Solved: Facebook Ads Not Spending Despite Active Campaign

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 really common and frustrating problem, but the reasons are often not what people think they are. The list of potential issues you found is a decent starting point, but the real reason is usually a bit more subtle and strategic than a simple technical glitch.

Honestly, when an ad isn't spending, it’s rarely a bug. It's the algorithm telling you something important about your ad, your audience, or your offer. I'm going to walk you through why Meta is likely ignoring your campaign and give you a proper framework to fix it, not just for this ad, but for all your future campaigns. It's less about flicking switches in Ads Manager and more about getting the core strategy right from the start.

We'll need to look at why Meta is ignoring you...

The first thing to get your head around is that Meta's advertising platform is not a vending machine. You don't just put money in and get ad impressions out. It's an auction, a massive, real-time competition for user attention. Every time a user scrolls through their feed, an auction happens in milliseconds to decide which ad they see. Your ad is competing against thousands of others.

You mentioned your budget is "decent." That's good, but your bid is only one part of the equation. Meta's goal is to maximise value for both the advertiser (you) and the user. To do this, they calculate a 'Total Value' score for each ad in the auction. It looks something like this:

[Advertiser Bid] x [Estimated Action Rates] + [Ad Quality & Relevance] = Total Value

Let's break that down:

• Advertiser Bid: This is how much you're willing to pay. Simple enough.
• Estimated Action Rates: This is the algorithim's prediction of how likely a user is to take the action you're optimising for (e.g., click, sign up, purchase). This is based on your ad's historical performance and the user's past behaviour.
• Ad Quality & Relevance: This is a measure of how good your ad is. Does it get positive feedback (likes, shares)? Or negative feedback (people hiding it)? Is it relevant to the person seeing it?

When your ad isn't spending, it’s because your 'Total Value' score is so low you're losing every single auction. The algorithm has looked at your ad and concluded that it's not worth showing to anyone. It predicts that users won't click it, they won't convert, and they probably won't even like it. So, to protect its user experience (and save you from wasting money on an ad that won't work), it simply throttles your spend down to zero.

Think of it like being a new street performer. You can stand on the busiest corner in London (your massive audience) with a big hat for money (your decent budget), but if your act is rubbish, no one will stop to watch, and you'll go home with nothing. The crowd just walks on by. That's what's happening to your ad. The platform is the crowd, and it's decided your performance isn't worth anyone's time.

I'd say you need to re-examine what you ruled out...

You went through a list of common issues and felt they didn't apply. I'd argue they almost certainly do, but perhaps not in the way you're thinking. Let's look at them again from an expert's perspective.

1. "It can't be Ad Fatigue because my ad has barely been up for 3 days."

This is a classic misunderstanding. You're thinking of fatigue as something that happens over weeks when the same people have seen your ad too many times. That's one type, sure. But there's another, more brutal type: instant creative failure. If your ad creative and messaging are weak, they are effectively "exhausted" from the very first impression. The algorithm shows it to a tiny test group of people, gets zero positive signals (no clicks, no engagement), and immediately concludes, "This ad is a dud. Stop showing it."

So, it's not about time; it's about impact. A bad ad doesn't need three weeks to fail; it can fail in three minutes. You need to be brutally honest with yourself: is your ad genuinely stopping someone mid-scroll? Does it speak directly to a burning problem they have? Or is it just another piece of generic marketing that's easy to ignore? One campaign we worked on for a medical job matching SaaS client saw their cost per user acquisition drop from £100 to just £7. A huge part of that was moving from feature-focused ads to pain-focused, user-generated style videos that felt native to the feed and grabbed attention instantly.

2. "The interest I included for an audience are pretty massive interest groups."

This is probably the biggest red flag in your post. Targeting "massive" interest groups is one of the most common ways new advertisers burn through money with no results—or in your case, get no spend at all. It seems logical, right? Bigger audience, more people to reach. But it's a trap.

When you target a broad interest like "Business" (2 billion people) or "Marketing" (800 million people), you're asking the algorithm to find your perfect customer in a crowd the size of China. It has no idea where to start. You're targeting CEOs, interns, students, and people who just liked a random marketing meme five years ago. The vast majority of these people are completely irrelevant to you.

The algorithm starts by showing your ad to a random sample of this massive group. Because most of them are the wrong people, they ignore it. The Estimated Action Rate plummets. Ad Quality tanks. Your Total Value score hits rock bottom. And your spend stops. Your job isn't to find a massive audience; it's to find the *most relevant* audience, even if it's much smaller. Your ICP isn't a demographic; it's a problem state. You need to target the *problem*, not the population.

3. "My Budget is decent."

As we've seen from the Total Value formula, budget is only part of the story. A £1,000/day budget on a terrible ad is still a terrible ad. The algorithm won't just spend your money for the sake of it. In fact, if your ad quality is low, it sees a high budget as a risk. It won't let you waste a grand a day on something that provides no value to users. So, it keeps your spend at £0. A "decent" budget only becomes a factor once you have an ad that shows some sign of life.

4. "I've only made like 2 changes for the campaign since its been up."

This is fine, but it also means you haven't given the system much to learn from. Constant tinkering is bad, yes. But if the initial setup is flawed (which it almost certainly is, given the spending issue), then leaving it alone won't fix it. The problem isn't the changes you've made; it's the initial creative and targeting strategy you launched with.

So, what's the real issue? It's a combination of all of the above. Your creative is likely not compelling enough, and your audience is far too broad. The result is a failed launch where the algorithm throttled you before you even got started.

You probably should focus on your offer...

Before we even get into fixing your ads, we have to talk about the single most important thing: your offer. I've seen more campaigns fail because of a weak offer than any other reason. You can have the best targeting and the most beautiful ads in the world, but if what you're offering doesn't solve a painful, urgent problem for a specific group of people, it will fail.

A great offer makes advertising easy. A bad offer makes it impossible.

So, ask yourself these questions:

• Who is this for, specifically? And I don't mean "small business owners." I mean, "Founders of B2B SaaS companies with 10-50 employees who are struggling to book demos and are terrified of running out of cash." Be specific. Your ICP is defined by their nightmare, not their demographics.
• What is their urgent, expensive nightmare? People don't buy "solutions." They buy an end to their pain. For a legal tech SaaS, the nightmare isn't 'needing document management'; it's 'a partner missing a critical filing deadline and exposing the firm to a malpractice suit.' You need to know what keeps them awake at night.
• How does your offer make that nightmare go away, instantly and believably? Your offer needs to be the clear, obvious bridge from their current pain to their desired outcome. The "Request a Demo" button is one of the worst offers in B2B. It’s high-friction and promises a sales pitch. A much better offer solves a small part of their problem for free, right now.

For example, a company that sells high-end brand films will struggle if their ads just sell a "brand film"—that's a feature. A much stronger approach is to solve a nightmare. Instead of selling a film, they could be selling a solution for "Talented architecture firms who are losing bids to bigger, more established competitors." By developing a productised "1-Day Filming Process" that delivers a powerful case study video to help them win bigger contracts, the offer becomes specific, solves an urgent pain (losing money), and feels tangible. An offer like that, which clearly resonates with a specific audience's problem, is what gets results.

Until you have an offer that's this clear and compelling, you're just pushing water uphill. Fix the offer before you fix the ads.

You'll need a proper targeting strategy...

Once your offer is sharp, you need to get it in front of the right people. Your "massive interest groups" approach needs to be thrown out. You need a structured, prioritised approach to testing audiences, moving from the highest-intent people to colder audiences as you gather data.

For almost any business, especially eCommerce or lead gen, I structure campaigns in a ToFu-MoFu-BoFu funnel (Top, Middle, Bottom of Funnel). Here's how you should prioritise your audiences:

For a brand new account with no traffic, you have to start at the ToFu stage. But you don't start with broad interests. You start with Lookalike audiences (once you have at least 100 purchasers to model from) or highly specific, layered interests that align with the 'nightmare problem' you solve. If you sell project management software for construction firms, don't target "Project Management." Target people who are interested in "Procore" AND "Construction Management" AND are page admins of a business in the construction industry. Be specific. Test 3-5 of these hyper-targeted audiences in separate ad sets. That's how you give the algorithm a chance to find the right people from the start.

You'll need to understand your numbers...

This might seem like a diversion, but it's probably the most powerful strategic shift you can make. Most advertisers are obsessed with getting the lowest possible Cost Per Lead (CPL) or Cost Per Acquisition (CPA). It's a race to the bottom that leads to cheap, low-quality traffic. 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 is your Customer Lifetime Value (LTV). Once you know what a customer is worth to you over their entire relationship with your business, you can stop being scared of a high CPL. You can confidently spend what's necessary to acquire high-value customers.

The formula is simple:

LTV = (Average Revenue Per Account * Gross Margin %) / Monthly Churn Rate

Let's say you run a SaaS business. Your average customer pays £200/month (ARPA), your gross margin is 75%, and you lose 5% of your customers each month (churn). Your LTV would be (£200 * 0.75) / 0.05 = £3,000. Each customer is worth £3,000 in gross margin.

A healthy business aims for a 3:1 LTV to Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) ratio. This means for a £3,000 LTV, you can afford to spend up to £1,000 to acquire a single customer. If your sales process converts 1 in 10 qualified leads into a customer, you can afford to pay up to £100 per qualified lead! Suddenly that £30 CPL you were getting from your broad audience doesn't look so good, and paying a bit more for a hyper-targeted, high-quality audience seems like a bargain.

Use this calculator to figure out your own numbers. It will change your perspective entirely.

I'd say you need to overhaul your creative...

Now we get to the ad itself. This is where you grab the attention of your hyper-targeted audience and present your compelling offer. Your creative is not just a pretty picture; it's a sales argument. It needs to work hard.

Most ads fail because they are boring, generic, and talk about features. Great ads talk about the customer's pain and the transformation your offer provides. Two powerful frameworks for this are Problem-Agitate-Solve (PAS) and Before-After-Bridge (BAB).

Let's imagine you sell accounting software for freelancers. Here's how most people would write an ad, and why it fails:

The bad ad is all about the company ("Our software," "we're the top choice"). It lists features that every other competitor also has. It's generic and forgettable. The good ad is all about the customer's pain ("sinking feeling," "crumpled receipts," "wasting hours"). It agitates that pain and then presents the software not as a tool, but as "the relief." It sells a transformation, an emotional outcome. This is the kind of ad that gets clicks, that gets high relevance scores, and that the algorithm loves to show to people.

You need to test at least 3-5 completely different ad concepts like this. Different hooks, different pain points, different visuals (static image vs. video vs. carousel). One of them will likely outperform the others significantly. That's your winner, and that's what you scale.

This is the main advice I have for you:

Recreating the ads from scratch might give you a temporary fix if there was a minor glitch, but it won't solve the underlying strategic problem. You're going to end up back here in a week. Instead, you need a systematic approach. Here are the exact steps I'd recommend you take.

Why you might want some expert help...

As you can see, getting ads to run profitably is a lot more involved than just setting up a campaign. It's a mix of deep customer psychology, strategic targeting, compelling copywriting, and constant, structured testing. It’s a full-time job, and it's what we do all day, every day.

You can definatly go through this process on your own, but it involves a lot of trial and error (which can be expensive). Working with an expert can shortcut that process dramatically. We've run campaigns for dozens of businesses, from B2B SaaS to eCommerce stores, and we've seen what works and what doesn't across multiple industries. We've helped clients generate a 1000% return on ad spend and reduced cost per acquisition by over 90% by implementing these exact kinds of strategic frameworks.

If you'd like to get a second pair of eyes on your strategy and a tailored plan of action, we offer a completely free, no-obligation initial consultation. We can jump on a call, review your ad account and your offer together, and give you some concrete advice you can implement straight away. It’s often incredibly helpful for potential clients and gives them a real taste of the expertise we bring to the table.

Hope this detailed breakdown has been helpful and gives you a much clearer path forward!

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh