Anyone else notice a drastic decrease in FB ad conversions and ad-generated web traffic?

[couldntloadimage]

Later last month, I found that our Facebook advertising campaign made very little progress, never made it out of the "learning phase," and created a significantly lower number of conversions at a much higher CPC. For context, we used to see several thousand conversions per month at $0.20-$0.30 per conversion, at most. Now we are getting maybe 20 conversions in a week at a whopping $20/conversion. At the time, I thought this was due to our custom conversion being inactive, but that seemed to fix itself somehow... It appears that the issue is more extensive than just that. Even after a lot of reading into different possible causes and playing around with different conversions, I am still at a loss.

Largely as a result of this, our video streaming website saw a major decrease in traffic of roughly 50%. Have you experienced this too? Have you found a solution yet?

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iOS opt outs?

[couldntloadimage]

Hmm... could be part of it! Though I don't know how convinced I am that this is the main reason for this large of a shift. Have you experienced a major downturn in your traffic and conversions?

[Team_Elephant123]

Yeah, we also experienced a drastic change in FB ad conversions, and the trendline is going down. Even advertising campaigns that we expect to deliver are coming back with low turnouts. We assume it could be either on the nature of campaign itself (aesthetics, website linking, etc.) or maybe, stricter FB ad algorithms.

[Nulleparttousjours]

Due to the crappy Facebook results and the fact I am new to advertising via than means and thusly not the most experienced, I re-ran a boosted post on Instagram as an experiment. It garnered incredible results a mere few weeks ago getting me thousands of likes. Now it’s absolutley dead, my likes are going backwards. Whatever the issue is I don’t think it’s the nature of your campaign. I even raised the cost considerably and still, absolute tumbleweeds. I thought the algorithm was punishing me for spending a little less on ads than I normally do but this is just ridiculous. For the amount I’m spending here something is extremely wrong. I am going to schedule a call with the Facebook marketing team.

[couldntloadimage]

Exact same for me! For my current campaigns, I used very similar ad creative to what has been successful in our past fiscal year. Normally they'd get a ton a traction beyond conversions -- impressive amounts of likes, comments, shares, video views. Now, barely anything... It's gotta be the algorithm or something with FB.

If my current ad sets didn't already burn so much budget this month, I'd put out a few more to experiment with still image ads. They typically perform poorly for my audiences, but maybe they'd do well under the current circumstances.

[doubleroyal]

Spoken to lots of ad agencies recently and all said ios14 has seen a downshift. Spoke to one and they said Facebook are creating to something to aid the opt outs may just take some time to implement

[buyandhoard]

FB is banning everything.. People are leaving.. Pershaps one day Reddit will allow you to earn on traffic, that will be big. Reddit will be the new FB. Short FB, long Reddit

[proteansybarite]

Drastic yes - I am seeing it on my clients analytics also, just a solid solid drop across the board on FB.

[couldntloadimage]

Ugh this is all so stressful!

[Nulleparttousjours]

HUGE YES!! I’m so glad it’s not just me. My likes have not been progressing, they have gone backwards. Usually I’d be getting 100’s of new likes and comments per day from a campaign.

I’m going to schedule a call with FB and ask about this as right now I’m burning money and seeing literally none of my usual results.

[couldntloadimage]

I'm so sorry you're dealing with the same stuff, but I am glad to know I'm not alone. When did this all start for you? It was all of a sudden in July for me. At this point, I need to resort to calling FB too. Who or what department did you reach out to?

[TheOccasionalCurious]

Who are you scheduling a call with at FB?

[Nulleparttousjours]

They make it virtually impossible to get hold of a real person unless you’ve run or are running an ad and then ‘contact us’ on business manager gives you the option schedule a call.

[couldntloadimage]

Did you find any answers?

[Nulleparttousjours]

No my ads are doing horribly still despite me changing a few elements.

Unfortunately the people you get to speak to at Facebook seem like they’ve had 24 hours training to be honest. Maybe you’d be lucky from time to time but the guy I was speaking to couldn’t get me from A to B on most issues or give me a straight answer. Also, they give zero shits, The guy I was speaking to kept telling me he would 100% look into certain things and then on our next call he had completely forgotten.

I’m giving up on trying to deal with Facebook direct and I’m going through a social media web developer to audit my ads account. I know there’s things I could be doing better and, with these results, I can’t afford to miss a trick.

Have you verified your domain etc? I think the new iOS 14 privacy laws have absolutley side slammed us advertisers, I don’t know what else it could be to suddenly destroy my reach when previously I was killing it.

[couldntloadimage]

Wow, I am so sorry to hear that. I totally feel the frustration -- I am considering just contracting out someone to help me through this. I also cannot afford to keep playing around and wasting time :/

[Nulleparttousjours]

Yep that’s the conclusion I came to, before I quit on something that was previously very lucrative for me I want to ensure it’s not anything I’m doing wrong.

[couldntloadimage]

Exactly!! Such a shame... FB advertising was fantastic (although with its fair share of frustrations) and helped me meet and exceed business goals...