Welcome to Let's run Facebook ads with me, Nick Boddington. This podcast is your go to for mastering Facebook ads. But as you know, success doesn't stop at the ad itself. We'll dive into everything from funnels and e-commerce to email marketing, lead generation and more. If you're ready to take your skills to the next level, check out my new school platform@school.com. The Ads clinic. Inside you'll find how to videos and live dropping clinicals where you can ask your Facebook questions and get the answers you need to grow your business. And lastly, if you enjoy the podcast, it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the channel. It's the best way to help the podcast grow and keep bringing you valuable content every week. Let's get on with the podcast. Let me guess what happened. You launch a campaign week one. Great. We. Two strong. Week three sales are coming in. You're happy and you're thinking we've cracked it. suddenly performance drops. KPIs creep up, Roas full sales slow down, And your first thought is ad fatigue. But when you check, frequency is fine. The ads still look good. Engagement is steady. Nothing obvious is broken. So what happened? Why would a campaign work perfectly for 2 or 3 weeks and then stop? This is one of the most common questions I get. And the answer is not dramatic. It's structural. But before I break it down, here's why you should listen to me. I spent every single day inside real metro accounts inside the Ads clinic. We worked with hundreds of businesses across e-commerce subscriptions, lead generation, and I see this pattern constantly. campaign launches. Strong start then a noticeable drop off for a few weeks. So what I'm about to explain isn't theory. It's what actually happens inside the algorithm. Hey, while I've got you, I just wanted to ask. Would you like me to go into your ads manager and actually see what's working? Because I bet your ads aren't broken and I bet we can fix something. There's a reason our top clients stop guessing and start scaling. So if you've got campaigns that are burning cash, or you're having trouble barely even breaking even on them, let's have a look and let's see what we can fix. 100% no fluff, no sales pitch, just a pro-level ad review. So book your 30 minute free Facebook ad review session and walk away with some instant wins. Go to the Ads Clinic icon and book your call today. Do it now before you forget, but make sure you come back to listen to the rest of the podcast. Enjoy! Now, here's the key thing most people don't understand. When you launch a brand new campaign. Meta doesn't start showing it to random cold strangers. It starts with the people most likely to convert. I call this low hanging fruit. These are people who have visited your website before, are on your email list, have engaged with you on Instagram, or clicked previous habits, maybe even at its core recently, even if you didn't set up a retargeting audience. when you use a broad audience, meta still prioritizes people closest to converting because it wants early wins. The system is designed to build momentum quickly. in the first couple of weeks, a surprisingly high percentage of your budget often goes towards warm or semi warm people. you can actually prove this if you break performance down by audience segments. part as manager on the left hand side in the in the columns. In many accounts, you'll see something like 25% of spend goes to warm audiences at the beginning. Then over time, that drops to 10%, sometimes 5%. But why? Because that audience is small and it gets exhausted quickly. Those people either convert or decide they're not interested. Once that happens, meta has to expand out And the next group of people that colder, the less aware, less convinced, less ready, which naturally means lower conversion rates. That's the first reason campaigns stopped working after 2 or 3 weeks. It's not that they've stopped. Is that the easy wins run out. Now, here's something important. I don't believe it's normal to go from amazing performance to terrible performance permanently. You should expect some leveling off, but not a collapse after the low hanging fruit phase. Performance should stabilize. If it doesn't, then something else is happening. And here the common possibilities. One. Your remarketing audience was doing more heavy lifting than you realized. If your warm audience is tiny and your product is niche, that initial lift might be carrying out the numbers to your overall audience, probably small. if you're targeting a very specific niche or a small country, there may simply not be a huge amount of scalable demand. And three, you're creative isn't strong enough for coder audiences. And an app that converts warm traffic might not be persuasive enough for people who have never heard of you before. And this is where people misdiagnose the issue. They think it worked before, so the ad must be fine. but it may have only been fine for warm buyers. Cold audiences require more proof, more clarity, stronger hooks. Now let's talk about creative fatigue. Sometimes it is fatigue, but often it's not frequency based fatigue. It's message fatigue at scale. When matter expands into colder groups, your ads need to resonate more broadly. If you're only launched 1 or 2 ads, you've limited the algorithm's options. And this is why I'm such a big advocate of creative diversity. Even if fatigue is an obvious matter, performs better when it has options. Different formats, different hooks, different angles, different personas not to overwhelm the account, but to give the system room to adjust as it moves beyond low hanging fruit. Now here's the most important mindset shift campaigns don't break. After two weeks, they transition. Phase one warm and high intent bias. Phase two. Colder, more hesitant buyers. If your structure and creative can handle phase two performance, it. If it can't, performance drops. So what should you actually do? First don't panic. Expect some regression after the initial surge. Second. check. Audience segmentation. See how much of your early budget went to warm audiences? if it was high, then the drop makes sense. Third, introduce new creative intentionally, preferably using the creative testing tool. Not random tweaks. not desperate edits. Structural testing gave them better fresh angles so it can continue optimizing as it expands outwards. And finally, zoom out. If performance went from incredible to slightly worse, but still profitable, that's normal. If you went from incredible to completely unprofitable and never recovered. That's a signal. But even then, it's rarely because meta stopped working. It's because the easy wins were temporary and your system wasn't built for scale beyond them. So here's the takeaway. The first 2 or 3 weeks of a campaign are often boosted by low hanging fruit. After that, the algorithm has to work harder. If your creative audience size and offer a strong, the campaign will balance out. If they're not performance drops, campaigns don't magically expire. They evolve. And your job is to evolve the creative with them. Thank you for joining us again today. If you want to find out more, please head over to our socials at Let's Run Social, where we share daily content. And please feel free to drop us a message. We'd love to hear from you and any questions that you would like answered. We can do that here on the podcast.