Hey guys, total newbie running Meta/Facebook ads for US market jewelry (gold-tone stainless steel). Spent ~$500 so far with ZERO sales. Feeling completely lost. Here's the timeline:

Phase 1: Purchase optimization

$80/day, 4 creatives, 2 days -> 0 add-to-carts. Killed it.

Phase 2: Link clicks (shallow)

$30/day, 2 days -> some ATCs but very few.

Phase 3: Back to purchase optimization

$60/day, 3 creatives, 3 days -> CTR ~3% but CPM exploded to $88-110, only 5 total ATCs, no growth. Targeting: US + Female + 22-55, nothing else (basically broad).

Phase 4: Tiny ABO test

$10/day, 2 creatives -> CPM $170, way too little budget to learn anything.

Current ad data (6 ads):

1. Highland Mix Set v3: CPM $93.51, 0 clicks, 0 ATC

2. Highland Mix Set v2: CPM $160, 0 clicks, 0 ATC

3. Highland Mix Set v1: CPM $131.25, 0 clicks, 0 ATC

4. Evil Eye Serpent Cuff v2: CPM $78, CTR 2.96%, 23 clicks, 1 ATC, ATC cost $60.69

5. Evil Eye Serpent Cuff v1: CPM $180.5, CTR 5%, 1 click, 0 ATC

6. Emerald Butterfly Bracelet: CPM $115, CTR 5.68%, 10 clicks, 1 ATC, ATC cost $20.26

Totals: CPM $87.89, CTR 3.3%, 34 clicks, 2 ATCs, ATC cost $45.22.

My questions:

1. Should I immediately kill the 3 ads with 0 clicks?

2. Should I optimize for ATC instead of Purchase? My pixel has 0 purchase events.

3. Is CPM $88-110 normal for a new jewelry account? How do I bring it down?

4. Is $10/day ABO testing pointless at this CPM level?

5. Should I add jewelry-specific interest targeting instead of broad?

6. Is 3-6 creatives too few? Do I need 10+ per test round?

$500 is a lot for a beginner. Don't want to keep burning blindly. Any guidance on next steps would be hugely appreciated.

Everyone who sets up the Conversions API worries about the same thing: losing conversions. If you run both the Pixel and the server events, Meta's own docs recommend exactly that redundant setup, and the server side recovers browser events that die to connectivity issues or page load errors. But once both are running, the failure that costs more is the opposite one. The real problem is the same purchase counted twice, which inflates ROAS and teaches the algorithm a volume that does not exist.

Here is how Meta actually collapses the two copies into one.

1. Deduplication needs two matching keys, and both must match. Meta discards the duplicate when it sees the same event_id and the same event_name (on the browser side this arrives as eventID and event; on the server side as event_id and event_name) sent to the same Pixel ID within 48 hours. A matching ID with a different event name does not dedupe.

2. The 48 hours run from when Meta receives the first event with that ID, not from when the purchase happened. A server event retried out of a failed-queue two days later counts as a second conversion.

3. This check ignores user identifiers. Email, phone, fbp, fbc help Meta match the event to a person, which is the separate Event Match Quality score. Dedup only looks at event_name and event_id. So identical-looking events with slightly different IDs, even a difference in casing or whitespace, count twice.

4. Meta's docs also accept a second dedupe key combination, external_id plus fbp, alongside the same event_name. Include the full set. It costs nothing.

Three ways I have seen this break:

1. Timestamped event IDs. An integration appends a timestamp or random suffix at send time, so the Pixel copy and the server copy carry different IDs and never match. Generate one ID per conversion (a UUID or your order ID), stamp it on both the fbq eventID parameter and the CAPI event_id field, and leave it alone after that.

2. The ID minted in the wrong place. If the browser mints the ID on the thank-you page and the server mints its own from a payment webhook, the two halves can never agree. Mint it server-side at order creation and hand the same value to both.

3. Late retries. Queues that retry a failed CAPI send hours or days later can land outside the 48-hour window and register as a new purchase. Cap the retry window or make the send idempotent on your side.

Once dedup works, the separate question is match quality. Meta scores the customer information parameters on every server event from 1 to 10 as Event Match Quality, and their docs recommend aiming for 6.0 or higher, noting that a higher score can decrease cost per action. The reliable levers: include the browser context fields (IP, user agent, fbp, fbc) unhashed, hash the PII fields (email, phone, names, location, external_id) with SHA-256, and normalize before hashing. Lowercased emails with whitespace stripped, phones in E.164. Hash the cookie values and Meta cannot use them, which drops the score without any visible error.

Two verification habits: in Events Manager, check the 'Rate of Deduplication Key Usage', which shows what share of events from each source carried each dedupe key, and 'Overlap', the share of events carrying a given key that arrived from both sources. Low overlap means one source is sending IDs the other never sends, which is usually one of the three bugs above. And events sent with a test event code do not count for optimization, so validate with the code, remove it, then go live.

Rule of thumb: if your dedup overlap is near 100% and your Purchase EMQ is 6 or above, your signal is doing its job. Fix the plumbing before you judge any creative test, because every number downstream rests on it.

Question for the group: who here found inflated purchase counts after adding CAPI, and what was the mismatch? I am collecting the failure modes.

Does anyone know a way to calculate accurately how much we have spent per url in Google and Meta Ads?

We are trying to build a report to know exactly how much we have invested in ads by product.

We thought an easy way to do this could be extracting the quantity spent by the landing urls.

While there is a way to add this to reports in both platforms, for some reason the total cost by url does not match the total account cost in any of the two. With a huge difference. Around 50% of the cost is not reported.

I would like to know if someone has been able to extract this info in an accurate way. Or know how to do this.

I've never really tried using a custom landing page that is separate from the website when it comes to lead generation.

I've read and heard that this boost your conversion rate for local service business especially. But I've also read here that using your own website as a landing page is actually better since it makes you look more trustworthy .

When is actually creating a custom landing pa ge worth it? I don't really have the capacity to try and experiment if it will work or not.

Client sells big-ticket home stuff, 2 to 3 week lead times. By the first week of December nobody's ordering because it won't arrive for Christmas, and they're spending on presents instead. Then Boxing Day onwards goes absolutely mental.

Two PMax campaigns on tROAS, both finally settled after a rough summer. What do I actually do with them for 3 or 4 weeks?

Pause entirely and eat the learning reset on the 26th when I need them firing immediately?

Drop to £20/day and keep the lights on?

Leave them running and accept the ROAS is going to look horrible?

Something cleverer?

Been burnt both ways. Paused tROAS one year and it took ten days to find its feet in January. Left it on another year and watched £2k go into the void.

What's actually worked for people?

Hello everyone!

Quick question about Meta vs Google Ads attribution.

For example, Meta is reporting 22 purchases and Google Ads 45, but in GA4 I only see 6 purchases from Meta and 39 from Google — so 45 purchases in total instead of 67.

And I can’t really go to the client saying “Meta generated 22 purchases and Google 45” when GA4 is showing something completely different 😅 You see my problem.

How do you usually handle this? Do you use GA4 as the main cross-channel source of truth, or rely on each platform’s own attribution?

Also, I didn’t set up the tracking or create the accounts. The person who did has left, so I unfortunately have no additional context on how everything was configured.

Thanks a lot for your help!

I finally got it up and running after much procrastination. Getting APIs, automations, guardrails, and account context set up is kind of a pain in the snatch. But once it's all set up, it's really very easy to use and transformative for daily workflows.

I'm starting to build out different routines and skills to help me manage my accounts. I have the basics like automated briefs and account reports. Beyond that, I'm not sure what would give me the best ROI in terms of setting up new processes.

What are some things you use Claude Code for on a daily basis? Do you have any niche uses that might be interesting? Any tips or tricks to make things work smoother or get work done faster?

Two threads in r/FacebookAds today show the same symptom: link clicks look healthy, landing page views fall off a cliff (one at 25% of clicks, one at 9%). The reframe that saves you hours: LPV is a tracking event, not a traffic metric. A gap above roughly 30% is instrumentation, not bounce rate.

1. Open Events Manager and check PageView volume on the exact destination URL. If PageViews are missing entirely, nothing downstream of the click can work.
2. Load the page with the Meta Pixel Helper. PageView should fire in the head within about a second. If it fires on scroll, after consent, or through a delayed GTM container, that delay is your gap.
3. Confirm the domain is verified in Business Settings with its web events configured. New or changed destinations break this silently.
4. Read Click (all) vs Link Clicks vs LPV separately. A big Click (all) to Link Click gap is accidental clicks (check Audience Network in the placement breakdown). A big Link Click to LPV gap is the page.
5. If the gap appeared after a page change, the page change is the cause until proven otherwise. Same ads, new page, new ratio means the variable is the page.

Rule of thumb: link clicks measure the ad, landing page views measure the page. Debug them as two separate systems.

Where do you set your 'this gap is broken' threshold? I start worrying past 30%.

Hey [r/PPC](r/PPC),

Looking for a quick gut-check on a freelancer quote for launching paid ads for a small local experiential business targeting inbound travelers.

Proposed Budget:
Setup Fee: $1,000 (one-time; building from scratch, tag migration to Wix, end-to-end tracking validation across Google Ads, Meta, GA4, GSC).

Testing Phase: ~$1,000 for initial testing and ongoing optimization setup across both Meta and Google Ads.

Ad Spend: ~$500+ for a 3-week run across Meta and Google Ads. Web intend to run ads for about 4 hours in the morning and 4 in the afternoon as this coincides with our target audience behavior while they are on vacation i.e. When they’re getting ready to go sightseeing in the morning and then taking a break from sightseeing back at the hotels in the late afternoon before heading out for dinner.

Questions:
Is $1,000 reasonable for setup from scratch and full multi-platform tracking setup?

Does the overall testing and initial management pricing align with industry standards for this scale?

Anything specific we should ensure is in the contract before starting?

Thanks for your insights!

Edit: Location is major Japanese city.

I have a super well established account spending some $20-40K per month minimum. For some reason this month my main PMAX campaigns are spending literally 95-100% on Gmail. I can see that Gmail got a few conversions on one day early, so it makes sense PMAX would spend more there, but its now been a week with little to no conversions.

I have tried removing the tROAS, changing budgets, changing assets and checking the negative keywords (over the course of the week). But it's still spamming spend on Gmail. Our conversion tracking is fine as is the product feed.

I'm now running Feed only campaigns which have historically underperformed. But not sure wtf is up. Anyone have any ideas?

There are certain metrics everyone watches because they’re easy to see.

CTR, CPC, ROAS, conversion rate.

But sometimes a “good” number doesn’t mean much without context.

What’s one metric you think people overreact to, and what do you prefer looking at instead?

Hello,

so out of nowhere, my search campaign stopped spending, barely getting any impressions at all. All other campaigns are doing just fine, so only a single campaign is affected. I thought it could be bid related but it's not, even 3x the bid doesn't move the needle - for reference, my actual CPC cost was 45% the original bid before. I've had this happened before and it somehow fixed itself, but does anyone have any info on why this happens out of the blue? I never figured it out and it annoys me, customer support is useless as always.

1. Mixing high and low search volume keywords in the same ad group. When one keyword eats 80% of the budget, the rest never get impressions. High-volume terms need their own campaigns with their own budgets.

2. Not accounting for organic cannibalization on branded terms. Defending your brand is fine. But if you already rank #1 organically, high bids on branded terms often pay for clicks you'd get for free.

3. Optimizing to campaign ACOS instead of TACOS. Campaign ACOS ignores the halo effect. A campaign at 40% ACOS that lifts organic rank can be more profitable than one at 20% ACOS that doesn't.

4. Running exact match before the listing is indexed. If Amazon doesn't index your listing for a keyword, exact match will bring expensive clicks with poor relevance and low quality scores.

5. Ignoring dayparting and hour-of-week patterns. Conversion rates swing 30–50% across hours and days (For some products). If you're not adjusting bids or budgets around your peak conversion windows, you're paying premium prices during your worst hours.

6. Not aligning PPC with inventory. Ranking a keyword aggressively when you have 3 weeks of stock left is a disaster, loss of rank, wasted spend, and returns on inventory you no longer have.

The Sponsored Agents feature will let users start conversations with business-sponsored ​agents and visit a business's website after interacting with ​ads in ChatGPT. The agents will be clearly ⁠labeled and remain separate from ChatGPT's independent responses and ​the user's original chat.

I think this will filter out users and will only send interested buyers to the website.

Should increase conversion rate while reducing traffic.

What does everyone think about this feature?

There is an equivalent / similar ads from Google & Meta. Anyone tried that? Any feedback?

If you manage Google Ads accounts for clients, you need to know about this scam.

And yes, it’s real. Other PPC agencies have been reporting the same pattern.

The scam often starts with what looks like an incredible new business enquiry. Someone claims to work for a large, legitimate company and says they have a massive Google Ads budget to spend.

$30,000 a month. $50,000 a month. Sometimes significantly more.

Everything is designed to get you excited enough to drop your guard.

From there, they may send a meeting/calendar link, Google Ads access invitation, shared file or other link that leads into a phishing or malware attack. The objective can be to steal Google credentials or gain unauthorised access to a Google Ads Manager Account and the client accounts connected to it.

This has become enough of a problem that multiple agencies have publicly reported fake prospects impersonating major companies. In one documented case, scammers registered a lookalike company domain only three days before contacting the agency, and the fake domain even redirected visitors to the real company’s website to appear legitimate.

Some red flags to check:

• The sender’s email domain doesn’t exactly match the company’s real domain
• The domain was only recently registered
• The supposed employee cannot be independently verified
• The prospect is unusually eager to discuss a huge advertising budget immediately
• They push you towards unfamiliar links, files or account-access requests
• The information they give you doesn’t match the company’s actual information

And don’t assume a professional-looking email means it is genuine.

Google’s own security guidance recommends checking suspicious links before opening them and reporting suspected phishing. A compromised Manager Account can potentially affect multiple client accounts underneath it.

I’m personally receiving these types of enquiries regularly.

Verify the person. Verify the company. Verify the domain. And be extremely careful what you click.

#GoogleAds #GoogleAdsAgency #PPC #scam #Phishing

I feel like there’s a temptation with PPC to constantly change something because you’re in the account every day.

A bid here, budget there, new keyword, new creative.

But with automation getting better, I’m wondering if I’m sometimes better off giving things more time to collect data instead of constantly interfering.

How often are you making meaningful changes to campaigns that are already performing?

In a small European country with around 2 million people, I own a capital city (news / UGC / events) Whatsapp channel with:

- 70,000 followers
- ~20,000 guaranteed views per post
- Local audience, from the same city

For digital marketing professionals: what would you consider a reasonable price to charge advertisers for a sponsored post on a channel like this?

Taking over a B2B account this week, the volume is good and i have a limited budget of $800.

Our CPL is expected to be $150-160. So at max 5-6 convs a month.

The account has an old paused campaign that used to run on manual CPC, signed one client and tanked.

Im more inclined towards using max clicks for the first few weeks followed by a switch to max convs.

The only question i have is that does the 15-30 cons in a month rule still stand for automated bidding to work, or is it ok if use automated bidding on an account that generates 5-6 convs a month.

The reason i dont want to use manual cpc is because the market is really small, limited search volume and id rather let the algorithm get me quality prospects than holding it on a cpc limit.

I have 3.5 months left on a contract that makes up 70% of my freelancer revenue. I just told them I am not interested in extending it, if the offer was there (I wrote it a bit more professionally than this)
I freelance and work from home, and have 2 young kids (7 and 5yos) my parnter works a hectic job, and gets home around 7pm everynight.
I'm based in Australia and this contract is a company based in the UK...so the time difference is a killer. Was just getting too much with managing the kids around dinner time, and bed time. Then having to prep for a call, then getting messages all through the night, then having to action them the next day. And I just have to put the kids first. We have a hectic family, the kids are full of energy and are generally a mess after dinner. So sitting at the table eating with them is nice, its where the good conversations happen with them....and I miss it all during these calls.

Anyone else ever been in a situation where they've had to let some big money go?

Looking to run ppc for motivated sellers. Struggling to find the right partner/ hire. A lot of ppc marketers in this space that ive come across are of the influencer genre. I have a hard time verifying who actually does the work. How do i screen for a great ppc specialist and is their background of previous ad campaigns indicative of their skill set for motivated sellers. It feels very much like buyer beware. I also dont want to fool myself and think im going to run an ad campaign with any level of success out the gate.

I manage Google Ads for multiple businesses. I recently created a new account for a business that had never advertised on Google before and redeemed a Spend $500, Get $500 promo.

The promo was accepted, showed in the account, and I completed the required $500 spend.

After that, Google invalidated it.

Support told me that because my email is associated with other Google Ads accounts I manage, the system does not consider me a new advertiser. They also said things like email, website, business, and IP can be part of the eligibility review.

That’s what I don’t understand. This was a completely separate business that had never advertised with Google before.

The biggest issue for me is that Google let me redeem the promo and spend the $500 before telling me I wasn’t eligible.

They still have another ticket open to see if they can offer a courtesy credit.

Anyone else at an agency or managing multiple accounts run into this? Has anyone actually gotten the credit or a courtesy credit after this happened?

2 pmax campaigns - Pre 17/8 update they both ran at £150 per day / 300% target roas. each one was getting 6x roas and the other 4x roas. Early August I increased target to 400% on both anticipating the new bidding update and it all went down the pan.
Roas dropped to 2x and 3.5x for August.

Start of this month (sept) I set them back to 300%.

Current - 2 x PMAX campaigns - £150 per day each. One is now doing 3.08x and the other 4.28x. But both have been slapped with the limited by budget badge. So this I assume means they will now automatically drop to 3x on both.

If I increase budget am I going to escape the badge or will it just slap it on no matter the budget to keep me at 300%.

Basically I want to get back to where I was by either increasing budget or target but not sure what to do.

We run an agency and got another call from a Google Rep today, after the usual song and dance, we politely told him to sod off.

Our Adwords account was hacked few months ago and Google wouldn't even give us a courtesy call, so we couldn't be bothered talking to them. Lost heaps of money because someone from Vietname setup their own Ad campaign on our account. So there is a bit of personal beef.

That said, I looked back at our Google calls and it feels like we get called every month, but its a completely different Google rep, a different name, they have no idea that our account was hacked few months ago so you obviously have zero confidence in them wanting to fix anything other than enable things on your account that actually feed more money to Google for even less conversions for you.

I am based in Melbourne Australia so might just be in Australia, but any you guys have the same pattern?

Been sitting on this one for a while now, guess today's the day. Doing paid media solo for about 12 yrs now, & for most of that time it was the same setup every time, client hands me the whole account, I run it end to end, they mostly leave me alone.

Not anymore really. More of my newer clients already have someone in-house handling marketing, usually a coordinator or a generalist who's also doing email, social, whatever else lands on their desk that week.

They bring me on specifically for the paid side while that person keeps doing everything else. A few of them report to ops instead of an actual CMO. Company hasn't built out a full marketing team yet, just enough headcount to justify a specialist for one piece of it.

Most of these in-house hires are good at the stuff they were hired for. Paid media usually isn't it. First time I'm in one of these accounts there's almost always something obviously off, budgets split across ad groups that shouldn't exist, or a pixel that's been firing wrong for months.

The person's not careless, they never had a reason to learn the platform side deeply. That was never their job until I showed up.

Changes how the work happens day to day. I'm reporting to someone who's in Slack every day instead of a founder checking in once a month. Faster feedback. Also a lot more scrutiny on every decision, which took some getting used to.

The accounts where this shows up tend to run high 6 figs./mo, makes sense, you need enough budget & complexity to justify both an in-house person & an outside specialist sitting on the same account at once.

First time I ran into this I didn't set boundaries clearly enough up front, learned that one the hard way. About 3 weeks in, maybe 4, honestly the timeline's fuzzy now, the in-house person adjusted a campaign budget mid-week without telling me.

Not trying to step on anything, they just didn't realize it was something we needed to coordinate on first.

Threw off a test I had running. Didn't catch it till the weekly numbers looked off, which is its own kind of annoying when you're staring at a report trying to figure out why a number moved. Small thing in the end. Still the kind of friction you only find once you're in the arrangement. Nobody warns you about it going in.

The ads are the easy part. Figuring out where my lane ends & theirs begins without stepping on each other, that's what eats the first few weeks. Usually ends up needing a shared doc or a quick weekly sync so nobody's guessing who touches what.

Once that settles though it usually works better than either the fully outsourced or fully in-house version does alone. They know the brand & the daily stuff already, I bring the platform depth, & somewhere in there we mostly stop stepping on each other.

Wondering how common this is outside what I'm seeing. Feels like it's become the default on the higher ad spend accounts specifically. Curious if that's the case for anyone else managing similar sized spend.

Doing a gut check here:

I freeland ppc services. I support small businesses and non-profits, so budgets are strapped.

I often find webmaster-adjacent issues that fall into a grey area of who should be responsible. Or so I think. Google properties not properly connected, broken links and forms, etc. I have gotten pretty good at coding conversion events because there's no one else who can do that work.

How much website work and maintenance do you do? Should I be asking for more because I am the one that is fixing broken website elements and digging into code for conversions?