fatigue is possible in general. This happened at low spend, over a very short window, on the same creatives that had just worked.

For people who’ve scaled app campaigns on TikTok: how do you handle pruning and scaling when purchase volume is still low? Do you let the ad group recover for 24-48h, or do you rebuild into clean test/scaling lanes?

EDIT: Important clarification: we use Singular as our MMP, so I’m not judging this only from delayed TikTok/SKAN reporting. Installs, purchases, and revenue show up almost real time in TikTok.