Solved: Meta Ads Only Run for 24 Hours - Burnout Fix

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out!

Honestly, what you're describing is an incredibly common problem with Meta ads, and it drives a lot of people mad. It's that classic sugar rush – amazing results for a day, then a complete crash. The good news is it's not random, and it's definitely fixable. The bad news is that it points to a deeper issue in your campaign structure and audience strategy.

You're stuck in a loop of short-term tactics, and the algorithm is burning through your best prospects in hours, not days. We need to get you out of that cycle and build a proper system that delivers consistent results, not just 24-hour flashes of brilliance. I'll walk you through my thoughts on why this is happening and what you can do about it.

We'll need to look at why your ads die so quickly...

Right, let's get one thing straight. The Meta algorithm is exceptionally good at its job. When you tell it to get purchases, it goes out and finds the people inside your targeting parameters who are most likely to buy something *right now*. Think of it like a hungry lion dropped into a small pen full of sheep. It's going to have a very successful first day.

That's what's giving you that fantastic 24-hour performance. The algorithm is cherry-picking all the low-hanging fruit, the people who were already on the verge of buying. But what happens on day two? The easy targets are gone. Now the algorithm has to work much harder. It starts showing your ad to people who are less interested, more expensive to reach, and further away from making a purchase. Your frequency skyrockets, your cost-per-click goes up, your engagement plummets, and your sales dry up. It's not that the ad is being "pushed to the back"; it's that you've exhausted the tiny pocket of your audience that was ready to convert instantly.

This isn't a bug, its a feature of running ads into an audience that's too small or isn't being constantly refreshed with new people. You're effectively trying to run a marathon by sprinting the first 100 metres over and over again. It's exhausting and you'll get nowhere. Here's what that burnout cycle looks like in practice:

I'd say you need to stop fishing in a puddle...

The solution isn't a magic button or a different pixel setup. It's strategy. You need to build a machine that constantly finds new people, warms them up to your brand, and then converts them when they're ready. This is the classic Top-of-Funnel (ToFu), Middle-of-Funnel (MoFu), and Bottom-of-Funnel (BoFu) approach. It sounds like jargon, but it's just common sense.

You need seperate, always-on campaigns for each stage:

• Top of Funnel (ToFu): This is your prospecting campaign. Its only job is to find cold audiences – people who have never heard of you but fit your ideal customer profile. You'll use broad interest, demographic, and lookalike audiences here. The goal isn't immediate sales (though they will happen); it's to feed the top of your funnel with fresh, relevant people. This is where most of your budget should go.
• Middle of Funnel (MoFu): This is for warming people up. You'll retarget people who have engaged with your brand but haven't taken a high-intent action yet. Think video viewers, social media page engagers, or general website visitors. You show them different ads, maybe testimonials, behind-the-scenes content, or educational stuff.
• Bottom of Funnel (BoFu): This is where you close the deal. You retarget your hottest prospects – people who have added to cart, initiated checkout, or viewed specific products. These audiences are smaller but highly motivated. The ads here can be more direct, maybe with an offer or a reminder.

By structuring your account this way, you create a continous flow. The ToFu campaign constantly finds new people, who then get nurtured in the MoFu campaign, and finally converted by the BoFu campaign. This stops any single audience from burning out because it's always being replenished. One campaign we worked on for a subscription box client achieved a 1000% return on ad spend using this exact structure. It's about system building, not campaign sprinting.

You probably should stop obsessing over daily costs...

This brings me to the biggest mindset shift you need to make. The reason you're panicking when performance drops on day two is because you're judging success on a 24-hour cycle. To scale properly, you need to stop thinking about Cost Per Purchase (CPP) and start thinking about Customer Lifetime Value (LTV).

The real question isn't "How cheap can I get a sale today?" but "How much can I afford to spend to acquire a customer who will be worth X amount to me over the next year?". When you know your LTV, you can make much better decisions. Maybe your ToFu campaign has a high cost per purchase on day one, but if it's bringing in customers who go on to spend 10x that amount over their lifetime, then it's an incredibly profitable campaign. You're making an investment, not just a transaction.

Calculating LTV gives you your 'allowable' Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC). A healthy business can typically spend about 1/3 of its LTV to acquire a new customer. Let's do the maths. Once you know what you can afford to spend, that £100 cost-per-purchase on a cold audience doesn't seem so scary if you know the LTV is £3000.

I've built a simple calculator for you below. Play around with your own numbers. This calculation is the single most important peice of data for scaling your ads profitably. Without it, you're flying blind.

You'll need to stop being boring...

Finally, let's talk about the ads themselves. Even with the perfect funnel structure and a solid grasp of your LTV, your ads will still die if they're not fresh. Audience fatigue is one thing, but creative fatigue is just as powerfull. If people in your audience see the same image and headline ten times, they're going to tune it out. That drop in engagement you mentioned is a clear sign of this.

You need a systematic way to test and rotate your creatives. Don't just make one ad and hope for the best. For every campaign, you should be testing multiple things:

• Different Angles: Don't just sell the product, sell the outcome. Use a "Before-After-Bridge" format. Before: "Tired of dull skin and endless products that dont work?". After: "Imagine waking up with a natural glow, feeling confident without makeup." Bridge: "Our serum is the bridge that gets you there."
• Different Formats: Test static images against user-generated content (UGC) style videos, carousels, and simple text-based ads. I remember several SaaS clients seeing really good results with UGC videos, and the same principles apply to eCommerce.
• Different Hooks: The first three seconds of a video or the first line of text is everything. Test a question vs. a bold statement vs. a startling statistic.

You should have a constant rotation of new creatives going into your ToFu campaigns especially. This keeps the ads fresh for the algorithm and prevents the audience from getting bored. The moment you see frequency rising and performance dipping on a specific ad, swap it out for a new contender. It's a continuous process of optimisation.

This is the main advice I have for you:

To pull this all together, you need to move away from launching individual ads and start managing a complete advertising system. It requires more setup upfront but leads to far more stable and scalable results. Here's a table outlining the structure I'd recommend starting with.

Implementing a structure like this is a significant shift. It's not just about setting up a few ad sets and hoping for the best. It's about understanding the entire customer journey, having a deep knowledge of your business's metrics, and creating a robust system for creative development and testing. It takes expertise and constant attention to manage effectively.

This is where getting professional help can make a huge difference. An expert can audit your current setup, build out this entire funnel structure for you, and manage the ongoing optimisation process to ensure you're not just getting those 24-hour sugar rushes, but building a truly scalable and profitable advertising machine.

If you'd like to have a chat about how we could apply these principles specifically to your business, we offer a free, no-obligation strategy session where we can go through your account together. It might be helpful to get a second set of eyes on things.

Hope this helps!

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh