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13 Comments

Our ads stopped performing since March - are we alone?

There are a lot of important details, but the headline is this:
We have run ads for a long time, and slowly scaled up over past months. It worked well in January and February.

Then March came. And it was a disaster. Same with April - or worse.

We are running FB and Google ads.

FB ads was the worst downtrend.

Our monthly combined spend was roughly $10k.

Are we alone or has anyone else experienced this?

  1. 1

    Lessons learned. Don't build a business that depends on a paid marketing.

  2. 1

    No, you are not alone, this has happened in many industries.

    1. 1

      OK thanks for confirming. Any light you could shed on this would be amazing.

  3. 1

    I believe this depends on what your industry/product/service is. I work in an industry where it is currently slow for everyone, and it should be the busiest time of the year. We partially think it is due to the increase of price for everything . There not being stimulus checks, tax returns being spent already, but of course this varies on a case to case basis. I will say if you are in my industry you are not alone. Everything has been slowing down since March. Keep your head up and branch out to other forms of marketing if what you are doing is not working possibilities are endless, just be creative.

    1. 1

      Thanks for the insights!! :)

      Yeah I will stick to the grind and push organic growth.

      What sucks is that we planned on ads traffic being our biggest growth engine this year (maybe we got lazy) - that plan is now dead ;)

  4. 1

    Well Apple new tracking policy kinda killed Facebook ads targetting iPhone and Mac Users. Similar things will Google do in coming years for Android.

  5. 1

    What's your business? Maybe it can be seasonal or something like this.

    And of course, there are a lot of reasons like optimization, tests, ad creatives etc... It's kinda hard to help you without looking into some data or even what you guys did over these months.

    1. 1

      Makes sense Thomaz :) I wasn't looking for help on my situation. Of course that would be amazing. But for now I was just looking to see if others are seeing the same issues since March :)

        1. 1

          No problem at all! :)

          I might make a new post asking if someone knows a good FB ads freelancer :)

          1. 1

            That's probably a good idea. But first, if I may ask you... What have you done so far? How much have you invested? Are you profiting already? How many ad creatives are you actually testing? Your core market is US? How big is your Facebook audience that you're targeting right now?

            That's a couple of questions that maybe someone, or even myself, could help you out if we have more data. Optimizing FB Ads and metrics can be somehow tricky, but if we understand all of the nuances, maybe we can find some problems and fix them.

            1. 1

              Unfortunately I have only half of the answers here. I had a very respected agency do the work. And I believe they did a good job, but somehow everything just tanked in March and onwards.

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