Solved: Conversion Campaign CTR drops, Frequency rises Quickly

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out!

Read through your situation with your Facebook campaigns, and what you're describing is an incredibly common problem. Tbh, it's not at all suprising that you're seeing performance drop off so fast, espescially with the kind of setup you mentioned. Lots of people fall into this trap. The good news is that it's definately fixable, but it'll mean thinking about your audience and your entire campaign structure in a completely different way. You're right to question why things are going sour after just a week, but the creative itself is probably only one part of the puzzle. The real issue, the one that's causing all these symptoms like rising frequency and a dying CTR, is almost certainly your targeting strategy. You think an 80 million person audience is a safety net, but in reality, it's an anchor dragging you down.

You’re paying Facebook to find you the worst possible audience...

Here’s the blunt truth that most people don't want to hear about running ads on Meta. When you set your campaign objective to 'conversions' but give it a massive, undefined, 'broad' audience of 80 million people, you are giving the algorithm a very specific, and very flawed, command. You think you're telling it "go find me customers from this huge pool of people," but what the algorithm actually hears is: "Find me the cheapest possible clicks and impressions within this giant ocean of 80 million users that might, just might, lead to a conversion."

And the algorithm, being the ruthlessly efficient machine it is, does exactly what you asked. It goes out and finds the absolute dregs of the user base. It seeks out the users inside your targeting who are least likely to be in demand from other advertisers. The people who endlessly scroll but rarely click. The ones who click on anything shiny but never, ever pull out a credit card. Why? Because those users' attention is cheap. No one else is bidding for them. You're not in a competitive auction for high-intent buyers; you're in a bargain basement bidding for people who have demonstrated time and time again that they don't convert.

So in the first few days, the algorithm skims the tiny bit of cream off the top. It finds a few easy, cheap conversions and you think "brilliant, this is working!". But once that low-hanging fruit is gone, it defaults back to its primary instruction: get the cheapest impressions. It starts showing your ad to the same small, cheap, uninterested segment of that 80 million pool over and over again. Your frequency skyrockets because it's cheaper to show the ad to the same person for the 5th time than it is to find a new, more expensive (and potentially more valuable) person. Your CTR plummets because these people have already seen your ad and ignored it four times. And your CPA goes through the roof because you're now spending money to annoy people, not to convert them. You are actively paying the world's most powerful advertising machine to find you the worst possible audience for your product.

Your ideal customer isn't a number, it's a nightmare...

This brings me to the next point. You need to completely forget the idea of a 'broad' audience. An 80 million person audience isn't an audience; it's just a random crowd of people. To stop burning cash, you have to define your customer not by a demographic but by their pain. By their specific, urgent, expensive problem that you can solve.

Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) isn't "women aged 25-45 who live in the UK". That tells you nothing of value and it leads to the kind of generic ads that get ignored. You need to become an expert in their specific nightmare. For an eCommerce brand selling high-quality kitchen knives, the nightmare isn't 'needing a new knife'. It's the deep frustration of trying to prep a family meal with a dull, cheap knife that slips and makes the whole process a misery. For a skincare brand, the nightmare isn't 'needing moisturiser'. It's the panic and lack of confidence that comes from a sudden acne breakout before a big event.

Your ICP isn't a person; it's a problem state. Once you've isolated that nightmare, you can find them. What podcasts do they listen to? What Instagram accounts do they follow? What magazines do they read? What brands do they already love and trust? Are they in specific Facebook groups? Do they follow certain influencers? This intelligence is the blueprint for your entire targeting strategy. Without it, you're just shouting into the void and hoping someone, anyone, listens. That's why your ads are dying after a week. The message is too generic for the giant, random crowd you're showing it to. You're trying to speak to everyone, so in the end, you speak to no one.

I'd say you need to completely overhaul your audience targeting...

Okay, so how do we fix this? We stop thinking in terms of one single campaign and one single 'broad' audience. We build a proper funnel structure inside your Meta Ads account. This allows us to speak to people differently depending on how familiar they are with your brand and products. This is how you build a sustainable system, not just a one-week wonder.

I usually prioritise audiences in a very specific order. The further down the funnel someone is (i.e., the closer they are to buying), the more valuable they are, and the better they will perform. Here's a look at how that structure works, from coldest to warmest audiences.

You need to have seperate campaigns for each major stage of this funnel (e.g., one campaign for ToFu, one for MoFu/BoFu retargeting). Inside each campaign, you have different ad sets testing the different audiences. So in your ToFu campaign, you might have one ad set for 'Interest Group A', one for 'Interest Group B', and one for a '1% Lookalike of Purchasers'. You let them run, and you see which one performs. You turn off the losers and give more budget to the winners. This structure prevents audience overlap and stops your frequency from spiralling out of control, because you're constantly feeding the machine with new, segmented audiences and you're excluding people who move further down the funnel.

We'll need to look at what you’re actually offering them...

Even with the most perfect targeting in the world, your campaigns will fail if the offer isn't right. The offer is the number one reason why campaigns fail. It's the combination of your product, your price, your messaging, and the call to action on your landing page. I see so many founders with great products who struggle because they haven't constructed an offer that solves a real, urgent problem for a specific audience.

A great offer does three things:
1. It focuses on a specific audience with an urgent problem. We've talked about this. It makes the message hyper-relevant.
2. It presents a clear solution. It's not just a product; it's the answer to their 'nightmare'. The value is immediately obvious.
3. It feels tangible and low-risk. For eCommerce, this means great product photography, clear descriptions, social proof like reviews and testimonials, a solid returns policy, and a trustworthy checkout process. People need to feel comfortable giving you their money.

Take a hard look at your landing page. Is it clear within 3 seconds what you sell and what problem you solve? Are there compelling customer reviews? Is the 'Add to Cart' button obvious? Is the copy speaking to their pain points, or is it just listing features? A weak offer or a confusing landing page will kill your conversion rate, which drives your CPA up, no matter how good your ads are.

You probably should re-think your ad copy to match...

Once you've defined your audience's nightmare and built a funnel, your ad copy needs to reflect that. Generic copy gets generic results. You need to speak directly to their problem. You use a simple formula: Problem, Agitate, Solve.

Here’s what that looks like in practice. Let's imagine you sell high-end, comfortable office chairs for people working from home.

See the difference? The first one is talking about the product. The second one is talking about the customer's life. It enters the conversation already happening in their head. This is what stops the scroll and gets the click from the *right* people. Your creative might not be 'fatigued'; it might just be boring and not speaking to anyone's real problems.

You'll need to measure what actually matters...

Finally, let's talk about that CPA. You said it's 'very good' in the first few days and then increases. This obsession with a rock-bottom, day-one CPA can be a massive mistake. The real question isn't "How low can my CPA go?" but "How high a CPA can I afford to acquire a truly great customer?" The answer to that is Lifetime Value (LTV).

You need to know what a customer is actually worth to you over the long term. Here's a very simple way to think about it:

Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA): What's the average order value? Let's say it's £80.
Gross Margin %: What's your profit margin on that? Let's say it's 60%.
Monthly Churn Rate %: How many customers do you lose each month? For eCommerce, we can think of this as the inverse of purchase frequency. Let's say a good customer buys from you 3 times a year, so their 'lifespan' is roughly 4 months. That's a 25% monthly churn.

Now, the calculation:

LTV = (ARPA * Gross Margin %) / Monthly Churn Rate

In our example: LTV = (£80 * 0.60) / 0.25 = £48 / 0.25 = £192.

This is a simplified model, but the point is, in this example, each customer is worth £192 in gross margin to your business. A healthy business model often aims for a 3:1 LTV to Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) ratio. So, you can afford to spend up to £192 / 3 = £64 to acquire a single customer and still have a very healthy, profitable business. Suddenly that CPA that's creeping up to £25 or £30 doesn't look so scary, does it? It looks like a bargain. This is the maths that unlocks intelligent, aggressive growth. It frees you from the tyranny of cheap, low-quality conversions and allows you to bid for better customers.

This is the main advice I have for you:

I know this is a lot to take in. It's a fundamental shift from what you're currently doing. To make it clearer, here is a summary of the problems I see and the solutions I'm recommending.

Look, I know this is a hell of a lot to take in and implement. This is the difference between just 'running ads' and building a professional, scalable acquisition system. It's about strategy, structure, and measurement, not just uploading a nice image and hoping for the best. This is the kind of in-depth work that separates the campaigns that generate a 600%+ return, like we've seen for eCommerce clients, from the ones that just burn cash.

Getting this structure right from the start is the foundation for everything else. It takes experience to know which audiences to test first, how to write copy that converts, and how to interpret the data to make the right decisions.

If you'd like to go through your account and build out a proper strategy like this together, we offer a free, no-obligation initial consultation where we can do just that. It's often the quickest way to see exactly where the opportunities are.

Hope that helps!

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh