Solved: Facebook Ads Creative Tests Not Working After Months?

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out! I had a look over the situation you described, and the frustration is completely understandable. When you're doing everything you think is right and still hitting a brick wall, it's easy to start blaming the platform. I'm happy to give you some initial thoughts and guidance on this.

Honestly, from what you've described, I'm almost certain this isn't an algorithm issue or a 'bad auction'. In my experience, when creative tests consistently fail for over a year, it's usually a sign of a much deeper, more fundamental problem with the strategy. We need to look at what's happening *before* the creative even gets made.

We'll need to look at what your ads are really selling...

You mentioned competitors are succeeding with poorly made ads. This is actually a massive clue. It tells us that their success isn't coming from slick design or perfect grammar. It's because their message, however badly it's presented, is resonating with the audience's core problem. They have a strong offer that hits a nerve, so the creative execution almost doesn't matter. This is where we need to start our diagnosis.

The number one reason I see campaigns fail, especially after prolonged testing, is the offer. An offer that doesn't provide enough value, or an offer that's presented to an audience who doesn't feel an urgent need for it. It's a fundamental lack of demand. Your creatives aren't 'blowing up' because they're being shown to people who either don't care, don't understand, or don't feel the pain your product solves. The creative is just the delivery vehicle; if the cargo isn't right, the vehicle doesn't matter.

You’re trying to find a key that works by testing hundreds of different key designs. But what if you're trying to open the wrong door entirely? Before we even think about another creative test, we have to be brutally honest about who we're targeting and what we're offering them.

I'd say you need to define your audience's nightmare...

Forget the sterile, demographic-based profiles. "Males aged 25-44 interested in software" tells you nothing of value and leads to the kind of generic ads that get ignored. To stop burning cash, you must define your customer by their pain. You need to become an expert in their specific, urgent, expensive nightmare.

Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) isn't a person; it's a problem state. For a B2B SaaS client we worked with, their ICP wasn't "Head of Sales in a tech company". It was a Head of Sales who was terrified of missing their quarterly target because their team's lead data was a mess. Their nightmare was having to stand up in front of the board and explain why they failed. See the difference? One is a job title; the other is a career-threatening problem. All your advertising must speak directly to that nightmare.

Once you've isolated that specific pain, you can build a true picture of your audience. Where do they hang out online when they're trying to solve this problem?

• -> What niche podcasts do they listen to on their commute?
• -> Which industry newsletters do they actually open and read?
• -> What specific software tools (like HubSpot, Salesforce, etc.) do they already pay for?
• -> What Facebook groups are they members of? What influencers do they follow on LinkedIn or Twitter?

You probably need to fix your offer...

Once you know the nightmare, you can craft a message and an offer they can't ignore. This is likely the second major failure point in your campaigns. A great creative for a bad offer will always fail. 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.

Most B2B advertising fails here with the arrogant "Request a Demo" button. It presumes a busy decision-maker has nothing better to do than book a meeting to be sold to. It's high-friction, low-value, and positions you as just another commodity. You must solve a small, real problem for them for free to earn the right to solve the whole thing.

I remember one campaign for a data analytics platform where we moved away from a simple demo request. Instead, we helped them build an offer for a free, automated "Data Health Check" that flagged the top issues in a prospect's database. It provided instant value, made the need for their full platform completely obvious, and generated much better quality leads than a simple demo request ever did.

Think about how you can bottle your expertise into a tool, a piece of content, or an asset that provides instant value. For us, it's a free 20-minute strategy session where we audit failing ad campaigns. This proves our expertise and builds trust far more effectively than any ad ever could. Your offer has to do the same.

You'll need a better testing methodology...

Now, let's talk about your actual testing process. Putting each new creative in its own ad set at $100/day is a very old-school and inefficient way to test on Meta. It's likely contributing significantly to your problem. This method forces each creative into a seperate learning phase, fragments your data, and encourages the algorithm to find expensive pockets of traffic just to spend the budget. It doesn't allow for true competition based on performance.

A much more effective approach is to use a single Campaign Budget Optimisation (CBO) campaign for testing. You create one ad set with your best, most reliable audience (built from your 'nightmare' ICP research). Inside that one ad set, you place 3-5 new creative variations you want to test. Then, you set the budget at the campaign level and let Meta's algorithm do what it does best: automatically allocate more budget to the creative that performs the best. It's faster, cheaper, and gives you much clearer results. The algorithm finds the winners for you, rather than you forcing it to spend on a potential loser.

And to answer your other question: should you run engagement ads first? Absolutely not. This is a common myth that costs advertisers a fortune. When you tell Meta to optimise for 'Engagement', it does exactly that. It finds people inside your audience who are most likely to like, comment, and share... but who are almost never the ones who will actually buy anything. Their attention is cheap for a reason. From experience, audiences that are optimized for 'Brand Awareness' or 'Engagement' almost never convert as well as audiences from campaigns optimized for sales or leads. You're paying to reach non-customers. The best way to build 'social proof' is to get actual sales, and the testimonials that result from them. Always, always optimise for the final action you want someone to take (e.g., Sales, Leads).

We should look at the numbers properly...

Finally, to make intelligent decisions, you need to know your numbers inside out. Specifically, what can you actually afford to spend to acquire a customer? The answer is your Customer Lifetime Value (LTV). Without knowing this, you're flying blind, possibly turning off ads that are actually profitable in the long run.

Let's say a customer pays you £200 a month, your profit margin is 70%, and you lose 5% of your customers each month (churn).
The calculation is: LTV = (Average Revenue Per Customer * Gross Margin %) / Monthly Churn Rate
LTV = (£200 * 0.70) / 0.05 = £140 / 0.05 = £2,800.
Each customer is worth £2,800 in gross margin to you. A healthy business model aims for at least a 3:1 LTV to Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) ratio. This means you can afford to spend up to £933 to acquire a single customer. If your sales process converts 1 in 10 qualified leads, you can afford to pay up to £93 per lead. Suddenly, a £50 CPL from a highly targeted ad doesn't look so bad, does it? It looks like a bargain. This is the maths that unlocks aggressive, intelligent growth.

I've detailed my main recommendations for you below:

To break through this plateau, you need to stop focusing on the symptoms (failing creatives) and start treating the disease (a weak strategic foundation). This means a complete reset, moving from tactical guesses to a strategic, audience-first approach. Here is the main advice I have for you, laid out as a step-by-step plan.

This is a lot to take in, I know. It's a fundamental shift from just 'making ads' to building a proper customer acquisition system. The reason your creatives have been failing is that they've been built on sand. By fixing the foundation—the audience, the offer, and the message—you give your future creative tests a real chance to acheive succesful results.

Executing this kind of strategic pivot can be difficult to do from the inside. It requires a brutally honest look at the business and a level of paid advertising expertise that goes beyond just setting up campaigns. This is often where working with a specialist consultancy can make a huge difference. We can bring an objective perspective and the experience from running hundreds of these turnarounds for businesses just like yours, from B2B software companies to eCommerce stores.

If you'd like to discuss how we could apply this framework specifically to your business, we offer a completely free, no-obligation 20-minute strategy call. We can take a look at your account together and give you some more tailored, actionable advice. Let me know if that's something you'd be interested in.

Hope this helps!

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh