Solved: Facebook Ads Not Spending or Reaching Audience

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out! I had a look at the problem you're facing with your Meta ads. It’s incredibly frustrating when a campaign that was performing brilliantly suddenly grinds to a halt, especially when you're trying to give it more budget. It's a common problem though, and usually fixable once you diagnose the root cause.

I'm happy to give you some of my initial thoughts and a bit of guidance on what's likely happening here and how you can get things moving again. It's almost certainly not a technical glitch, but a classic case of ad fatigue hitting your winning formula.

We'll need to look at why your campaign actually stalled...

When a high-performing ad campaign suddenly stops spending, advertisers often panic and start changing everything at once – increasing the budget, duplicating the campaign, or, as Meta is suggesting, switching to a completely different campaign type. This is usually the wrong move. The first step is to diagnose the underlying issue, which is almost always one of two things: audience saturation or creative fatigue. Your budget isn't being spent because the algorithm has determined it can no longer achieve your desired result (a sale) at a cost it deems efficient within the audience you've provided.

Think of it like this: last month, you had a great offer (your wooden tableware), a great ad, and a hungry audience. Meta showed your ad to the people most likely to buy, and they did. But that group of people is finite. Eventually, you've shown the ad to most of them. The ones who were going to buy have bought. The others aren't interested. Now, for Meta to get you another sale from that same group, it has to show the ad again and again, which is inefficient. The cost per purchase (CPA) starts to climb. The algorithm sees this, knows it can't hit its targets, and throttles your spend to avoid wasting your money. It's a protective mechanism, even if it feels like a punishment.

Here’s a simple process to figure out where the breakdown is happening in your existing campaigns.

Following this logic, you’ll quickly see the problem. My bet is that your frequency is high and your CTR has started to drop off. People are literally tired of seeing your ad. Increasing the budget just tells Meta to try and force that same tired ad on that same saturated audience, which it rightly refuses to do.

I'd say you need to combat ad fatigue systematically...

Ad fatigue is the silent killer of profitable campaigns. It happens gradually, then all at once. The metrics tell the story: your Frequency goes up, your Click-Through Rate (CTR) goes down, and your Cost Per Purchase (CPA) skyrockets until the campaign is no longer profitable and the algorithm shuts it down. The relationship between how often someone sees your ad (frequency) and how much it costs to get them to buy is direct and punishing.

I've seen it time and time again with eCommerce clients. One campaign for a cleaning products company we worked with saw its CPA double as the frequency crept from 2 to 5 over a few weeks. The ads were the same, the audience was the same, but the performance fell off a cliff. We had to intervene by introducing completely new creative and targeting fresh audiences to bring the costs back down and restore the 633% return they were used to.

The solution isn’t to abandon what worked, but to evolve it. You need a structure that constantly feeds the algorithm new audiences and new creatives. This means moving away from having one or two "winning" ad sets and building a proper marketing funnel within your Meta account.

You probably should restructure your campaigns into a funnel...

The most reliable way to scale eCommerce brands on Meta is with a ToFu/MoFu/BoFu funnel structure. This stands for Top of Funnel, Middle of Funnel, and Bottom of Funnel. It's a way of organising your campaigns to speak to people at different stages of awareness and interest. It ensures you're always bringing new potential customers in (ToFu), nurturing their interest (MoFu), and converting the hottest prospects (BoFu).

For your wooden tableware brand, it would look something like this:

• ToFu (Top of Funnel - Cold Audiences): This is where you find new customers. People who have never heard of you. Your goal here isn't necessarily immediate sales, but to generate interest and drive traffic. Your brilliant campaign last month was likely targeting a great ToFu audience, but you've now exhausted it. You need to test new ones.
• MoFu (Middle of Funnel - Warm Audiences): These are people who have shown some interest but haven't bought yet. They might have watched one of your videos, engaged with an ad, or visited your website. You show them different ads, perhaps highlighting customer reviews or different product uses.
• BoFu (Bottom of Funnel - Hot Audiences): This is your lowest-hanging fruit. People who have added a product to their cart or started the checkout process. These are your retargeting campaigns, and they should be highly focused on getting the sale over the line, maybe with an offer for free shipping.

By separating your audiences like this into different campaigns or ad sets, you can control the message, budget, and expectations for each stage. It stops your hot retargeting audiences from getting burned out and ensures you have a constant stream of new potential customers coming through. This is the structure we use for almost all our eCommerce clients, including a women's apparel brand where it helped us drive a 691% return on ad spend.

Here’s a breakdown of the audiences you should be testing at each stage for your tableware brand.

You'll need a relentless creative testing engine...

Just as audiences get saturated, so do your ads. What was eye-catching last month is invisible this month. You can't rely on one or two winning creatives. You need a system to constantly test and find new winners. This doesn't have to be complicated. I'd recomend setting aside 10-20% of your total budget purely for testing new creatives against new cold audiences.

For your products, the creative angles are endless. Your ads shouldn't just show a wooden bowl; they should sell the feeling it creates. Use the Before-After-Bridge framework:

• Before: Show a generic, boring, ceramic-filled dinner table. Lifeless.
• After: Show a vibrant, warm, beautiful table setting featuring your wooden tableware. It feels natural, inviting, and unique.
• Bridge: Your product is the bridge. "Tired of sterile table settings? Bring natural warmth to every meal. Shop our handcrafted wooden tableware collection."

Here are some creative ideas to test immediately:

• Lifestyle Photography: Your products in a beautifully styled home, being used for a dinner party. Make people imagine your products in their life.
• User-Generated Content (UGC): Ask happy customers for photos. An authentic photo from a real customer's home is often more persuasive than a professional studio shot.
• Short Video Ads: A simple video showing the grain of the wood, someone serving a salad from one of your bowls, or the process of how they are made. Video captures attention far better than static images.
• Carousel Ads: Showcase a full collection or different ways to style a single product.

The key is variety. Test different formats (image vs video), different hooks (pain point vs benefit), and different visuals (product shot vs lifestyle). A simple change in the first line of your ad copy can completly change its performance.

So, should you use Advantage+ Shopping?

Now to Meta's big recommendation. Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns (ASC) can be incredibly powerful. They essentually automate the funnel structure I described above, using Meta's AI to find cold audiences and retarget warm ones within a single campaign. For some accounts, especially those with a lot of pixel data, they work exceptionally well.

However, it is not a silver bullet. My main issue with it is that it's a "black box." You have very little control over who sees your ads, and the reporting is limited. You can't easily tell the system to spend more on finding new customers or to focus on retargeting. You just give it a budget and your product catalogue and hope for the best.

My advice is this: do not abandon your manual campaigns for ASC. Instead, fix your manual campaigns first by implementing the funnel structure and new creatives. Once that is stable and profitable again, you should absolutely test ASC. Run it alongside your manual campaigns with a smaller budget. See if it can beat your structured approach. Sometimes it can, sometimes it can't. But by testing it, you'll know for sure, and you'll have a reliable manual setup to fall back on. Blindly switching now would be abandoning a strategy you know can work, without understanding why it stopped.

Let's calculate what's possible...

When you get the structure right, the results can be transformative. We've taken eCommerce clients from break-even to achieving 8x or even 10x Return On Ad Spend (ROAS). It's all about finding the right combination of audience, creative, and offer, and then scaling it methodically. The goal isn't just to get sales, but to acquire customers profitably so you can re-invest in more growth.

Use the simple calculator below to see how changes in your metrics can impact your bottom line. Plug in your monthly ad spend, your average order value, and your website's conversion rate. See how a small improvement in your conversion rate (which comes from better targeting and creative) can dramatically increase your revenue and ROAS.

The numbers can look promising, but getting there requires a consistent and disciplined approach. It’s not about finding one magic ad set, but about building a reliable system for growth.

This is the main advice I have for you:

To summarise, here are the actionable steps I'd recomend you take to get your ads spending profitably again. This isn't a quick fix, but a strategic reset that will build a much more resilient advertising foundation for your business.

This is a lot to take in, I know. Moving from a single successful campaign to a multi-layered funnel structure can feel daunting. It requires more time for setup, more creative assets, and more diligent monitoring. The payoff, however, is a much more stable and scalable advertising machine that isn't reliant on a single audience or ad.

If you're feeling overwhelmed by this, that's completely normal. This is the difference between running ads and managing a professional paid media strategy. It's what we do for our clients every day, taking the complexity off their hands so they can focus on running their business. We handle the structure, the testing, the analysis, and the optimisation to deliver predictable growth.

If you'd like to chat through your specific situation in more detail, we offer a completely free, no-obligation initial consultation. We could have a look at your account together and map out a precise recovery plan. It's a great way to get some expert eyes on your strategy and see if we might be a good fit to help you scale.

Hope that helps!

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh