Solved: Facebook Ads Not Spending Budget

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out! Happy to give you some initial thoughts on why your Meta ads might not be spending. It’s a common and bloody frustrating problem, but the reasons are often not the ones people first think of. It's rarely about a single button you forgot to press; it's usually a more fundamental issue with the strategy behind the campaign. I'll walk you through how we'd diagnose this.

We'll need to look at the usual suspects, but with a bit more nuance...

You’ve already listed the common reasons you found online, which is a good start. But let's look at them from an expert's point of view, because how they apply to a brand new campaign is different. Things like 'Ad Fatigue' and 'Creative Exhaustion' are completely irrelevant for a campaign that's only been live for three days. You're right to dismiss them.

Things like Ad Account Limits or Payment Issues are a possibility, but you'd usually get a pretty clear notification from Meta if that was the case. It's always worth double-checking your billing section for any failed payments or verification requests, but it's unlikley to be the core issue if everything looks green. Frequent changes can sometimes reset the learning phase, but making only two changes shouldn't stall a campaign completely. That leaves us with the two big ones you mentioned: audience and creative. But the problem is almost always deeper than just "small audience" or "poor creative".

The real issue, 99 times out of 100, is that you haven't given the Meta algorithm a compelling reason to spend your money. Think of it like a very picky, data-hungry employee. You've given it a task (spend this budget to get results), but you haven't given it clear instructions or the right tools. So, it just sits there, refusing to work because it predicts failure. Our job is to figure out what part of your instruction set is broken.

I'd say the algorithm is bored to death...

Here’s the first uncomfortable truth: Meta doesn't *want* to take your money unless it believes it can deliver a result. Why? Because its entire business model is based on advertisers feeling like they're getting a return. If it just burned your cash showing your ads to people who instantly ignore them, you wouldn't come back. So, when an ad launches, the algorithm shows it to a tiny test slice of your audience to see how they react.

It's measuring things like Click-Through Rate (CTR), engagement rate, and how long people look at the ad. If these initial signals are terrible – and I mean, really low – the algorithm concludes that your ad is rubbish and irrelevant to the audience. It decides that showing it more widely would just annoy users and waste your money. So, it throttles delivery. Dramatically. Sometime's it stops it completely.

You mentioned your budget is "decent," but if your initial performance signals are poor, Meta won't even try to spend it. It's not a budget problem; it's a performance prediction problem. A low CTR is the most common symptom of this. What's a "low" CTR? It varies wildly by industry, but for a brand new campaign, if you're seeing anything under 0.5%, you're probably in trouble. A healthy campaign should be aiming for 1% or higher. Anything below that and the algorithm starts to lose confidence, fast.

You probably should stop shouting into a crowd...

You said, "The interest I included for a audience are pretty massive interest groups." This sounds like a good thing, but it's actually one of the biggest mistakes we see. It’s a classic case of confusing scale with relevance. Shouting into a massive, indifferent crowd is far less effective than whispering to a small group of people who are desperate to hear what you have to say.

Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) isn't a demographic. It's not "women aged 25-40 who like fashion". That's useless. Your ICP is a *problem state*. It's a specific, urgent, and often expensive nightmare that your product or service solves. For example, one of our B2B SaaS clients doesn't target "CTOs at tech companies." They target CTOs who are terrified of their best developers quitting because of a broken workflow. That's a nightmare. We build the ads around that specific pain.

Instead of broad interests, you need to find niche signals. What specific software do your real customers use (e.g., Shopify, HubSpot)? What niche podcasts do they listen to? What specific industry leaders do they follow on LinkedIn or Twitter? Who are your direct competitors that you can target an interest for? Layering these more specific interests is far more powerful. For instance, if you were selling to recruiters, instead of targeting a massive interest like "Human Resources," you would target people with interests in specific HR software combined with job titles like "Recruitment Manager". This laser-focus on relevance ensures your ad is seen by the right people, giving the algorithm the positive signals it needs. I remember one campaign we worked on for a medical job matching SaaS, where careful and strategic optimisation on Meta and Google Ads allowed us to reduce their cost per user acquisition from £100 down to just £7.

The goal isn't to find the biggest audience; it's to find the most *concentrated* audience of people experiencing the nightmare you solve.

You'll need an offer that can't be ignored...

This leads directly to the next point, which is probably the most important of all. Even with perfect targeting, your ads won't spend if your message is weak. Your ad has less than two seconds to stop someone scrolling and convince them to care. A low CTR is almost always a symptom of a boring ad and a weak offer.

Your ad copy and creative must speak directly to the customer's nightmare. We use a few frameworks for this:

• Problem-Agitate-Solve (PAS): You don't sell "accounting services." You sell a good night's sleep. Your ad should say something like, "Staring at a messy spreadsheet at 2 AM again? Worried one wrong calculation could lead to a massive tax bill? We take the chaos out of your bookkeeping so you can focus on running your business, not just surviving it."
• Before-After-Bridge (BAB): You don't sell a "project management tool." You sell the feeling of control. "Before: Your team is drowning in emails, missing deadlines, and you have no idea who's working on what. After: Imagine a single dashboard where every project is on track, on time, and on budget. Bridge: Our platform is the bridge that gets you there in 10 minutes."

Notice how these examples don't talk about features. They talk about feelings, frustrations, and transformations. This is what gets clicks. This is what generates the positive signals the algorithm needs to see. If your ad just says "Buy our handcrafted jewelry" or "We are an AI agency," you're invisible. There's no urgency, no emotion, no reason to click. And if no one clicks, your budget doesn't get spent.

This is so important that remaking the ads from scratch, as you suggested, is exactly the right instinct. But don't just remake them. Rethink them entirely from the perspective of your customer's biggest problem.

You must tell the algorithm what you actually want...

Finally, what is your campaign objective? If you’ve set it to "Reach" or "Brand Awareness," you have actively commanded Meta to find you the worst possible audience. The algorithm interprets this as "Find me the cheapest eyeballs, regardless of quality." And it does exactly that, seeking out users who are known to be inactive, don't click on ads, and certainly don't buy things. Their attention is cheap for a reason.

For almost any business that needs to see a return, you MUST optimise for a conversion event. This could be Leads, Add to Cart, or Purchases. By doing this, you're telling the algorithm, "I don't care about cheap eyeballs. Go and find me people who are similar to those who have previously taken this specific, valuable action."

If your pixel is new and has no conversion data, this can be tricky. The algorithm has no idea what a 'purchaser' looks like for you. In this case, you start with an easier conversion, like 'View Content' or 'Add to Cart', to gather data. But you should aim to move to 'Purchase' or 'Lead' optimisation as soon as you have enough data points (around 50-100 of that event per week). Choosing the wrong objective is like giving a map with the wrong destination to a taxi driver – you'll go somewhere, but it won't be where you want to end up, and your campaign will stall because the algorithm can't find people who fit your vague, low-value criteria.

To help you figure this out, here's a quick diagnostic flow.

You'll need a realistic budget to get started...

You mentioned your budget is "decent," but this is subjective. For an algorithm that needs data to learn, a "decent" budget is one that allows it to get enough conversions within its learning phase (typically aiming for 50 conversions per ad set per week). If your Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) is £20, you'd need a budget of £1,000 per week (£140/day) per ad set just to exit the learning phase effectively. If your budget is, say, £20 a day, the algorithm knows it will take forever to gather enough data, which can also contribute to it being hesitant to spend.

Use the calculator below to get a rough idea of what a "minimum viable budget" might look like for your campaign. This isn't a perfect science, but it grounds the conversation in maths, not feelings.

I've detailed my main recommendations for you below:

Right, that was a lot to take in. This is the process we'd follow to fix your campaign and get it spending effectively. It's not about flicking a switch; it's about building a solid foundation based on a deep understanding of your customer.

As you can see, getting an ad campaign to work properly involves a lot more than just the technical setup in Ads Manager. It's about deep strategic work on your audience, your messaging, and your offer. The platform is just a tool; its effectiveness depends entirely on the quality of the strategy you feed into it.

This is where expert help can make a massive difference. We've managed campaigns for dozens of clients, from B2B SaaS companies to eCommerce stores, and we've seen this exact problem countless times. We know the patterns, we know the frameworks that work, and we can move through this diagnostic and rebuilding process far more quickly and effectively because it's what we do all day, every day.

If you'd like to go through your account together and apply some of these principles directly to your campaigns, we offer a completely free, no-obligation initial strategy session. We can have a look at your setup and give you some concrete, actionable advice you can implement straight away.

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh