Solved: Facebook Ads Campaigns Drop After a Week

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out! I've had a look over the situation you described, and I'm happy to give you some initial thoughts and guidance. It's a frustrating spot to be in, for sure. That pattern of a campaign starting strong and then falling off a cliff after a week is something we see quite a bit, and while it feels like you're being penalised or flagged, the real reason is often hiding in plain sight within the campaign strategy itself. It's almost never a 'fingerprint' issue and almost always a structural one.

Honestly, before you go through the hassle of setting up virtual desktops and trying to hide from Meta, I'd bet a good amount of money the problem lies in how your audiences and campaigns are structured. Let's walk through what's likely happening and how to fix it for good.

We'll need to look at your audience strategy, it's probably the main issue...

Right, let's get into the meat of it. That one-week performance drop? It’s a classic symptom of audience exhaustion. When you launch a campaign, especially with a fresh creative, Meta's algorithm is brilliant at finding the 'low-hanging fruit' within your chosen audience. It identifies the handful of people who are most likely to convert, right now, and serves them your ad first. For about a week, you see great results, and everything looks amazing. You think you've cracked it.

But then, that segment of eager buyers is exhausted. The algorithm has run through them. Now, to keep spending your budget, it has to move on to the less interested, less likely-to-convert people in the same audience. Clicks and CTR might stay the same because the ad is still decent, but the actual conversions—the sales, the leads—they plummet. Your cost per result skyrockets, and the campaign dies. Sound familiar?

This happens because most people build their campaigns around a single type of audience: cold, detailed-targeting interests. You might target "Shopify" or "Small Business Owners" and hope for the best. This is a recipe for the exact boom-and-bust cycle you're experiencing. You're treating all potential customers as if they are the same, but they exist on a spectrum of awareness and intent.

The solution is to stop thinking in terms of single campaigns and start thinking in terms of a marketing funnel. You need to structure your entire ad account to guide people from being completely unaware of you (Top of Funnel - ToFu), to considering your offer (Middle of Funnel - MoFu), to making a purchase (Bottom of Funnel - BoFu). This means creating separate, ongoing campaigns for each stage.

Here’s how we prioritise audiences for our clients. It’s not just a list; it’s a hierarchy of value. The audiences at the bottom (BoFu) are your hottest prospects and should convert the best, while the ones at the top (ToFu) are for finding new people.

By splitting your budget across these three stages (e.g., 70% ToFu, 20% MoFu, 10% BoFu), you create a constantly replenishing system. The ToFu campaigns feed new people into your funnel, who then see your MoFu ads, and the hottest prospects are converted by your BoFu ads. Your campaigns will never "dry up" again because you're always filling the top of the funnel. This is how you build a scalable and predictable advertising machine, not just a one-hit-wonder campaign.

I'd say you need to stop telling Facebook to find non-customers...

Here is another uncomfortable truth that might be contributing to your problem. The campaign objective you choose is the single most important instruction you give to the Meta algorithm. A lot of people, especially when they're worried about performance, choose 'softer' objectives like "Reach," "Brand Awareness," or "Traffic." This is a catastrophic mistake.

When you set your campaign objective to "Brand Awareness," you are giving the algorithm a very specific command: "Find me the largest number of people for the lowest possible price." The algorithm, being the ruthlessly efficient machine it is, does exactly what you asked. It seeks out the users inside your targeting who are least likely to click, least likely to engage, and absolutely, positively least likely to ever buy anything. Why? Because those users are not in demand by other advertisers. Their attention is cheap. You are actively paying one of the world's most powerful advertising platforms to find you the worst possible audience for your product.

You MUST use a conversion-based objective. That means selecting "Sales" (if you're eCommerce) or "Leads" (if you're service-based) and setting your conversion event to something meaningful, like a Purchase or a Lead submission. This tells the algorithm, "I don't care about clicks or views. I only care about results. Go and find people inside my audience who have a history of taking this specific action."

This is a completely different instruction. The algorithm will now ignore the cheap, passive users and focus on the much smaller, more expensive, but infinitely more valuable segment of your audience that actually buys things. Yes, your CPMs (cost per 1,000 impressions) will be higher. Your CPCs (cost per click) might even be higher. But your cost per *acquisition* will be far, far lower, because you're fishing in the right pond. Awareness is a byproduct of making sales to happy customers, not a prerequisite for making a sale. You've got to trust the algorithm by giving it the right goal. Running a Traffic campaign and hoping for sales is like hiring a plumber to fix your electrics—you're using the wrong tool for the job.

You probably should focus on what you're offering, not just who you're targeting...

So we've talked about structure and objectives. But there's a third peice of the puzzle that's just as important, if not more so: your offer. You can have the best targeting in the world, a perfect funnel, and the right objective, but if what you're offering to people is weak, your campaigns will fail.

