Solved: Meta Ads Delivering Only to One Ad

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out!

Happy to give you some initial thoughts and guidance on what you're seeing in your Meta ad account. Those are actually two really common issues that trip up a lot of people when they're starting out. It's less about your account being misconfigured and more about understanding the slightly weird way Meta's system works. I'll walk you through why it's happening and what you should be doing instead.

We'll need to look at how you're testing your ads...

Right, let's get into the first problem: only one of your four ads is getting any impressions. This isn't a bug, it's a feature. A really annoying one, but a feature nonetheless. When you put multiple ads into a single ad set, you're not actually setting up a proper A/B split test. What you're doing is telling Meta's algorithm, "Here's a bunch of ads, go find the cheapest conversions for me."

The algorithm is designed for one thing: efficiency at scale. It will do a very quick, initial test with a tiny bit of your budget across all four ads. In that first hour or two, it'll decide one ad is the 'winner' based on early signals like clicks or even just initial engagement. Once it's picked its favourite, it will pour almost the entire budget into that one ad and pretty much ignore the others. It's not trying to give each ad a fair chance; it's trying to get you the result you asked for (e.g., clicks, leads, sales) as cheaply as possible, as fast as possible. This means an ad that might have performed brilliantly over a week never gets a proper look-in because it had a slightly slower start in the first 90 minutes. It's a massive flaw in how most people try to test creative.

Tbh, testing creative like this is one of the biggest wastes of time and money I see when I audit accounts. New advertisers obsess over finding the perfect headline or image, but the truth is, the audience is far, far more important. A slightly rubbish ad shown to the perfect audience will always outperform a masterpiece of an ad shown to the wrong people.

So, what should you do instead? You need to structure your campaigns to test the thing that actually matters: your targeting. Instead of one ad set with four ads, you should be thinking about having multiple ad sets, each targeting a completely different audience. Inside each of those ad sets, you can have maybe two or three ads that are substantially different from each other (e.g., a video vs. an image, not just a different headline).

This structure forces Meta to spend your budget across different audiences, which is how you'll discover where your actual customers are hiding. I've mapped out a simplified version of a proper testing structure below. This is the kind of setup we use to find winning audiences for clients, from eCommerce stores to B2B software companies.

I'd say you look at your billing settings...

Now for the second issue: spending $10 but being charged $40. This one freaks everyone out at first, but 99% of the time, it's perfectly normal. Again, it comes down to how Meta's system is built. You're not charged in real-time for every single impression or click.

Instead, Meta uses a **billing threshold**. When you first start an account, your threshold might be very low, say £20 or £25. You'll run ads, and as soon as your accumulated ad spend hits that £25 mark, Meta charges your card for that amount. Once that payment goes through successfully, they increase your threshold to, say, £50. Then £75, £150, and so on. They do this to limit their risk with new advertisers.

There's also a time-based charge. You'll also be charged on your monthly bill date for any outstanding amount, even if you haven't hit your threshold. What's likely happened to you is a combination of this and a reporting delay. The Ads Manager dashboard can sometimes lag behind the actual spend by several hours. So, your ads might have actually spent closer to $40, but the dashboard was still showing $10 when the system triggered a charge because you crossed your billing threshold.

You can check your specific threshold in your billing settings. It'll say something like, "You'll be charged when you spend £50.00, or on the 15th of June 2024."

The only time to be genuinely worried is if you see lots of small, random charges, or if the numbers never add up over a few days. I have seen some cases where this was caused by click fraud from bots, particulerly if you're targeting worldwide without excluding certain low-income countries where this is rife. We almost always exlude the top 30 or so poorest countries from campaigns to avoid wasting budget on bots. But for now, I'd bet my hat on it just being a normal case of hitting your billing threshold combined with a bit of reporting lag.

You probably should focus on your customer, not your ads...

Okay, so we've sorted out your immediate problems. But I'm going to be brutally honest with you: these issues are just symptoms. The real problem is that you're focusing on the wrong things. As someone new to marketing, your instinct is to fiddle with the tools—the ad copy, the buttons, the billing page. But none of that matters if you haven't nailed the foundation.

The foundation of all good advertising isn't the ad itself; it's a deep, almost obsessive understanding of your ideal customer. And I don't mean their demographics. "Women aged 35-50 who live in London and like yoga" is completely useless information. It tells you nothing of value and leads to generic ads that get ignored.

You need to define your customer by their **pain**. By their specific, urgent, expensive nightmare. What is the problem that keeps them awake at 3 AM? What is the frustration in their job or their life that they would gladly pay money to make disappear? Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) isn't a person; it's a problem state.

I remember for one of our B2B software clients, their ICP wasn't "CTOs at tech companies." It was "A Head of Engineering who is terrified her best developers are about to quit because their workflow is a complete mess." See the difference? One is a job title. The other is a career-threatening nightmare. We built an entire campaign around that single, visceral fear, and the leads were incredibly high quality because the message resonated so deeply.

Once you know their nightmare, you can figure out where to find them. What specific podcasts do they listen to? What niche newsletters do they actually read? What influencers do they follow on LinkedIn or Instagram? Who are the competitors they already use and complain about? This intelligence is the blueprint for your entire targeting strategy on Meta. If you haven't done this work, you have no business spending a single penny on ads.

You'll need an offer they can't ignore...

Once you know your customer's nightmare, the next step is to create a message that speaks directly to it. Your ad copy's only job is to get the right person to stop scrolling and think, "That's me. They understand my problem."

Most ads fail because they talk about features, not feelings. They sell the "what," not the "so what." No one cares that your product has "AI-powered analytics." They care that it can stop them from making a catastrophic cash flow mistake that could bankrupt their business. You need to connect your feature to their nightmare.

We use a simple framework for this called **Problem-Agitate-Solve**.

1. Problem: State their nightmare in the first line. Use their own words if you can. "Are your ad campaigns just burning cash?"
2. Agitate: Pour salt on the wound. Remind them of the negative consequences of the problem. "Are you one bad month away from a crisis while your competitors are scaling with ease?"
3. Solve: Introduce your product or service as the clear, obvious solution. "We build ad campaigns that turn uncertainty into predictable growth."

This simple structure transforms your ad from a boring product announcement into a compelling message that demands attention. It shows you understand their pain, which builds instant trust and makes them far more likely to click. One campaign we worked on for a cleaning products company was a huge success. Instead of saying "Our spray is tough on grease," their ads said, "Tired of spending your Saturday scrubbing a greasy hob? Get a spotless kitchen in 5 minutes and get your weekend back." It generated a 633% return because it sold a feeling (freedom), not a feature (degreaser).

This applies to your offer, too. The most common mistake in B2B is the "Request a Demo" button. It's a high-friction, low-value offer. You're asking a busy person to give up 30 minutes of their time to be sold to. It's arrogant. Your offer needs to provide instant, undeniable value. Solve a small part of their problem for free to earn the right to solve the whole thing. For us, it's a free ad account audit. For a software company, it's a free trial. For a service business, it could be a free checklist or a calculator. Give them an "aha!" moment for free, and they'll sell themselves on paying you.

I'd say you need to understand your numbers...

This is probably the most important part of this entire letter. The question you should be asking isn't "Why is my ad not running?" or "Why was I charged $40?". The real question is, "How much can I actually afford to spend to get a customer?"

If you don't know the answer to this, you're flying blind. You have no way of knowing if a campaign is successful or not. You might turn off a campaign with a $50 cost per lead, thinking it's too expensive, when in reality, that lead is worth $5,000 to your business. This is where most businesses go wrong. They focus on minimizing the cost per click (CPC) or cost per lead (CPL), when they should be focused on maximising their return.

To figure this out, you need to calculate your **Customer Lifetime Value (LTV)**. This is the total profit you can expect to make from an average customer over the entire time they do business with you. The formula is actually quite simple:

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

Let's break that down:

• Average Revenue: What does a typical customer pay you each month?
• Gross Margin: What's your profit margin on that revenue after the cost of goods/services?
• Churn Rate: What percentage of your customers do you lose each month?

Once you know your LTV, you can determine your target **Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)**. A healthy business model usually aims for an LTV to CAC ratio of at least 3:1. This means for every £1 you spend to acquire a customer, you should get at least £3 back in profit over their lifetime. So, if your LTV is £9,000, you can afford to spend up to £3,000 to acquire a single customer and still have a very healthy business.

This single piece of math changes everything. It stops you from making emotional decisions based on short-term costs and allows you to make strategic investments based on long-term value. Suddenly, that $50 lead doesn't look so expensive anymore. It looks like a bargain. I've built a calculator below to help you figure out your own numbers.

This is the main advice I have for you:

There's a lot to take in here, I know. It can feel overwhelming when you're starting out. To make it easier, I've broken down the most important actions you should take into a simple table. Forget about everything else for now and just focus on these steps. This is the path from fiddling with ads to building a proper growth engine.

I hope this has been genuinely helpful and has cleared up some of the confusion. The world of paid advertising is full of bad advice and myths, and it's easy to get lost focusing on the tiny details that don't move the needle.

Getting these foundational pieces right—your customer's pain, your LTV, and your testing structure—is 90% of the battle. It's what separates the businesses that waste a fortune on ads from the ones that build predictable, scalable growth.

If you'd like to go over your specific situation in more detail, we offer a free, no-obligation 20-minute strategy session where we can have a look at your account together and give you some more tailored advice. It's often the quickest way to get clarity and a solid plan of action.

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh