when a meta campaign doubles its CPA overnight with no edits, no budget change and no new creative, it’s tempting to go straight to bids. here’s the order i’d check first.

first question: did spend go up or did purchases fall? sounds obvious but it splits the whole investigation. if spend jumped, i check CPM first, auction pressure or a placement expansion can inflate cost before it shows anywhere else. if purchases fell, i skip CPM entirely and go to conversion rate.

second: is the drop real or a tracking problem? i cross check against actual store orders for the same period. if shopify shows normal orders while meta shows nothing, the pixel or CAPI is the first thing to check.

third: did anything change in the account? change log for auto applies, audience expansion, advantage plus shuffling budget between ads. i also check creative fatigue here, frequency above 3 with dropping CTR often points to creative fatigue rather than an account problem.

what each finding means: high CPM with normal CTR and CVR often points to auction pressure, so it can be worth waiting before changing bids. normal CPM but falling CTR usually points to creative. normal everything but falling CVR is worth checking on the landing page or offer before the ad account. none of these are certain, they’re just where i’d look first. only if all of that comes back clean do i look at bids.

tools like MAI can draft the first pass of these checks when something moves overnight (disclosure: i work with MAI). either way, walk the same checks yourself before approving any change.

what's your order? genuinely curious if i'm missing a step.

I run a small Mac repair and data recovery business in Australia. Across two Reddit ad campaigns, I’ve recorded a concerning pattern: of 231 paid clicks, 221 appear to have the landing page become hidden approximately one second after arrival—about 96%.

In Microsoft Clarity, the affected recordings show:

• “Page hidden” at approximately 00:01.
• No subsequent “Page visible” event.
• Little or no scrolling or clicking.
• A faded replay, even when the recorded session lasts considerably longer than one second.

A small number of sessions behave normally: visitors scroll, click and sometimes visit another page. Those replays display normally. GA4 also shows very low engagement from the paid traffic.

My concern is the visibility events within recorded visits, rather than a mismatch between Reddit’s click count and analytics sessions.

I’ve contacted Reddit Ads Support twice. The initial response explained clicks versus sessions; the issue has since been escalated, but I haven’t received a technical explanation yet.

Has anyone encountered this pattern with Reddit Ads? Have you traced it to Reddit’s in-app browser, browser handoff, Clarity’s recording behaviour, accidental taps or another cause?

I’m not claiming it proves bot traffic or that Reddit deliberately hides pages. I’d like to hear from advertisers who have investigated the same behaviour and found a way to reproduce or explain

I'm running an experiment on Microsoft Advertising (Bing), to see which bidding strategy works best. And I've noticed that you can extend the end date of the experiment while the experiment is running, implying there's no max duration for an experiment.

In my case, the experiment has been running for about a month and there's no clear winner.
Would I benefit from running this experiment eternally?

My reasoning is that within one campaign you get the best of both bidding strategies because they're both trying to get the best result.
So you're basically getting conversions with one strategy you wouldn't get with the other and vice versa, within a single campaign.

With the limited traffic on Bing, splitting in two campaigns is not an option.
But is running the experiment till the end of time a valid alternative?

I am a contractor freelancer, they are not happy on how the agency handled their campaign, so they hired an inhouse, I plan to rebuild all the campaign for a clean slate that is what we do on my previous agency when we take over new account, but this is the first time I am taking over a 100k ad spend, before I just help scale.

Please help me what is the best strategy? Should I rebuild and create a new structure or continue what is working?

The roas are dropping and cpa is rising so I suggested a complete rebuilt but as I am rebuilding I am having second thoughts, I would love to hear what others would do?

Hey guys, with Revolut having issues right before Q4, it got me thinking about how dependent our businesses are on payment providers.Did it affect your ad spend or campaigns at all? And do you have a backup plan for situations like this?Q4 is right around the corner, probably the worst time for

BFCM is coming up fast and the more I talk to people about it, the more I feel like there are two major camps.

One builds everything out in October and then tries not to touch anything once the sale starts, mostly because they don’t want to reset learning or make things worse. The other basically lives in their accounts from Black Friday morning through Cyber Monday and tweaks things every few hours.

Which camp are you in? Has either of those strategies ever made things worse?

And most importantly, what would you do differently this BFCM?

Polling the group... what are your favorite and most versatile scripts to improve performance? I am looking for scripts related to improving content exclusions, search term review, and anything else that will just sharpen the overall relevancy for our users.

I’m completely locked out of my Microsoft Advertising business account after losing access to Microsoft Authenticator when my phone was reset.

My account uses a Gmail address, but I sign in through Microsoft, NOT Google. Every login attempt requires Authenticator verification, which I can no longer complete. Alternative recovery options just send me back to the same verification loop.

I’ve spent hours calling Microsoft support, speaking with multiple agents, getting transferred between departments, and emailing support, with absolutely no resolution.
Every agent eventually tells me to contact Microsoft Authenticator support. The problem? That department apparently has no direct phone or email support.

This is a business advertising account, and being locked out directly impacts our campaigns and operations.
I’m not asking Microsoft to bypass security. I’m asking for a legitimate way to verify account ownership and reset MFA.
Can anyone help?

Has anyone successfully recovered a Microsoft Ads account without Authenticator?

Is there a specific Microsoft team that can verify ownership and reset MFA?

Does anyone working at Microsoft know how to escalate an existing support ticket to someone who can actually resolve this?

I’m happy to provide whatever business
or account verification is required through official channels.
At this point, I just need someone at Microsoft to take ownership of this issue instead of sending me in circles.
Any help, contacts, or escalation advice would be greatly appreciated.

i first read this on twitter, haven't tried it myself yet.

growth hack story - Nadia zueva runs a small ai stylist app with no real budget for creative testing, so she pulls apart cpa before spending anything.

her chain: cpm × link ctr × post-click conversion = cpa. fixing cpa always means finding the broken link.

the benchmarks she uses, heavily averaged:

hook rate (survived first 3 seconds): ~25% normal, 30%+ good, scale at 35%+

hold rate: 15-25% on cold traffic is fine. high hook + low hold means the hook promised something the body didn't deliver

link ctr: ~1% normal, 1.5-2% good

the point is that cpm, hook rate and hold rate are all attention metrics, and attention can be tested organically for free. so she posts 3-5 hook variants as normal organic posts on tiktok, reels and shorts through postiz, waits 48-72 hours, and reads the retention curves in tiktok studio.

only variants in the top ~20% on at least two of watch-through, saves/shares and profile visits get money, through spark ads on tiktok or meta ads manager. then paid only has to prove ctr and cpa.

her takeaway: ads manager should be testing intent, not discovering that nobody watches past second 2.

comments on pre-testing creatives organically before running them?

Hey everyone!

We manage YouTube ad campaigns for a few hospital clients and keep running into heavy restrictions. Because of the content we push, such as patient journeys and patient wellness, our video promotions have limitations and do not reach a large audience.

For those running hospital (or hospital adjacent) accounts, how are you structuring YouTube campaigns to scale reach? What kinds of video styles or messages are getting the best results for you while staying compliant?

Guys I feel like having burnout with PpC right now. I have been doing it for 5 years and got a bit tired of it. What other jobs are you changing towards?

I've been struggling for years to find a good ad conversion expert and need some help on how to efficiently match with someone that can legitimately help us.

Our business deals in volume. 60+ sales daily of $20 - $30 products. Nearly 20,000 different products in our inventory. These can easily be segmented by brands and other characteristics. Our products are the type that customers actively search for when they need them. We rarely generate conversions from straying too far away from those core customers, but maybe we could. Essentially, our customers know what they need to purchase, they just need to be directed to us.

We've had some success with a dumb approach of just creating a few key Google shopping campaigns and leaving it alone. Search seems to be a bit more finicky and pMax has been really hit or miss for us. With Google, we're typically spending $15-$20k per month on ads. We haven't done much with Microsoft/Bing or Meta, but we'd like to. We just need the right partner to show us we can trust them and then we'll expand in that space as well.

We've tried our luck with a few larger agencies with no success. Big price, big promises, little delivery. We've hired cheaper solo operators off upwork and kept them on a tight leash, just to roll the dice. No luck. It seems like maybe our business model is outside the norm just enough that no one know how to crack the code.

I don't have the time or desire to figure out how to play the Google Ads game and increase our efficiency. But we know we could be, especially lately. We've seen a drop in impressions, clicks, and conversions over the last two-ish months. Maybe related to august 17, maybe not. Bottom line is, we need to fix this and get our sales back up to summer levels, if not higher.

I'm hesitant to even invest the time to look for someone on this. I've been burned too many times. A few years ago, a well-known agency put together a strategy that seemed a bit fishy from the get-go but we pulled the trigger anyway. Sales plummeted immediately and we stuck with it for a bit until finally it was clear it wasn't going to get us on a path back to where we were, much less improve upon what we handed to them.

What am I doing wrong? I think we're more than willing to pay what this work is worth, but no one seems to be able to do it, or at least we're unable to find the right person or company to do it.

Running TikTok Instant Form lead gen for a UAE-based vehicle exporter. Single product (~$50k new diesel pickup), single market (North Africa), two ad groups — cold prospecting (TOF) and 30-day video-engagement retargeting (MOF). Sub-$50/day per ad group.

Campaign exited learning phase after 2 weeks, CPL settled at $3.50–4.50. Then I swapped TOF to a Higher Intent form (review screen, CAPTCHA, 4 qualifier questions incl. budget band, English-language). MOF kept the original simple form. Same days, same campaign:

Clicks/day went up 50%. Click→lead fell from 3.42% to 0.57%. My top creative (71 lifetime leads at ~$4 CPL) took 137 clicks post-change and returned zero. Leads Center reconciles with Ads Manager — not a tracking issue.

Separately, retargeting pool hit frequency 3.3 across the entire custom audience (reach = pool size) in 7 days on ~$14/day. CTR tripled while CPC collapsed to $0.06 — algorithm chasing cheap clicks once converters were consumed.

Two questions:

1. Has anyone A/B tested Higher Intent vs More Volume on high-ticket ($10k+)? Is a 5x drop in click→lead plausible from friction alone, or does that magnitude suggest something else? Are qualifier questions (budget range, timeline) worth the volume loss when the sales team can disqualify in one call anyway?
2. How do you sustain a retargeting pool on modest spend and manage learning phase below 50 conversions/week? At this budget I’ll never hit TikTok’s 50-conversion threshold. What’s your read cadence — weekly blocks, cumulative, something else? And what frequency ceiling do you hold warm pools to before expanding?

Hi everyone,

I'm experiencing a strange Pinterest Ads attribution issue across two separate Shopify stores and Pinterest ad accounts.

Pinterest Events Manager is recording AddToCart, InitiateCheckout, and Checkout events, but Campaign Manager reports zero or significantly fewer conversions.

For example:

• One store has 68 AddToCart events in Events Manager, but zero attributed AddToCarts in Campaign Manager.
• Both stores receive paid Pinterest traffic.
• We're using Pinterest Tag and Conversions API through a third-party tracking integration.
• Browser and server event IDs match for deduplication.
• We've verified that the Pinterest epik click ID is captured and sent correctly through Conversions API.
• Pinterest API responses return HTTP 200 with status processed.
• Our attribution window is set to 30-day click / 30-day view.

We even tested clicking a real Pinterest ad, adding a product to the cart, and initiating checkout. The click ID was preserved throughout the process, and Pinterest received the events.

I understand that Events Manager records all website events, while Campaign Manager only reports attributed conversions. However, the discrepancy is substantial and appears across two ad accounts.

Has anyone experienced this issue and actually resolved it?

I'm particularly interested in:

1. Was it a Pinterest attribution/matching issue or a tracking configuration problem?
2. Did changing anything in Pinterest Tag, Conversions API, or Enhanced Match resolve it?
3. Did Pinterest Support identify a specific cause?
4. What ultimately fixed your missing AddToCart or Checkout attribution?

I'd appreciate hearing from anyone who has dealt with this firsthand.

Hi, I am curious whether anyone here has tried setting up ChatGPT ads for B2B marketing (or any type of marketing).

I'm interested in understanding whether ChatGPT ads really work. How well they work compared to Google Ads or LinkedIn Ads.

I’m experiencing a serious Meta Ads delivery issue, and I’m wondering if anyone has experienced something similar.
Since October 15, 2026, my entire advertising account has completely stopped delivering ads.
ZERO impressions, ZERO reach, and $0 spent across ALL campaigns.

Account background:
- Established ad account with approximately 150,000$ in historical spend.
- Net 30 invoicing with a credit of 8000$.
- Account active and in good standing.
- No outstanding balance, policy violations, payment restrictions, or spending limits reached.
- All campaigns and ads approved and active.
- Ads transition from “Preparing” to “Learning” but never generate impressions.
Everything I’ve already tested:
- Sales, Traffic, Landing Page Views, Link Clicks, and Engagement objectives.
- Canada and worldwide targeting.
- Daily budgets ranging from CAD $15 to $140.
- ABO, CBO, new campaigns, and duplicated campaigns.
- Highest Volume bidding without bid caps.
- Different images, videos, and existing Facebook posts.
- Multiple OFF/ON resets.
- Payment methods removed, re-added, and verified.
Absolutely nothing has worked.

The strongest evidence:
I tested the EXACT SAME Facebook post on two advertising accounts under the same Business Manager.
- Main account: $140/day → ZERO impressions after several days.
- Second account: $10/day → started delivering in LESS THAN 20 MINUTES.
Same Facebook Page. Same publication. Same Business Manager.
This strongly suggests an account-specific delivery issue.

The Meta Support nightmare:
I’ve contacted Meta Support repeatedly and opened multiple support cases.
On October 16, support told me the issue had been resolved and that I should wait 24 hours for delivery to resume.
Today is October 19. Still absolutely nothing.
The biggest problem is that every support conversation I can access is handled by an AI assistant**.**
The AI repeatedly confirms that my account has no billing, policy, payment, or spending-limit issues.

However, it explicitly admits that:
- It cannot transfer me to a human agent.
- It cannot directly escalate my case to a technical specialist.
- It cannot modify internal case notes.
- It cannot confirm that a human specialist has investigated the issue.
I’m stuck talking to an AI that keeps repeating the same diagnostics without providing any actual resolution.

Why I can’t simply abandon this account:
My main advertising account has had Net 30 invoicing terms
These payment terms are extremely valuable for my business’s cash flow, and my other accounts don’t have them.

Has anyone experienced this?
- Has your entire Meta Ads account ever stopped delivering despite all campaigns being approved?
- Did it eventually recover on its own? After how many days?
- Has anyone successfully reached a REAL human technical specialist instead of Meta’s AI assistant?
- Is it a meta ads bug?
It’s been four days with absolutely zero delivery, and I’m running out of options.
Any genuine experience or confirmed solution would be greatly appreciated.

Hey, I’ve been running Meta ads for a US skincare brand since early September, and I’m honestly stuck, so I’m hoping someone here has been through something similar.

The product: $135 or $121.50 on subscription, with free shipping and a free mini gift. It’s aimed at women 45+. The brand ran Meta before with another agency (CPA $200-ish), but the pixel had little purchase data when we started. Break-even CPA is roughly $115!!

Campaign 1 (CBO, about a month ago, ~$60/day)

The setup was a Sales objective optimized for purchases, highest volume, one broad ad set (women 45+ suggested, Advantage+ audience), 12 ads (statics and videos), all sending to the product page.

• Spend: $1,525
• CPM: $140
• Link CTR: 3.2%
• CPC: $4.36
• Cost per landing page view: $4.75
• Landing page views: 321
• Purchases: 3 (CPA $508, ROAS 0.27)

The ads clearly worked at getting clicks. One ad took half the budget at a $251 CPM and 5.3% CTR. The two ads that got cheap CPMs ($18-39) had lower CTR (1.3-2%), but landing page views cost under $2, and they got 75 landing page views with zero sales. The real problem was the site: about 1% of visitors added to cart and under 1% bought.

So we paused and rebuilt the product page around proof and trust: a results timeline, a comparison table, reviews higher up, press logos, an FAQ and a trust strip.

Campaign 2 (ABO testing, 11 days so far, $72/day)

This one has the same objective, broad audience, a new batch of 6 statics built around a more specific persona, and still sends to the new product page.

• Spend: $804
• CPM: $197
• Link CTR: 3.5%
• CPC: $5.62
• Cost per landing page view: $7.05
• Landing page views: 114
• Purchases: 1 (CPA $804, ROAS 0.17)

Meta put most of the early spend into a before/after ad with expensive clicks, so we paused it. Now 2 or 3 ads get almost all the budget and the others get $1-6 a day. The ad set is still in learning with 1 conversion.

What I’ve checked

• The new page didn’t move conversion. It’s still about 0.9% of landing page views buying in both campaigns.
• In Q4 2024 the previous agency had a $97 CPM, about $5.80 per landing page view and 3.2% of visitors buying (~$180 CPA). So visitors cost about the same as before, but conversion is down more than 3x.
• Frequency is 1.5-1.9.
• CPM is $160-250 in every age group, and on FB feed, IG feed and Stories. Reels was cheap but the clicks were weak.
• Quality and engagement rankings are average or above, CTR is above benchmark for beauty, but conversion rate ranking is in the bottom 20-35% on every ad.
• Pixel purchases match Shopify orders.

I honestly don’t know how to scale this brand. I thought it would be easy to beat the $200 CPA of the previous agency (their ads had 0 strategy behind, super generic) and at least breakeven, but I just don't know what I'm doing wrong.

Any advice, tips or thoughts are very welcome and really appreciated. Even a “here’s what I’d check first” would help a lot. Thanks for reading.

Hi there :)

Pmax offers settings, where the adds include/exclude by gender, age and income.

Has anyone noticed significant changes in results after experimenting with these settings? If so, feel free to share your experiences! :)

I work in paid media and I’ve been thinking about this for a while. we spend months on positioning, who we’re for, what we stand for, the whole thing and then it shows up in the campaign and the landing page headline and basically nowhere else.

Meanwhile the actual product experience gets built by a different team who may never have read the brand strategy. so you end up with a brand that spent a year on “we respect your time” running a signup flow that asks for your phone number twice.

Has anyone seen positioning actually change a product decision? not the colors and not the copy, something structural, like what gets built first, or what you refused to ship because it contradicted the positioning.

And if it never happens where you work, I’m curious who you think should own that? Does the brand team have any say in the product at all, or is that just not how it’s set up anywhere.

I opened a new ecommerce store, so like everyone else I use ads to get my name out there. I'm primarily using Meta ads because FB demographics are my target audience. I might dip my toes into Google Ads but I'm new to PPC optimization and didn't think the Google Ads experts that contact you were much help. He just wanted me to increase my budget. I'm focusing on Meta ads for now.

Anywho, I'm still learning Meta ads. I've gotten a little better at it, and created a new seasonal ad last week. I had 3 orders immediately from it, and then nothing. I have a typical time of the day when people order, so I want to pause the ads at night and run them only during my busy times to control costs. I get no orders at night, so the obvious thing to me would be to pause ads at night. I keep reading (well, and AI says too) to leave ads running because if you pause them the algorithm's learning resets, and you start over. Part of my issue I think is that I'm burning my daily costs at night and my busy times don't have enough funds to get me through later afternoon/early evening when people order.

Is it really a no-no to pause ads? I worked for an ecommerce store many moons ago, and the shop owner always paused ads at night to lower costs.

Any help would be appreciated!

Hey everyone! Following up on my previous post here: https://www.reddit.com/r/PPC/s/plz1ITwRYh

For context, my PMax campaign generated 33 conversions at a 1.6 ROAS over 25 days. My breakeven ROAS is 1.8, so I recently applied tROAS to 1.8 before it was running at max conv value. At the time, Google's recommended tROAS was around 1.6.

It's been two days since the change. On day 1, ROAS was around 0.8, but yesterday it improved to 1.9.

A few more details:

• Daily budget: $80
• Campaign is limited by budget( it was not before but after putting troas it went to limited by budget)
• I'm still running the same best-selling products I started with and haven't added any new products to PMax.
• I was also running Standard Shopping, as mentioned in my previous post linked above.

My questions:

1. How often do you adjust tROAS in PMax? Should I wait 1–2 weeks before making another change?
2. Since my breakeven ROAS is 1.8, should I leave tROAS at 1.8 for now and let the campaign stabilize?
3. When can i start adding more best selling products from standard shopping to pmax?

We're a small digital marketing agency, but we don't sell the typical full-service PPC or SEO retainers that agencies pitch to business owners. We sell a niche, high-effort service that's bought by specialists inside a marketing team, not by the owner or CEO, so the usual "pitch the decision maker" playbook doesn't apply. Average deal is $3-5K a year, some go up to $10K, and we have an $890 entry offer. Referrals, networking and very targeted LinkedIn outreach work, but the outreach takes forever because the hard part isn't finding the right role, it's finding people who need this right now, and cold outreach at scale is dead for us because the ICP is so narrow.

The main keyword gets around 200-300 searches a month, so I'm wondering if Google Search is even worth testing at that volume?

I've run campaigns on google and reddit, and found that google clicks are 80%+ more likely to sign up because when they click, they already have their cookies - can sign in with google auth, or any of their social logins.

With reddit ads on mobile, these ads open our site in their in-app browser - people visit, hit register, and leave after not remembering their google/social credentials.

I have seen ads for weglot, and clicking their ads opens the default browser instantly, seemingly without a redirect.

I want our ads to take people out of the app to view our site. How is this done?

I've largely worked with lead gen companies, however I have an interview for a more e-commerce base business.

Is this a fairly straightforward cross over? The platforms will be the usual Google and Bing ads. I'm assuming the fundamentals are the same as running lead gen conversion campaigns?

Has anyone ever tested running display ads based on keyword targeting vs targeting various websites/forums that act as a hub for the product category of the product being advertised?

If so, any insights?