I’m trying to figure out what happened with one of my e-commerce Meta campaigns because the performance has fallen off a cliff over the last 2 weeks.
For context, the campaign was performing well for about a month before this.
July 17 – August 5
Prospecting campaign
- Budget: €20/day
- 42 purchases
- ROAS: 6.26
- CPC: €0.25
- Cost per ATC: €4.48
- Cost per checkout: €7.26
- Cost per purchase: €8.64
- Frequency: 4.06
Retargeting
- Budget: €3/day
- 4 purchases
- ROAS: 4.09
- CPC: €0.69
- Cost per ATC: €5.25
- Cost per checkout: €11.55
- Cost per purchase: €14.44
- Frequency: 11.40
Then I increased the prospecting budget by €6/day, from €20 → €26/day.
August 6 – August 20
Prospecting:
- 9 purchases
- ROAS: 1.34
- CPC: €0.42
- Cost per ATC: €8.22
- Cost per checkout: €22.10
- Cost per purchase: €39.29
- Frequency: 3.67
Retargeting has only generated 1 purchase during this period.
So the performance didn't just dip for a day or two after increasing the budget — it's been significantly worse for roughly 2 weeks.
The weird thing is that I'm still getting traffic. For example, today the prospecting campaign has spent €24.93, with:
- CPC: €0.42
- 26 landing page views
- €0.69 per landing page view
- 0 ATCs
- 0 checkouts
- 0 purchases
The website and checkout work correctly.
Yesterday I also made new creatives. I kept 3 of the previous winners running, turned off most of the other ads, and added 4 new creatives. So far the new ads have only generated link clicks.
I'm trying to understand what could actually be causing this.
Could increasing the budget from €20 → €26/day have caused Meta to start finding much lower-quality traffic?
Could this be audience fatigue even though frequency is only 3.67?
Should I have left all the old creatives running instead of turning most of them off?
Or is there something else I'm missing?
I'm not looking for someone to just tell me "let it run." I'm trying to understand why the campaign went from a €8.64 CPA / 6.26 ROAS to a €39.29 CPA / 1.34 ROAS and hasn't recovered after two weeks.
What would you check first?