Solved: ROAS Dropped Suddenly on Meta Ads

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out! I've had a look over the situation you described with your Meta ads. It's completely normal to feel a bit of panic when you see a sudden drop in ROAS like that, especially when things have been stable. I've seen it happen to countless campaigns, from small eCommerce stores to big B2B software companies.

The good news is that it's rarely a sign of a complete disaster. More often than not, it's a symptom of an underlying issue that we can diagnose and fix. It's tempting to blame a Meta outage or just a 'bad day', but the best advertisers treat these moments as an opportunity to really dig into the data and understand what's happening under the bonnet. I'm happy to give you some initial thoughts and a framework for how you can approach this yourself.

You should stop blaming 'bad days' and start diagnosing your funnel...

Alright, let's get straight to it. The first instinct for many when ROAS tanks is to either blame a platform glitch or immediately start fiddling with bids and budgets. Both are usually mistakes. While platform-wide issues do happen, they're not as common as people think, and they tend to affect everyone. Using it as a go-to explanation is a way of avoiding the real work of campaign analysis.

A single day's data is just noise. An algorithm-driven platform like Meta has natural ebbs and flows in performance based on auction dynamics, user behaviour (e.g., performance is often different on a Monday vs. a Saturday), and a hundred other variables. I always advise clients to wait at least 48-72 hours before drawing any conclusions. I've lost count of the number of times I've seen a campaign have a terrible Monday only to have a record-breaking Wednesday for no apparent reason. Patience is probably the most underrated skill in paid advertising.

But if after a few days things haven't recovered, it's not a 'bad day' anymore. It's a data point telling you something has broken. The ROAS figure itself doesn't tell you *what* broke. It's the final result of a long chain of events. To find the problem, you have to work backwards along that chain. Think of yourself as a detective at a crime scene. The low ROAS is the body, but you need to find the cause of death. Was it the auction, the ad creative, the landing page, or the product offer?

We'll need to look at your customer journey, metric by metric...

Your customer's journey doesn't start when they buy something; it starts the moment Meta decides to show them your ad. Every step is a potential failure point. Let's walk through it.

Step 1: The Auction – Are you paying more for worse eyeballs?

Before anyone even sees your ad, you have to win a spot in the newsfeed. The two metrics to watch here are CPM (Cost Per 1,000 Impressions) and Frequency.

• -> CPM: This is how much it costs for your ad to be seen 1,000 times. If your CPM has shot up, it means the auction is more competitive, or Meta's algorithm thinks your ad is less relevant to the audience than it was before. This is an early warning sign. You're now paying more just to show up to the party.
• -> Frequency: This is the average number of times a person has seen your ad. If this number is getting high (say, above 3-4 in a week for a prospecting campaign), it's a massive red flag for audience fatigue. You're just annoying the same people over and over, and they've started to ignore you. The algorithm notices this lack of engagement and starts charging you more (higher CPM) for the privilege of showing your now-boring ad.

If your CPMs are up and your ROAS is down, the problem could be that you've exhausted your current audience. It's time to either introduce fresh ad creatives or test entirely new audiences.

Step 2: The Scroll-Stop – Is your ad being ignored?

Once you've won the auction, your ad appears in someone's feed. Do they stop scrolling? This is measured by your Click-Through Rate (CTR). A sudden drop here is a clear signal that your creative has died. The image or video that was working wonders last week is now stale. It's lost its novelty and effectiveness.

Tbh, most performance drops I see come down to this. Advertisers find a winning creative and run it into the ground. Creative is not a 'set and forget' task; it needs constant refreshing. I remember one women's apparel campaign where we achieved a 691% return on Meta ads; a big part of that success came from having a rigorous creative testing process, constantly cycling in new images, videos, and ad copy to keep things fresh. If your CTR has halved, your traffic has halved (or your cost per click has doubled), which will obviously crush your ROAS. You need to get new creatives into testing, stat.

Step 3: The Landing Page – Does your website kill the sale?

So they've clicked the ad. Great. But that's only half the battle. Now they're on your website. This is where we look at on-site metrics like Add to Cart Rate and, ultimately, your Purchase Conversion Rate.

• -> Lots of Clicks, No Adds to Cart? This usually points to a disconnect between your ad and your landing page. Does the product page deliver on the promise of the ad? Are the product photos high quality? Is the description persuasive? Is the price clear and fair? Or maybe your site is just slow to load, and people are leaving before the page even finishes rendering. I remember one eCommerce client who was getting loads of traffic but no sales. A quick look at their site showed they had no product descriptions and the photos were blurry. People don't buy what they can't understand or trust.
• -> Lots of Adds to Cart, No Purchases? This is a classic sign of a problem in your checkout process. The most common culprit is unexpected shipping costs. You get a customer excited about a £30 product, they go to checkout, and suddenly you slap them with a £7 shipping fee. It feels like a betrayal, and they abandon the cart. Other issues could be a lack of payment options (no PayPal, no Apple Pay), forcing them to create an account, or just a confusing, multi-step checkout process.

This is where you need to put your customer hat on. Go through the entire buying process on your site, especially on a mobile phone. Is it smooth? Is it trustworthy? Is there any friction at all?

To help with this, I've built a small interactive calculator for you. Pop in your numbers from a good day and a bad day to see exactly where your funnel is leaking the most.

I'd say you should look beyond daily metrics and think about system health...

Okay, so we've diagnosed the immediate funnel. But sometimes, a ROAS drop is a symptom of a deeper, more strategic problem with the account. It's not just about one bad ad or one slow loading page. It's about the long-term health of your advertising system.

Audience Strategy: Are you talking to the right people?

One of the biggest mistakes I see is a chaotic approach to audience targeting. People test random interests, throw in a broad lookalike, and hope for the best. A structured approach is always better. For eCommerce, I usually prioritise audiences in this order:

1. BoFu (Bottom of Funnel - Retargeting): These are your warmest audiences. People who have added to cart, initiated checkout, etc. They know you and are close to buying. You should always have a campaign dedicated to them.
2. MoFu (Middle of Funnel - Engagement): These are people who have visited your website, watched your videos, or engaged with your social media pages. They're aware of you but need more convincing.
3. ToFu (Top of Funnel - Prospecting): This is your cold traffic. Here you test lookalike audiences (based on your best customers first!) and detailed interest/behaviour targeting.

If your performance has dropped, where did it drop the most? If your BoFu campaign has died, it might mean your ToFu campaigns are bringing in lower quality traffic than before. If your ToFu campaigns have died, you've likely saturated those audiences and need to find new ones. The solution to a problem in one part of the funnel often lies in another.

The Final Boss: Is your offer compelling enough?

This is the question that most advertisers are afraid to ask. Sometimes, no amount of clever targeting or beautiful creative can fix a weak offer. The number one reason campaigns fail, especially over the long term, is that what they're selling isn't valuable enough to the audience they're reaching.

Have your competitors launched a new product? Have they started a massive sale? Has the market's taste simply changed? A sudden ROAS drop can sometimes be an external market signal that your offer is no longer as competitive as it was. You might need to consider a promotion, a bundle, free shipping, or some other way to increase the perceived value of your product. I worked on a subscription box campaign that was struggling. We introduced a "get your first box free" offer, and ROAS went up by over 1000%. The ads and targeting were fine; the offer just needed to be irresistible.

You probably should focus on the maths that really matters...

While we're talking about ROAS, let's address a bigger point. Fixating on daily ROAS is a fool's game. It's a short-term metric that can lead to very poor long-term decisions. The real question you should be asking isn't "What was my ROAS today?" but "How much can I afford to pay to acquire a customer?"

The answer lies in calculating your Customer Lifetime Value (LTV). How much gross profit does an average customer generate for you over their entire relationship with your business?

The simple formula is: LTV = (Average Order Value * Gross Margin % * Purchase Frequency) / Churn Rate

Once you know a customer is worth, say, £200 to you, you can make much smarter decisions. A common goal is to maintain a 3:1 LTV to Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) ratio. This means for a customer worth £200, you can afford to spend up to £66 to acquire them and still have a very healthy business. Suddenly, a bad day where your CPA (Cost Per Acquisition) jumps from £25 to £40 doesn't seem so catastrophic. You're still acquiring customers profitably. This long-term perspective is what separates amateur advertisers from professional growth marketers.

You'll need a clear action plan...

I know this is a lot to take in. When you're in the thick of it, it's hard to know where to start. So, based on everything we've covered, here is the exact step-by-step process I would follow if I were in your shoes.

I've detailed my main recommendations for you below:

As you can see, managing paid advertising effectively is far more complex than just setting a budget and watching the sales roll in. It requires a systematic, data-driven approach, constant vigilance, and a deep understanding of auction dynamics, consumer psychology, and creative strategy. It's a full-time job, and for many business owners, it's a massive distraction from what they do best—running their business.

This is where expert help comes in. Having a dedicated specialist or an agency manage this process for you not only saves you an enormous amount of time and stress but can also unlock growth you wouldn't be able to achieve on your own. We live and breathe this stuff every day, so we can often diagnose problems and implement solutions much faster than someone who is learning as they go.

I hope this detailed breakdown has been genuinely helpful and given you a clear path forward. If you go through these steps and still feel stuck, or if you'd rather have an expert take a look, we offer a completely free, no-obligation initial consultation. We can jump on a call, share screens, and go through your ad account together to identify the biggest opportunities for improvement.

Hope this helps!

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh