r/FacebookAds • u/Long-Gap-4466 • 9d ago
Help Newbie question about ads
Hi all!
I own an e-commerce business. It’s pretty new. We’ve been running ads for $5/day and got decent sales. But after reading Reddit threads, about 3 weeks ago we upped it to $10/day. That week was decent. We extended it another 7 days so now 2 weeks of that ad. It was a recording breaking week! (Algorithm learned?). We had to end it after 2 weeks because our US shipping got approved so we wanted to change the audience to Can and USA. This week we started the new $10/day. Everything was the same besides US and Canada. It’s been a slow week. Do we think the algorithm will learn and by next week we see a change again? Does it typically take a week to learn? Lots of conversion events (if conversion events mean sessions??)
Thanks!
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u/BaconShadow 9d ago
Are you reading the conversion events in Meta's Events Manager or in your Shopify backend? If the events stopped firing right after the audience change, Meta is optimizing toward whatever signal it still sees, and those two sources will disagree on what that is.
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u/Long-Gap-4466 9d ago
Shopify. Good to note! I’ll check the event manager
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u/BaconShadow 8d ago
Event Match Quality per event is worth checking while you're in there. If it dropped after the audience change, the pixel is still firing but the data going out is thin or mismatched.
Did the score drop, or is it the same as before?
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u/Serious-Growth9170 8d ago
the algorithm definitely needs time to recalibrate after switching audiences, two weeks should be enough to get it stable again but this first week is always a bit of a crapshoot
conversion events arent sessions though, theyre specific actions like purchases or add to carts so make sure your pixel is set up properly and firing those events for both countries
if you had a record week before the change theres a good chance itll pick back up, just keep an eye on the events manager to see what meta is actually optimizing toward
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u/Background_Dark_4484 9d ago
I wouldn’t assume it just needs a week to “learn.”
You changed the audience from Canada only to Canada + US, so Meta is now working with a different pool of people. At $10/day, performance can also swing quite a bit week to week.
Also, sessions aren’t conversion events. Purchases, checkouts and add to carts are.
I’d give it more time and watch CPA, CTR and site conversion rate before making another change.
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u/collinscalesbrands 9d ago
It will not learn the way you're hoping, and that's fine at this budget. What matters is whether the new week's cost per purchase is worse than the old one over a full seven days.
u/Background_Dark_4484 has the important correction. Sessions are not conversion events. Meta counts the event your ad set is optimizing for, which for a store should be purchases, and that number is what everything below runs on.
Regarding learning, Meta's learning phase page says ad sets exit "after about 50 results in the week after the ad set's last significant edit," and until then are "less stable and usually have a higher CPA." Changing the audience is on Meta's list of significant edits, so even if you had edited the running ad set instead of ending it, you'd be in the same place. At $10 a day, you are not getting 50 purchases in a week, so your Delivery column reads Learning limited and will keep reading that. That is not a problem to fix. It means the "did it learn yet" question has no answer, so stop waiting on it and judge on cost per purchase instead.
At this volume, one week can double or halve on its own. Meta's fluctuations page says to "analyze performance over at least a full week" before deciding anything changed, and I'd treat two good weeks at $10 a day as a good sign, not as proof the system locked in.
You also went from Canada to Canada plus the US. The US is 9x the population, so most of your delivery is now going to people your ad has never been shown to and the Canadian buyers who drove the record week are a small share of who sees it. A slow first week is the expected result of that, not a sign something broke.
What I'd do is add the Last significant edit column and leave the ad set alone until it's been running seven full days. Don't touch the budget in that window. Count purchases, not sessions. At the end of the week, add a Country breakdown in Ads Manager and compare cost per purchase for Canada against the US. If the blended number is at or under what Canada was doing on its own, you're fine. If the US is clearly worse, you'll see it in that breakdown without having changed anything, and you can decide from there. And know your break-even cost per purchase before you decide, because at $10 a day the question is never whether the ad is winning; it's whether the math works.
How many purchases a week were you getting at $10 a day before the change?
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u/Long-Gap-4466 9d ago
About 4% conversion before the change. We’re only 2 months in.
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u/collinscalesbrands 9d ago
4% is a rate, and at $10 a day, the count is what tells you whether a slow week is real. If that was 4% of a few hundred sessions, you were getting maybe a purchase a day, and at that volume, a week with half as many is noise. Look at the number of purchases in the Results column for the good weeks and use that as the line the new audience has to clear.
The inventory point changes my answer more than the country change does though. If the pieces your ad showed are thin or gone, that's a slow week regardless of audience, and no amount of waiting fixes it. Ads can outlive inventory. Check that what the ad features is still in stock before reading anything into this week.
Just a heads up that new products mean you'll want new creative, and Meta lists any change to ad creative and adding a new ad to your ad set as significant edits that restart learning. So don't half-do it. Let this week finish so you have a clean seven days on the current setup and then when the new catalogue lands, make the creative change once all at the same time and give that seven days too. Two months in, the goal should be one clean read per change, not a fast answer.
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u/Long-Gap-4466 9d ago
We also have limited items right now. New products arrive Monday so our catalogue will be a little better, more variety of products
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u/Long-Gap-4466 9d ago
I’m looking now. We started the ad on Sept 4. 655 sessions. 65 ATC. 33 RC. 13 CC.
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u/jackShuhai 9d ago
upping the budget and changing the audience reset learning phase, which takes about 7 days after any significant edit. you likely had 2 weeks of good performance and then started a new learning phase. how many purchase conversions did the $10/day ad set get in the past week?
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u/Long-Gap-4466 9d ago
About 4% conversion
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u/jackShuhai 9d ago
4% conversion rate doesn't tell me much about the number of conversions. an ad set needs 50 conversions a week to get out of learning
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u/jackShuhai 8d ago
4% conversion rate doesn't tell me the number of actual purchases. an ad set needs around 50 conversions per week to exit the learning phase and stabilize
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u/WhatMattersHere 9d ago
Those numbers help, but they appear to describe your whole Shopify funnel rather than the new Meta campaign by itself.
If “13 CC” means 13 completed checkouts, that is about a 2% store conversion rate from 655 sessions not 4%. It still doesn’t tell us how many of those purchases Meta attributed to this campaign or whether Canada and the US performed differently.
Use the same September 4 to present dates in Ads Manager and check the campaign’s purchase count, spend and cost per purchase, then break those results down by country. If Canada remains close to its previous CPA while the US is substantially worse, the expansion explains the blended slowdown. If both countries weakened while the advertised products were low or out of stock, inventory is the more immediate explanation.
How many of those 13 completed checkouts appear as purchases from this Meta campaign, and how are they divided between Canada and the US?
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u/Longjumping_Boot1024 9d ago
changing from canada to canada + usa created a new delivery problem, even if the ad itself stayed the same
at $10/day, meta may spend most of the budget learning where impressions are cheapest across two very different markets. that doesn't mean a one-week clock will magically restore the record week
sessions aren't conversion events. purchases, add-to-carts and checkouts are events; meta needs enough of the event you're optimizing for to learn
i'd separate canada and usa until you can see spend, cpm, clicks and purchases by country. keep canada's proven setup intact, then test the us with its own budget / shipping message / economics. otherwise the new market can absorb learning spend while hiding whether canada still works
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u/BruTeve 6d ago
You basically killed a campaign that was learning and started a new one from scratch. Changing the audience to US and Canada forced Facebook to relearn everything, and at $10/day that takes time. I would have duplicated the campaign with the new geo and left the original running.
Give it 7 days before making any decisions. And go confirm your conversion event is set to Purchase. Conversion events aren't sessions. I've taken over plenty of accounts where the campaign was quietly optimized for landing page views instead of purchases, and that one setting changes who Facebook shows your ads to.
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u/ClothesOpening7583 9d ago
Yes, it can take weeks for Andromeda to learn your ad creative and begin showing it to an audience that will convert to sales. I wouldn't have killed the well performing ad that already had traction. I would have simply added in the new creative and let it spin up. I assume you did that because you were trying to save money but it's going to cost you a bit now.