A common mistake, especially in B2B or service industries, is making the call-to-action "Request a Demo" or "Contact Us for a Quote." This is perhaps the most arrogant and highest-friction offer you can make. It presumes your prospect, who has never heard of you before, has nothing better to do than book a slot in their calendar to be sold to. It provides zero upfront value and positions you as just another commodity vendor.

Your offer’s only job is to deliver a moment of undeniable value—an "aha!" moment that makes the prospect sell *themselves* on your solution. You must solve a small, real problem for them for free to earn the right to solve the whole thing for a price.

What does this look like in practice?

• For a SaaS company: Don't ask for a demo. Offer a completely free trial with no credit card required. Let them use the actual product. Let them feel the transformation. The product itself becomes the salesperson.
• For a marketing agency: Don't say "Book a free consultation." Offer a "Free, Automated Website Audit" that instantly shows them their top 3 SEO opportunities. It's tangible, valuable, and demonstrates your expertise without a sales pitch.
• For an eCommerce store: Don't just show a product. Offer a compelling discount for first-time buyers, free shipping, or bundle it with a free, high-value digital guide related to the product (e.g., "The Ultimate Guide to Brewing the Perfect Coffee" for a store selling coffee beans).

Your ad needs to speak directly to the 'nightmare' your ideal customer is facing. Not their demographics. Nobody cares that they're a "male, aged 35-44, interested in marketing." What they care about is the fact that their cash flow projections are a shot in the dark and they're one bad month away from a payroll crisis. Your ad copy and your offer must connect directly to that pain point. For example, instead of selling "fractional CFO services", you sell "a good night's sleep". Your ad then says something like, "Worried about making payroll next month? Get an expert financial dashboard that turns uncertainty into predictable growth, for a fraction of a full-time hire." See the difference? One sells a service; the other sells a solution to a nightmare.

You'll need to understand the numbers that actually matter...

This brings me to the final, and most transformative, concept. Most advertisers are obsessed with the wrong metrics. They fret over CPC, CTR, and even Cost Per Lead (CPL). The real question isn't "How low can my CPL go?" but "How high a CPL can I *afford* to acquire a truly great customer?" The answer lies in its counterpart: Customer Lifetime Value (LTV).

Your LTV is the total profit you can expect to make from a single customer over the entire duration of their relationship with your business. Once you know this number, everything changes. It becomes your north star for how much you can sustainably spend on advertising.

Let's break down the calculation. You need three pieces of data:

1. Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA): What do you make per customer, per month/year?
2. Gross Margin %: What's your profit margin on that revenue? (Revenue - Cost of Goods Sold) / Revenue.
3. Monthly Churn Rate: What percentage of customers do you lose each month?

The calculation is: LTV = (ARPA * Gross Margin %) / Monthly Churn Rate

For example, if you have a subscription service where ARPA is £100, your Gross Margin is 70%, and you lose 5% of your customers each month (churn), your LTV is (£100 * 0.70) / 0.05 = £1,400.

Each customer is worth £1,400 in gross margin to your business. A healthy business model often aims for a 3:1 LTV to Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) ratio. This means you can afford to spend up to £1,400 / 3 = ~£467 to acquire a single customer and still have a very profitable business. Suddenly, that £50 cost per lead doesn't seem so scary, does it? If you know that 1 in 8 of those leads becomes a customer, you can afford to pay up to £467 / 8 = ~£58 per lead. This is the math that unlocks aggressive, intelligent growth and frees you from the tyranny of chasing cheap, low-quality leads.

To make this tangible for you, I've built a small interactive calculator below. Play around with your own numbers and see how it changes your perspective on what you can afford to spend.

This is the main advice I have for you:

To bring it all together, the problem isn't a mysterious 'flag' on your account. It's a strategic issue that can be fixed by implementing a more robust and professional approach to your advertising. It's about moving from launching individual, hopeful campaigns to building a predictable, data-driven growth engine.

I've detailed my main recommendations for you in the table below. This is a blueprint for what needs to change.

I know this is a lot to take in, and it represents a significant shift from how most people approach Facebook ads. But this is the difference between amateur tactics and professional strategy. It's about building a system that works for you 24/7, not just for a week at a time. The principles I've outlined are the foundation upon which multi-million pound advertising accounts are built.

Executing this correctly—setting up the right audiences, writing copy for each stage of the funnel, managing budgets between campaigns, and interpreting the data—takes expertise and experience. While you can certainly implement this yourself, working with a specialist can significantly shorten the learning curve and help you avoid costly mistakes along the way. We've seen these strategies turn struggling accounts around time and time again. For one client, a medical job matching software company, we were able to reduce their cost per user acquisition from £100 down to just £7 by implementing this same strategic overhaul.

If you'd like to discuss how we could apply this framework specifically to your business, I'd be happy to schedule a free, no-obligation consultation call. We can go through your account together and identify the biggest opportunities for immediate improvement.

Hope this helps!

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh