Introduction

What separates a good media buyer from a great media buyer? How they react when ad performance declines. Below is the order of operations that our team runs through when ROAS starts to tank, and the most common solutions we apply to turn things around in the short term.

Step 1: Run through the potential cause list to determine your reaction

Macroeconomic / Seasonal

Some examples of this might be: a sale period like Father’s Day, Memorial Day, Prime Day, etc when your client was not running a sale. It could be a non-seasonal thing like global news stories dominating online media consumption, or even nice weather. On the first nice weather weekend of spring, for example, many people are not on their phones. Weekend vs weekday performance is also generally very different for most brands. - Is something broken? Click through to your ads landing page. Try adding to cart or converting. Click around and see if anything obvious is broken. Perhaps a coupon code started to not work.

A suboptimal account setup

Look at your campaign and adset setup. One common culprit here is people forget to add proper exclusions, so your campaigns start retargeting existing customers at a higher and higher frequency. Check metrics like FTIR/Frequency/CPC over time.

Campaign-specific causes

Did it happen across ALL campaigns/adsets, or is it related to just a single culprit? Sometimes performance falls off a cliff on a particular audience or campaign type, but it doesn’t impact the rest of the account, despite impacting your blended performance numbers. In these cases, the fix can be quicker - simply reducing its budget or pausing.

Non-Meta channel decline

Is it isolated to a single channel? Maybe the client’s YouTube ad spend was paused, or their TikTok ad account got suspended, which hurt blended performance numbers. Check to see what’s happening with their broader channel mix.

Most common: inexplicable

If it’s none of the above, this could simply be something that you cannot explain. This is often the most common outcome. There are frequent periods of poor performance on Meta due to: updates to their ad delivery algo, natural variance that comes with human purchasing behavior, or spend changes from larger competitors.

Step 2: If you are unable to identify a quick, simple explanation, do nothing - at first

If performance dips, we typically do not make ANY large changes in the ad account until we see at least 3 consecutive days of negative performance. This constitutes a pattern. Anything before that could be natural variance (unless you spot something obvious like a broken landing page).

It’s important not to be too overreactive and make irreversible changes that could serve to only introduce more volatility in the ad account. Sometimes the best thing you can do in these situations, despite how unnatural it feels, is nothing at all.

Step 3: Apply a prescription

Assuming you monitored performance and it has continued to trend downward, and you were not able to identify a quick fix related to the potential causes I outlined in part 1, here are some changes that might turn performance around, from low to high complexity:

Turn on old creative winners

This is a simple one. If something was paused more than ~2 months ago and used to perform really well, flip it back on and see if it has any renewed life! It may turn around the ad account.

Consolidate adsets to exit learning

Take a step back and evaluate your account structure. One of the top culprits for poor performance is having adsets stuck in the learning phase. This is the #1 thing I typically bring up to the team. If you see any opportunities to consolidate adsets, make these changes. Less spend in the learning phase = less volatility = better results.

Spreading winning ads across all audience cohorts

Make sure you’ve tested all top performers in all audiences. Another simple one. If you have a broad audience and an interest audience in a prospecting campaign, as an example, make sure that the top creative in the broad audience are ALSO present in the interest audience. You never know which ads will work for which audiences.

Build a bid-constrained "old creative" super campaign

Re-test all of your past creative: here’s how you do this. Duplicate your creative testing campaign, and edit the campaign bid method to “bid cap” if it isn’t that already. Apply the same LOW target CPA bid cap on every single adset, and turn them all back on. Start with a low budget so you don’t spike your overall CPA. Incrementally raise the bid cap on all of these adsets at the same time over the next few days until they start to meaningfully spend at your target CPA. This often works because it is re-testing tons of creative that may not have worked at the time, but could work now, especially with the conservative bid cap. It is ok to have a high volume of adsets live in this campaign type with a low budget.

Net new creative

Do a quick creative sprint to inject net new ad creative into the account. I would focus on making simple static ads using premade templates. Throw in the ad account's top performing headlines into these templates and get them live ASAP. Generally speaking, creative is always the best way to turn around a struggling ad account.

Conclusion

Managing Meta ads requires a clear plan, especially when ad performance drops. First, check for possible causes like seasonal changes or campaign issues. Don’t rush to make big changes; wait to see if the problem persists for at least three days. If needed, try simple fixes like turning on old ads that worked well or combining ad sets to improve performance. Always test and add new creative ideas to keep your campaigns fresh. By following these steps, you can handle performance drops and keep your media buying successful.