Solved: Facebook Ads Conversions Drop After Few Days

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out! I had a look at the situation with your new Facebook campaign. It's completely normal to feel a bit frustrated when you see results bouncing around like that in the first few days. One day a sale, the next day nothing – it can feel like you're just throwing money away without any clear pattern.

I'm happy to give you some initial thoughts and guidance on this. The good news is, what you're seeing is very common. The bad news is that your reaction to it is probably the biggest thing holding you back right now. The problem isn't the daily fluctuation; the real issue is how you're thinking about the campaign and what metrics you're focusing on. We need to shift your perspective from short-term panic to a more structured, long-term approach that actually diagnoses the real bottlenecks in your sales process.

Let's get into it.

We'll need to look at why you're reacting too quickly...

Right, first things first. The single biggest mistake I see new advertisers make is panicking. You've run a campaign for four days. In the world of Meta advertising, that's nothing. It's barely enough time for the algorithm to figure out what it's even doing.

When you launch a new campaign, Meta's algorithm enters what's called the "Learning Phase". During this period, it's actively trying to figure out who in your target audience is most likely to actually buy something. It will show your ads to different types of people, at different times, on different placements (Facebook feed, Instagram stories, etc.) to gather data. This process is messy by nature. Performance will be all over the place. You'll have good days and bad days. This is not a sign of failure; it's a sign the system is working as intended.

Every time you make a significant change to the campaign – like changing the budget, the creative, or the targeting – you risk resetting this learning phase. By getting twitchy and wanting to change things after a day or two of no sales, you're essentially pulling the plug on the machine just as it's starting to learn. You're trapping yourself in a permanent state of learning, never giving the campaign a real chance to stabilise and optimise.

You need to commit to letting a new ad set run for at least 7 days and gather at least 50 conversion events (in your case, purchases) before you even think about judging its perfomance. If you don't have the budget to wait for 50 purchases, then you at least need to give it a week. Anything less is just guessing. You are currently caught in what I call the "Advertiser's Panic Cycle".

Your job isn't to react to every dip. Your job is to set up a valid test, let it run its course, and then analyse the data calmly and rationally. Forget the daily check-ins. It's doing more harm than good.

I'd say you need to diagnose where customers are *really* dropping off...

You mentioned that your CTR, CPC, and CPM haven't changed much. Tbh, this is a distraction. While these metrics can be useful indicators, they don't tell you the whole story for an eCommerce business. A low CPC is useless if none of those cheap clicks ever turn into a sale. I've seen campaigns with high CPCs be wildly profitable because they were bringing in the *right* people who were ready to buy. Your focus should be on the entire customer journey, from the moment they see your ad to the moment they complete a purchase. This is your sales funnel.

Let's break it down into stages. For any given person to buy from you, they have to:

1. See your Ad & Click it: This is measured by your Click-Through Rate (CTR). A low CTR usually means your ad creative (the image/video) or your ad copy isn't compelling enough to grab attention.
2. Visit your Product Page: They've clicked the ad and landed on your site. Do they stick around, or do they leave immediately? A high drop-off here could mean your site is slow to load, doesn't look trustworthy, or the product isn't what they expected from the ad.
3. Add the Product to their Cart: They're on the product page. Are they convinced enough to take the next step? If you're getting lots of product page views but very few 'Add to Carts', the problem is likely your product photos, your description, the price, or a lack of social proof like reviews.
4. Initiate Checkout: They've added to cart. Do they start the checkout process? A drop-off here can sometimes be caused by unexpected shipping costs or a confusing cart page.
5. Complete the Purchase: This is the final step. If people are starting checkout but not finishing, your payment process might be too complicated, you might not offer the right payment options, or there could be a technical issue.

You need to look at your metrics for each of these stages to find the "leak" in your funnel. Where are you losing the most people? That's the area you need to fix first. Fixing a low CTR is pointless if your product page converts at 0%. You're just sending more people to a broken page. I remember one of our clients, a cleaning products brand, saw a 190% increase in revenue not just by improving their ads, but by optimising their entire funnel to reduce these drop-offs. It's a holistic process.

Here's a simple visualisation of that funnel. Your job is to make each stage as wide as possible.

To really see the impact of this, play around with the calculator below. You'll see how a tiny improvement in your 'Add to Cart' rate, for example, can have a massive effect on your final number of sales and your cost per acquisition, even if your ad's CTR stays exactly the same.

You probably should be more strategic with your targeting...

Okay, so once you've committed to being patient and you understand your funnel, the next big piece of the puzzle is *who* you're showing your ads to. Just because your CPC and CTR are stable doesn't mean you're reaching the right people. You could be showing your ads to an audience that is consistently uninterested in buying.

A huge mistake is lumping everyone into one big audience. You need to structure your campaigns based on how familiar people are with your brand. We typically break this down into three stages:

• ToFu (Top of Funnel): These are completely new people who have never heard of you. You reach them using interest-based targeting (e.g., people interested in 'women's apparel', 'Shopify', or competitor brands) or lookalike audiences based on your existing customers. This is your prospecting campaign.
• MoFu (Middle of Funnel): These are people who have shown some interest but haven't taken a key action yet. This could be people who have watched 50% of your video ad or engaged with your Instagram page. You retarget them to bring them back.
• BoFu (Bottom of Funnel): These are your hottest prospects. People who have visited your website, viewed a product, or even added an item to their cart but didn't buy. You retarget them with a more direct offer, like a reminder or maybe a small discount, to get them over the finish line.

Your campaigns should be structured with seperate ad sets for each of these funnel stages. Why? Because the message you show to a complete stranger (ToFu) should be very different from the message you show to someone who abandoned their shopping cart (BoFu). The BoFu audience will almost always have the highest Return On Ad Spend (ROAS). In fact, one of the most successful campaigns we've worked on was for a subscription box client where we achieved a 1000% ROAS almost entirely through a well-structured retargeting (BoFu) campaign.

If you're just starting out, you want to put most of your budget into ToFu to gather data and build up your MoFu/BoFu audiences. As you get more website traffic and data, you can allocate more budget to your retargeting campaigns. The key is to test different audiences within each stage of the funnel. Test different interests. Test different lookalike percentages (1%, 2%, 5%). Never assume you know which audience will work best. Let the data decide.

You'll need to work on your offer and your ads...

Even with the right targeting and a perfect funnel, your campaign can still fail if your offer isn't compelling or your ads are boring. You said your metrics aren't improving. That might be because your ad creative has hit its ceiling. It's doing an okay job, but it's not a 'winner'.

In eCommerce, the creative is everything. Your product images or videos have to stop someone from scrolling, instantly communicate value, and create desire. Are your product photos professional? Do they show the product in use? Have you tried video ads? User-Generated Content (UGC) style videos often perform incredibly well because they feel more authentic and act as social proof.

Your ad copy needs to speak directly to the customer's problem or desire. Don't just list features. Sell the outcome. Instead of saying "Our dresses are made from 100% organic cotton," say "Feel comfortable and confident all day long in our breathable, eco-friendly dresses." It's the classic Before-After-Bridge technique:

• Before: Describe their current frustrating situation. ("Tired of clothes that lose their shape after one wash?")
• After: Paint a picture of their ideal situation. ("Imagine a wardrobe full of timeless pieces you'll love for years.")
• Bridge: Position your product as the way to get there. ("Our collection is designed for lasting quality and style. Shop now.")

You should constantly be testing new creatives. Even successful campaigns experience 'ad fatigue' where the audience gets tired of seeing the same ad, and performance drops. Always have 3-5 different ad variations (different images, videos, headlines, copy) running in an ad set. Meta will automatically show the best-performing ones more often. After a week or two, pause the losers and introduce new ones to test against your current winner. This iterative process of testing and optimising is how you find ads that don't just get stable CTRs, but that actually drive profitable growth. For one women's apparel client, we saw a 691% return by continuously testing new creatives and targeting on Meta and Pinterest.

You'll need a clearer picture of what success really is...

This brings me back to my first point about focusing on the wrong metrics. Your goal isn't a low CPC or a high CTR. Your goal is to run a profitable business. To do that, you need to understand two key numbers: your Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) and your target Cost Per Acquisition (CPA).

Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) is the total profit you can expect to make from a single customer over the entire time they buy from you. If customers often come back and make repeat purchases, your LTV will be much higher than just their first order value. Knowing your LTV is powerful because it tells you how much you can afford to spend to acquire a customer in the first place.

A simple way to estimate it:

LTV = (Average Order Value * Purchase Frequency * Gross Margin) / Customer Churn Rate

Once you know your LTV, you can determine a healthy CPA. A common rule of thumb is that your CPA should be no more than one-third of your LTV. So if your LTV is £300, you can afford to spend up to £100 to acquire a new customer and still have a very healthy, profitable business model. Suddenly, seeing a £40 cost per purchase on a single campaign doesn't seem so scary, does it?

This is the math that allows you to scale aggressively. You stop worrying about daily sales figures and start focusing on whether you are acquiring customers at a profitable CPA. Your primary metric in the Meta Ads Manager should be ROAS (Return On Ad Spend). If your ROAS is consistently above your break-even point, the campaign is a success, even if you have a day or two with no sales. We had an eCommerce client selling maps that generated $71k in revenue at an 8x return – we weren't worried about the daily CPC, we were focused on that profitable return.

This is the main advice I have for you:

To wrap this all up, you're not in a bad spot, you just need a more professional framework for your advertising. Here are the exact steps I would recommend you take right now.

I know this can seem like a lot to take in. Moving from a reactive approach to a strategic one takes a bit of a mental shift. It means being more patient, more analytical, and more disciplined. But it's the only way to build a scalable and profitable advertising system for your business.

This is where expert help can make a huge difference. Instead of spending months and thousands of pounds on trial and error, an experienced consultant can help you implement this kind of structure from day one, identify your biggest opportunities for growth, and start getting consistent, profitable results much faster.

If you'd like to have a chat about how we could apply this framework specifically to your business, we offer a free, no-obligation initial consultation. We can review your account together and give you a clear roadmap for what to do next.

Hope this helps!

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh