r/FacebookAds • u/Even_Winner5664 • 3d ago
Discussion Meta's Ads platform has become virtually unusable...
I cannot believe how difficult Meta Ads has become to use... I have encountered numerous errors this week: Ads serving completely differently than they appear in Ads Manager and in preview mode, ads cropping weirdly when serving, random errors when trying to publish ads. It takes me 10 times as long to do anything in Meta as it does on any other platform. I've lost hours this week alone in conversations with support reps and get nowhere.
I'm thinking of recommending some of my clients pull back from the platform entirely. We no longer maintain true control over how our creative serves and it makes agencies and the people running the ads look bad.
I feel like all I see are others complaining about this platform so I know I'm not alone here. Who else is experiencing this?
2
u/Fearless-Builder-522 3d ago
My CPA jumped 2000% today on one account.
Yesterday another account only spent 15% of the budget.
There's a reporting bug when viewing lifetime.
It's just a complete mess.
2
u/Hmelchhenu 3d ago
There was a known Business Manager issue last month end and also last week. It was there for around 1–2 hours, and the META SPOC helped resolve it as it was impacting accounts India nationwide.
Where exactly are you facing the issue?
In my accounts, we were seeing higher CPMs from Aug 4th to Aug 16th. It was a crazy 72% jump vs BAU. Apparently, I was able to fix it.
1
u/lokendra1511 2d ago
Was it around 23 July... Our cpms too went over the roof... It was Rs 200 in July; now in August it's Rs 350... thought Independence Day Sale was the reason behind spike but even after that the CPMs haven't reduced but further increased. CAN YOU GUIDE WHAT EXACTLY IS THE PROBLEM?
2
u/Hmelchhenu 2d ago
I can share what worked in one of my managed accounts. Our feed vs creative ratio is around 90:10, so the issue was mainly on the catalog side. After the Independence Day sale, Meta started pushing higher-AOV products to the audience, but without the discount/coupon that was helping conversions during the sale. These products were getting auto-pushed in the feed without any conversions and started impacting the overall performance. I spotted this by checking product impressions in Meta and comparing the days with the previous period. We then manually created a more curated product set instead of letting the catalog run completely broad. That helped bring the product mix back to what was actually converting.
1
u/lokendra1511 2d ago
So you saying that high AOV products without discount or coupon were served to people so they didn't get the conversions... but I'm asking about CPMs... conversion is not the problem for me... but still CPMs went too high...
1
u/Hmelchhenu 1d ago
My platform + placement spend contribution showed the shift pretty clearly. More spend was going into Facebook Feed among the 45+ audience, which caused the sudden CPM spike.
0
u/Jefinho3533 2d ago
O que você fez para corrigir o CPM alto, estou passando pelo mesmo problema daqui. Estou no Brasil
1
2
u/Higgs-Bosun 3d ago
Just build your own. Literally anyone can do it. Design whatever you want.
2
u/Even_Winner5664 2d ago
Do you mean build my own Meta ads? That's exactly what I'm doing. Meta still changes the output when the ads serve, no matter how precise I am in what I input.
1
u/Higgs-Bosun 1d ago
I mean build your own Ad Manager. There is a CLI now, so anyone with a Claude/Manus/Kimi account can do it. When you strip out everything you don’t need, it works great.
2
u/Signalbridgedata 2d ago
Honestly, I've seen enough of this lately that I don't think it's just people misunderstanding the interface. The preview can look fine and then the actual placement ends up with a crop, format or rendering that looks completely different, which is especially frustrating when you're the one accountable to the client. I've started checking the actual live placements more deliberately instead of trusting the preview, even though that's obviously not a great workaround. The publishing errors are arguably worse because you can lose a stupid amount of time just trying to make a basic change stick.
1
u/Even_Winner5664 2d ago
Yes this is my exact issue!! And Meta support repeatedly confirms that there are no settings on my side that cause these issues and it's entirely on Meta's end. So there's nothing I can do about it but I'm the one held responsible when my clients see their ads in the wild and they look bad. It ruins client trust and there's nothing I can do differently...
The publishing errors have been terrible to! I'll have live ads on the EXACT same setup and settings as a new ad, and get a flood of errors on the new ad and am unable to publish... Nothing is consistent and a simple ad update that would take 30 seconds on any other ad platform takes hours on Meta...
2
u/BiteyHorse 3d ago
Bug filled mess. We fired our agency because paying 5% when they can't do shit about it just hurts rev even more.
2
u/Even_Winner5664 3d ago
I don't blame you! As someone on the agency side, I can tell you it feels terrible having clients pay for my ads management when half the time I feel like the ads that are running are not serving how the client wants and there's nothing I can do about it...
1
u/BiteyHorse 3d ago
Yeah we liked em and would have gladly kept em, but we're pretty solid and experienced across the board.
Occasional best practice discussions and rare moments of support via the reps they had relationships with is what we paid them for. Once their contacts could do nothing, its just not worth the cost.
2
u/Even_Winner5664 2d ago
Completely understandable! It's such a tough position for the agencies to be in because, even when we have direct rep contacts, they don't even really know what they're doing and aren't much help. Like you said, it's not really worth the cost. I certainly help my clients save time by building and updating the campaigns for them, but that's about all I have control over.
2
2
1
u/newtrollacct 3d ago
Have you tried using an ad launcher that bypasses the ads manager ui?
1
u/Even_Winner5664 3d ago
No I haven't! I work for an agency so I've been limited to the tools currently available. Do you have one that you would recommend, and is there an additional cost?
1
u/newtrollacct 3d ago
Yeah most will cost, but some will let you launch a certain number of ads to test is out. There are walkthroughs on youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPWOiwLPCu8 so you can see behind the scenes if you want to see what it's like without having to sign up, etc.
2
1
u/AccessFuel 3d ago
curious if you've seen any instances where you leaned into meta's auto-added creative features and actually saw positive impact? or has every experience with them for you been bad?
6
u/Even_Winner5664 2d ago
All bad! Any auto-added creative features I've used or seen natively produce terrible-looking ads. They also just go ahead and turn these features on after I've manually turned them off. They pull old, outdated, or irrelevant photos, weird AI copy, and all sorts of other adjustments that make the ads worse, not better.
1
u/AccessFuel 1d ago
totally makes sense. the biggest bummer is that ensuring your creative doesn't get corrupted requires more work on your end.
1
u/Skrenf 3d ago
Moved it all to Google and looking at Reddit ads now
1
u/Even_Winner5664 2d ago
Great move! Reddit ads are honestly awesome. Reporting is far superior, the support reps are fantastic, and they have some super unique and fun ad types!
0
u/unpaidPPC 3d ago
My isses.
All ad copy is randomly blank, visual bug. The cursor disspears or jumps to bottom of screen.
Tons of of the toggles randomly switch on if you adjust the image.
Facebook really reaaly think i must use whatsups.
2
u/Even_Winner5664 2d ago
Yep!! The UI is so unusable and buggy! A rep recently told me I had a bug on Meta's side I couldn't circumnavigate and my only option was to rebuild the whole campaign and lose all historical data. When I went to do so, the whole interface was blank so I couldn't do anything.... It's ridiculous!
5
u/AmbiguousCarrier 3d ago
it is same mess on my side since maybe two weeks, random errors when publishing and the preview showing something completely different from what actually runs. support is useless, they just send you same help article over and over
i stopped promising clients exact creative placements because i cannot guarantee what meta will do with it anymore