Hi there,
Thanks for reaching out. I'm happy to give you some initial thoughts and guidance on the situation you're facing with your Facebook ads. What you're describing is actually an incredibly common problem, probably one of the most frequent things we see from people just starting their ecom journey. So don't panic, and definitely don't feel like you've failed. You've hit a wall that almost everyone hits.
The good news is that this isn't random bad luck. There are very clear, mechanical reasons why this happens, and once you understand them, you can build a system to avoid it in the future. You've essentially just discovered the difference between getting a lucky sale and building a predictable advertising machine. Let's break down what's really going on.
Let's talk about why your results tanked when you scaled...
The first and most immediate issue is that sudden, large budget increase. You found a creative that was working at $60 a day, got excited (which is totally normal!), and jumped the budget to $100. In your mind, that's a logical step: more money should equal more sales. But that's not how Meta's algorithm sees it. This is probably the biggest myth in paid advertising that trips people up.
When your ad set is running at a stable budget, the algorithm enters what's called a 'learning phase'. It spends your money cautiously, trying to find the little pockets of people within your target audience who are most likely to buy your product for the lowest cost. It finds a rhythm. When you suddenly crank the budget up by more than 60% in one go, you completely shatter that rhythm. You've effectively told the algorithm: "Forget that careful searching you were doing. I need you to spend this new, larger amount of money, and I need you to spend it *today*."
The algorithm panics. To fulfill your command, it's forced to exit the efficient little pockets of customers it had found and start bidding aggressively in much broader, more expensive parts of the auction. It starts showing your ad to less-qualified people, people who are more expensive to reach, and people who are just less likely to convert. The result is exactly what you saw: your cost per sale skyrockets and your number of sales plummets. It's a bit like telling a fisherman who's found a small, rich fishing spot to suddenly catch five times the fish in the same amount of time. He has to abandon his good spot and just start casting his net wildly into the open ocean, hoping for the best. He'll spend more fuel and catch a lot of rubbish.
As for the 'Circumventing Systems' disapproval, that's often a symptom of the same problem. Meta's compliance bots are notoriously twitchy. A sudden, drastic change in spending behaviour on an ad can sometimes trigger a flag. They see it as unusual activity, and their default reaction is to disapprove first and ask questions later (or never). Duplicating the ad was the right immediate reaction to get something running again, but it doesn't solve the underlying strategic problem. The real fix isn't about getting one ad approved; it's about how you manage your budget and campaigns so this doesn't happen again.
A much safer way to scale is to do it gradually. A general rule of thumb is not to increase the budget of a winning ad set by more than 20-25% every 2-3 days. This gives the algorithm time to adjust, find new efficiencies at the slightly higher spend level, and maintain performance without going into shock. It's slower, I know, and it requires patience, but it's how you build sustainable growth rather than having these boom-and-bust cycles.
The real problem: you're relying on a single creative...
Okay, let's be brutally honest here. The scaling issue is just a symptom of a much bigger, more fundamental problem. You don't really have an advertising strategy yet. What you have is a single lottery ticket that happened to pay out for a few days. Relying on one "winning" creative is like building a house on a single wooden post. It might stand for a while, but the slightest gust of wind will knock the whole thing over.
Every single ad creative, no matter how brilliant it is, has a limited lifespan. This is a concept called 'ad fatigue'. People in your audience see the same image or video over and over again, and they simply start to ignore it. Their eyes glaze over. It becomes part of the digital background noise. Click-through rates drop, costs go up, and sales dry up. When you increased your budget to $100, you dramatically accelerated this process. You forced the ad in front of more people, more frequently, and burnt it out in a matter of days.
The solution isn't to find one 'perfect' ad that will work forever. That doesn't exist. The solution is to build a *creative testing system*. This is the absolute core of what separates amateur advertisers from professionals. Successful e-commerce brands, like a subscription box client we took to a 1000% Return On Ad Spend, are not successful because they found one magic ad. They are successful because they have a relentless, always-on process for testing new ads.
You should always be testing. Your goal is to have a pipeline of new ideas flowing into your ad account constantly. This means testing different:
-> Images: Different angles of your product, lifestyle shots vs. product-on-white-background, user-generated style photos.
-> Videos: Unboxing videos, product demonstrations, customer testimonials, simple slideshows.
-> Headlines: Ask a question, state a benefit, create urgency.
-> Copy: Long form vs. short form, focusing on different pain points or desires.
You dont need a Hollywood budget. Some of the best performing ads we've ever run for clients were filmed on an iPhone. Authenticity often beats high-production polish. The key is variety and a commitment to testing. A good structure is to have a dedicated testing campaign (or ad set) where you're always running 2-3 new creatives on a small budget. When you find one that beats your current 'winner', you swap it in and start scaling it slowly. Then the process repeats. This way, you're never caught "blanked" and panicked when your main ad dies. You already have its replacement warming up on the bench.
You need to look beyond just the sales numbers...
Right now, you're flying blind because you're only looking at one metric: sales. When sales stop, you feel "blanked" because you have no idea *why* they stopped. You need to become a detective and look at the clues your ad account is giving you. The customer journey from seeing an ad to making a purchase has several steps, and you need to see where people are dropping off.
Think of it like a leaky pipe. Just saying "there's no water coming out the end" isn't helpful. You need to find where the leak is. Is it near the start, in the middle, or right at the end? In Facebook Ads, your key diagnostic metrics tell you exactly this. I've put together a simple table to show you how to think about it.
| Metric to Check | What It Tells You (The Problem) | What You Need to Fix |
|---|---|---|
| Low Click-Through Rate (CTR) / High Cost Per Click (CPC) | Your ad isn't grabbing anyone's attention in the newsfeed. It's boring or irrelevant. This is the first and biggest leak. | Your creative (the image/video) is the problem 90% of the time. Your headline is the other 10%. Test completely new visuals and hooks. |
| High CTR, but few Adds to Cart | You've successfully got them to click, but they hate what they see on your product page. There's a major disconnect between the ad's promise and the page's reality. | Your website is the problem. It could be poor product photos, a confusing description, the price being a shock, or the site just looking untrustworthy. |
| Lots of Adds to Cart, but few Purchases | They want to buy! They've put it in their basket, but something in your checkout process is scaring them away at the last second. | Check your shipping costs – unexpected high shipping is the #1 killer of sales. Also check for a complicated checkout form, lack of payment options, or technical glitches. |
By customising your columns in Ads Manager to show these metrics, you can stop guessing. If your CTR is below 1%, you know you have an ad problem and need to focus on creative testing. If your CTR is great but your Add to Cart rate is terrible, you know you need to stop fiddling with the ads and go fix your website. This framework turns you from a panicked victim into an informed strategist.
I'd say you need a proper campaign structure...
The final piece of the puzzle is structure. Just running one campaign with one ad set is like trying to fish with a single line. A professional setup uses a net. For e-commerce, this almost always means splitting your efforts into at least two distinct campaigns: Prospecting and Retargeting.
1. Prospecting Campaign (Top of Funnel - ToFu): The entire job of this campaign is to find *new people* who have never heard of you before. This is where you do all your cold audience testing: targeting people based on their interests (e.g., competitor brands, magazines they read, related hobbies) and lookalike audiences (Meta finding people similar to your past customers or website visitors). This is your engine for growth.
2. Retargeting Campaign (Middle/Bottom of Funnel - MoFu/BoFu): This campaign's job is to bring back people who have already shown interest but didn't buy. This is the lowest-hanging fruit and often the most profitable part of any ad account. You're targeting people who have visited your website, watched your videos, or, most powerfully, added a product to their cart but abandoned it. These people are warm leads. Showing them a different ad, maybe with a customer testimonial or a small discount code, can be incredibly effective at pushing them over the line.
We used this exact seperation of campaigns for a cleaning products company and it was fundamental to achieving a 633% return for them. It ensures you're not just constantly shouting at strangers (prospecting) but also having a quiet, persuasive conversation with people who are already halfway in the door (retargeting). Here’s what a very basic version could look like:
| Campaign Type | Example Ad Set (Audience) | Your Job for this Campaign |
|---|---|---|
| PROSPECTING | -> Ad Set 1: Interest Targeting (e.g., people who like 'Brand X' + 'Magazine Y') -> Ad Set 2: Broad Targeting (if your pixel has enough data) -> Ad Set 3: 1% Lookalike of past Purchasers |
Find brand new customers. Test multiple audiences and creatives relentlessly to find what works. Turn off losers, scale winners slowly. |
| RETARGETING | -> Ad Set 1: All Website Visitors (last 30 days) -> Ad Set 2: Added to Cart but Didn't Purchase (last 14 days) |
Bring back the "ones that got away". Show them different ads – maybe highlighting your free shipping, a customer review, or the problem your product solves. |
This structure gives you control. You can allocate budget more intelligently, sending more money to what's working (often Retargeting has a higher ROAS, while Prospecting brings in new blood). It stops everything from being mashed together in one confusing ad set where you have no real idea what's driving the results.
This is the main advice I have for you:
I know this is a lot to take in, but these are the foundational pillars of running paid ads successfully. It's a shift from just "making an ad" to "managing a system". I've detailed my main recommendations for you below in a table to give you a clear, actionable checklist to work from. This is what you need to focus on right now.
| Area of Focus | Your Immediate Action | Why This is So Important |
|---|---|---|
| Scaling | Stop making huge budget changes. From now on, only increase the budget on a proven, stable ad set by a maximum of 20% every 2-3 days. | This prevents you from shocking the algorithm, keeps your performance stable, and allows for predictable, sustainable growth instead of chaos. |
| Creatives | Embrace that no ad lasts forever. Build a simple testing system. Always have 2-3 new ad creatives running on a small budget to find your *next* winner. | This is your insurance policy against ad fatigue. It ensures you are never again left "blanked" and without a functioning ad when your main one inevitably dies. |
| Metrics | Go into Ads Manager and add columns for CTR (All), CPC (All), and Add to Carts. Start looking at the whole funnel, not just the final sale. | This empowers you to diagnose *where* your process is broken. It turns you from a passive observer into an active problem-solver. |
| Structure | Pause your current campaign and rebuild with two new campaigns: one for Prospecting (new customers) and one for Retargeting (website visitors/cart abandoners). | This gives you proper control over your budget and messaging, allowing you to speak to cold and warm audiences differently and maximise your return. |
As you can probably see, there's a lot more to this than just pressing the 'Boost Post' button and hoping for the best. It's a skill, and it involves having proven systems for testing, scaling, and diagnosing problems before they become disasters. It's what we do all day, every day for our clients, taking them from a place of confusion and inconsistent results to having a predictable engine for growth. We've managed campaigns for all sorts of niches, from driving 45k+ signups for an app to helping an e-com store launch and get 1500 leads at just $0.29 each.
This is obviously just some initial advice based on what you've shared, and there's a limit to what I can diagnose without seeing the account itself. The next level of insight comes from looking at your specific metrics, your website, your product, and your audience.
If you'd like an expert pair of eyes on it, we do offer a completely free, no-obligation strategy session. We can get on a call, share screens, and go through your actual campaigns together. We'll show you exactly what we'd do to fix things and give you a proper plan of attack that you can implement yourself. There's no sales pressure; it's just a chance for us to show you what we know and for you to get some real, actionable advice.
Hope this helps clear things up and gives you a better path forward.
Regards,
Team @ Lukas Holschuh
