Hi there,
Thanks for reaching out!
I had a look at your question about the sudden drop in campaign results. It's a really common and frustrating problem, so you're definitely not alone in seeing this. One day everything's flying, the next it feels like someone's turned off the tap. You said nothing has changed, but the truth is, in the world of paid ads, *everything* is always changing, even if your settings stay the same.
I'm happy to give you some of my thoughts on what's likely happening and provide a bit of a framework for how to diagnose and fix it. It almost always comes down to a few key factors that you can control, and a few that you can't. The trick is knowing which is which and how to react.
TLDR;
- A one-day drop in performance is normal. Don't panic or make drastic changes based on 24 hours of data. Analyse trends over 7-14 days instead.
- The Facebook ad auction is a dynamic marketplace, not a vending machine. Your results are affected by competitor bidding, seasonality, and audience behaviour, which change daily.
- The most likely culprits for a sudden drop are Ad Fatigue (your audience is tired of your ad) or Audience Saturation (you've exhausted the best people in your audience).
- The most important thing you can do is diagnose the problem by looking at specific metrics: CPM, CTR, and Conversion Rate. A change in one of these will tell you where the issue lies.
- This letter includes a visual flowchart to help you diagnose performance drops and an interactive calculator to see how small metric changes impact your final results.
The first rule of ad performance: Don't Panic
Before we get into the weeds, the single most important piece of advice I can give you is this: never, ever make significant campaign decisions based on a single day's data. Performance fluctuations of 20-50% day-over-day are completely normal. The algorithm has good days and bad days, just like we do. Your audience's mood and online behaviour changes depending on the day of the week, the weather, or what's in the news.
A single bad day is just a blip. Two bad days is a coincidence. Three bad days is a trend. You should be looking at your performance in rolling 7-day or 14-day windows to make any real decisions. Making knee-jerk changes based on one day's performance is the fastest way to derail a perfectly good campaign.
We'll need to look at why 'the same campaign' is never truly the same...
You said you haven't changed anything, and I believe you. You haven't touched the budget, the audience, or the ads. But the environment your campaign operates in has changed. Think of it less like a machine and more like a real-world marketplace. You can have the same stall, the same products, and the same prices, but you'll sell a different amount on a rainy Tuesday than you will on a sunny Saturday when there's a festival next door.
The Facebook Ads auction is exactly like that. Here are the invisible things that changed overnight:
- Your Competitors: Maybe a competitor just launched a massive new campaign with a huge budget, targeting the exact same audience as you. Suddenly, there's more competition in the auction. This drives up the cost to reach people (your CPM), meaning your same budget now buys you less visibility, and therefore fewer results.
- Audience Behaviour: It could have been a bank holiday, a major sporting event, or just a really sunny day. Anything that pulls people away from their phones can impact results. Weekends often perform differently from weekdays.
- Ad Fatigue: This is a big one. Your audience has now seen your ad for one more day. For some people, that was the day it went from being interesting to being annoying. They start ignoring it, or worse, hiding it. This causes your click-through rate (CTR) to drop, and your costs rise as Facebook has to show it to more people to get a click.
- The Algorithm: Facebook's delivery algorithm is constantly making micro-adjustments, trying to find the best pockets of users for you. Sometimes it explores a new, less effective pocket of your audience, causing a temporary dip before it course-corrects.
The point is, even with fixed settings, the system is dynamic. Your campaign from yesterday isn't the same as your campaign today because the *context* has changed. The graph below shows a typical ad fatigue cycle. At the start, performance is great, but as more people see the ad multiple times (rising frequency), engagement drops off and costs start to climb. This can happen gradually or, sometimes, it hits a tipping point and feels like a sudden drop.
I'd say you need to become a detective: How to diagnose the drop
Okay, so you've waited a couple of days and the performance is still down. Now it's time to investigate. Don't just look at the final number of results. You need to look at the metrics that *lead* to those results. The main three are:
- CPM (Cost Per 1,000 Impressions): This tells you how much it costs to show your ad 1,000 times. It's your measure of auction competition.
- CTR (Click-Through Rate): This tells you what percentage of people who see your ad actually click on it. It's your measure of how relevant and engaging your ad is.
- CVR (Conversion Rate): This tells you what percentage of people who click on your ad then go on to complete your desired action (e.g., make a purchase, fill out a form). It's your measure of how effective your landing page and offer are.
Your number of results is simply a product of these three metrics. When results drop, it's because one (or more) of them has gotten worse. By identifying which one, you know exactly where the problem is. I've put together a little flowchart to help you think through this process.
You probably should start systematically testing
Once you've diagnosed the problem, you can apply the right solution. 90% of the time, for a campaign that was running well and then dipped, the answer is ad fatigue. The solution is simple, but requires consistent effort: you need to refresh your creative.
You can't just run the same ad forever and expect the same results. You need a system for continuously testing new ideas. I remember working with a women's apparel brand where we were constantly rotating creatives to keep things fresh, which was part of a strategy that led to a 691% return. For B2B software clients, we often test different messaging angles using frameworks like the Before-After-Bridge to see what resonates.
Here’s how you can approach it:
- Test a New Hook: Keep the ad body and image the same, but change the first sentence. Call out a different pain point or benefit.
- Test a New Image/Video: Keep the copy the same but try a completely different visual. A static image vs. a video. A picture of the product vs. a picture of a person using the product. For one of our clients, a medical job matching SaaS, a relentless creative testing strategy was a key part of reducing their Cost Per User Acquisition from a staggering £100 down to just £7.
- Test a New Angle: Rework the whole ad to talk about your product from a different perspective. Focus on a different feature or a different outcome for the customer.
The same logic applies if your problem is audience saturation (which is just a different kind of fatigue). If your current audience is tapped out, it's time to test new ones. This is where you can start building lookalike audiences from your best customers or testing new interest groups. My approach is to always start with the audiences closest to converting—like retargeting people who abandoned their cart—and then work your way outwards to broader audiences like new interest groups and lookalikes.
To really understand how sensitive your results are to small changes in these metrics, I've built a little calculator for you. Play around with the sliders and see how a 10% drop in CTR or a small increase in CPM can halve your results, just like you saw.
You'll need a clear action plan
This all might sound like a lot, but it boils down to a simple, repeatable process. You move from being reactive and panicking at every dip to being proactive and methodical in your optimisation. It’s this process that seperates the advertisers who consistently get results from those who are always chasing last week's performance.
I've detailed my main recommendations for you below in a simple table to give you a clear path forward.
| Step | Action | Why it's important |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Monitor | Don't react to a single day of data. Change your date range to view the last 7 or 14 days to identify a genuine trend before taking action. | Avoids making emotional, knee-jerk decisions that can harm a campaign's long-term performance and disrupt the algorithm's learning. |
| 2. Diagnose | Compare your key metrics (CPM, CTR, CVR) from the "bad" period to the "good" period. Identify which metric has changed the most. | Pinpoints the exact stage of your funnel that is failing, so you can apply the correct solution instead of guessing. |
| 3. Act (Test) | Based on your diagnosis:
- High CPM? Test new, less competitive audiences. - Low CTR? Launch 2-3 new ad creatives (new images/copy). - Low CVR? Review your landing page for issues. |
Systematically addresses the root cause of the problem and builds a library of winning ads and audiences for future stability and scale. |
| 4. Repeat | Make creative and audience testing a regular part of your process, even when things are going well. Aim to introduce new ads every 2-4 weeks. | Prevents future performance cliffs by proactively combating ad fatigue before it can severely impact your campaigns. This is how you achieve consistant results. |
Managing paid ad campaigns effectively isn't about setting them up and letting them run; its about this constant cycle of monitoring, diagnosing, and testing. It requires a deep understanding of the metrics, a disciplined approach, and a lot of creative energy to keep things fresh. It can be a full-time job in itself, which is why many businesses choose to work with specialists who live and breathe this stuff every day.
Hopefully this has given you a much clearer picture of what's happening with your campaigns and a solid framework to start improving things. If you'd like to chat through your specific situation in more detail, we offer a completely free, no-obligation strategy session where we can take a look at your account together and give you some more tailored advice.
Hope this helps!
Regards,
Team @ Lukas Holschuh
