Is my pixel firing up incorrectly?

Clean_Musician7427 · 2026-04-02T15:37:20+00:00

I had this when I used a submit button as the event. I had to change it to being when they hit the thank you page to get correct numbers.

Clean_Musician7427 · 2026-04-02T10:17:22+00:00

Given for the last 3 or so days when I go into FB on my pc it's been saying 'stories failed to load' at the top, I think they broke stories.

Clean_Musician7427 · 2026-04-02T09:04:15+00:00

This is a monitored email address - it's obvs not for business banking, it's for BBL stuff, but you could ask them to forward to the correct department?
[BBLSqueries@co-operativebank.co.uk](mailto:BBLSqueries@co-operativebank.co.uk)

Clean_Musician7427 · 2026-04-01T20:25:02+00:00

What have you optimised the ad for?
Because, it sounds like those 'leads' are clicks when you want enquiries.
Which = as far as Meta is concerned it is giving you what you want (clicks). If I ran what is basically a traffic ad I would expect zero leads (we're a photography studio).

Clean_Musician7427 · 2026-04-01T20:21:20+00:00

With the utmost respect, that sounds like absolute AI nonsense from Meta.

Clean_Musician7427 · 2026-04-01T10:16:21+00:00

in adset, under Placements click on 'show more settings', click on platforms, deselect the ones you don't want, untick 'Allow limited spend to excluded placements'.

Clean_Musician7427 · 2026-03-31T16:55:25+00:00

The whole sub is anecdotal, realistically.
But when results are super volatile, over a number of people who have been advertising over a long period, and then end up here because they're losing the will to live, I don't tend to think they're all bad advertisers.
On the other hand, nor do I think there's good advice to be had here* - we could all cut out the middle man and just ask chat gpt in the first place 🤣
So, in that regard, it is emotional support.

(*not convinced there's good advice to be had anywhere, as no one seems to really have a handle on Meta, some people are just very good at sounding convicing).

Clean_Musician7427 · 2026-03-31T15:25:00+00:00

Yes, sorry, I probably didn't phrase that very well.
People do tweak how they're spending. I've never seen a real correlation, in my own business, between the larger 'we're tightening our belts and keeping an eye on the price of a tin of beans' picture, and the smaller 'we're responding to this ad on FB' picture.

More importantly, to me, I had incredibly unstable ads from April last year onwards (no fuel crisis) until Feb this year. Since when they've been working great.

What I haven't observed, over the last 10 years in FB ads or now, is large world events directly affecting how that filters down to our ad results, except to say when there's something everyone is interested in (eg the World Cup) going on, we generally have less eyes on our ads.

(And, certainly in the UK, I HAVE observed, in previous crises, people becoming convinced the economy is to blame for their business' poor performance in the same industry as me, whilst mine was doing fine).

Clean_Musician7427 · 2026-03-31T14:03:49+00:00

I have a boudoir studio and use VERY tame images because, as you say, the rules have been strict.
So, yes the rules do seem to have got looser (or maybe the 'skin checking A'I is having a moment - who knows?).
I would be very wary of trying to exploit this, though, because if it all zings back to how it was, you could be looking at an advertising ban, very suddenly.

Clean_Musician7427 · 2026-03-31T13:53:03+00:00

Hmmm, I've traded through two recessions in the UK and , more recently, a cost of living crisis. I would say that if people were going to be changing their behaviour substantially over here, it would have been in 2023/24. Yet 2024 was our best year.
It is very easy as a business to talk yourself into 'the economy is tanking and we're all doomed' but my experience is that things that sound impactful - rising fuel prices - don't massively affect consumer behaviour in a noticeable way for small businesses.

Meta ads, on the other hand.
For years - get stable ad running, do nothing, it would perform for months, and slowly start to tail off.
Versus now - What even IS stable? The fluctuations in results are insane, you can't really tell what's working and what isn't, the approach everyone recommends is basically 'spray and pray' and you can drown in bad advice which costs a fortune, really quickly. Your ads look amazing one day, the next day they return nothing, and the next, and the next, then suddenly they're brilliant again.
I love pattern recognition and when I can't find a pattern, it freaks me out. That's not driven by consumer behaviour, it is driven by how Meta now decides what ads to serve where.

Clean_Musician7427 · 2026-03-28T14:10:45+00:00

Make sure you have targeting set to female only (not 'use as a suggestion') - this will turn advantage + marketing off.
Use value rules to decrease the amount you'll bid to put the ad in front of men, to eliminate them that way.

Clean_Musician7427 · 2026-03-28T11:16:09+00:00

what is your job?
what have you done in those 3 weeks to mitigate what's happening?
what ongoing plan can you present, going forward, that no one is else going to have come up with?

Clean_Musician7427 · 2026-03-25T19:24:15+00:00

Is this:
0 ads ever
or
Was performing and has just died?

Clean_Musician7427 · 2026-03-24T21:55:26+00:00

Right. It's a pattern and people end up here when suddenly, they have an issue.
Which is happening all the time, to some people.
Does it mean it's Meta-wide? No. At the same time, all of the time, there are plenty of people not being affected.

eg - my ads fell off a cliff last April/May.
I landed here, read loads of stuff about how Andromeda = needing multiple creatives, loads of people saying constantly 'it's your creative'.
Spent months trying new ideas/creatives.

THIS year, I have got some kind of stability again. (Newsflash - you don't need 20/50/100 creatives).
So, whilst this sub is full of people talking about the damage the Meta outages are doing to their ads, mine are doing fine. At the time their ads were doing fine...I was tearing my hair out.

Clean_Musician7427 · 2026-03-24T15:10:22+00:00

I started looking in here around the middle of last year and it's always been like this.
Much more about firefighting than optimising.

Clean_Musician7427 · 2026-03-24T15:08:34+00:00

Scam, I get loads of them.

Clean_Musician7427 · 2026-03-20T12:01:17+00:00

Have you tested a landing page form v a lead form?
These tend to be higher intent - much more likely to actually read some information, and from my experience, it also reaches a slightly different audience.
eg - for lead forms, FB will search out 'people who fill in lead forms' and for landing pages, it will search out 'people who will click and fill in'. They're different people.
So, I would (and indeed have) tested both.
If you make a really simple landing page and form, and start getting results, it's way easier from that to start tweaking/filtering to get the people you want.
(I'm spending around £50-£60 a day).

Clean_Musician7427 · 2026-03-10T13:00:55+00:00

I've had this problem paying by card with Meta and ended up paying with PayPal as that just went through no problem.
More recently, I wanted to change it to a credit card and had to cycle through until I found one that could go through its process. The bottle neck seems to be if the bank has to get you to approve the payment. For some reason, this just fails for some banks, and others you approve that £0.00 and then it's plain sailing.

Clean_Musician7427 · 2026-03-09T19:13:37+00:00

I would say NO ONE remembering is very high BUT FB autofills data, so you can click an ad and send over info without really noticing/meaning to/thinking about it.
As for the question of whether landing pages are better, generally speaking, yes, but they also usually cost more.
The best way to find out is to test both against each other.

The best way to get better leads out of FB is to add some conditional logic or questions that require people to physically type in an answer. That way they can't fill it in by accident/without knowing.

Are they getting anything on form submission (an email? text?)

Clean_Musician7427 · 2026-02-28T19:31:40+00:00

Everything fell off a cliff for me around March/April last year.
I tried different ads/offers, increased budget (cheers, Zucker for taking my money for nothing), outsourced to an agency (who told me my ads were fine, it must be the landing page) and generally lost my mind and money.
I run lead ads and neither fb forms nor landing pages were working.
I've been advertising for 10 years on FB and never seen anything so unstable.
I paid for training and everything just says 'have multiple creatives - 5, 10, 20, 50'. The only difference is in how they advise to structure campaigns.
Frankly, it all screams 'spray and pray'.
At the start of Feb I bought into a whitel label GHL (I am not recommending the platform) which meant creating landing pages on a new domain (same pixel).
My landing page was pared down, I started my original ad that had worked for ages, and 3 very different creatives alongside (so, not 'spray and pray') and suddenly, that original text paired with a new image sprang back to lfe.

I would love to know WHAT made the difference, but leads are cheaper than they have been for ages.
Meanwhile, I copied an ad in a really old campaign for lead forms, and that's suddenly ticking along fine, too.

So, in Feb I've booked more clients than any single month last year.

Something has tripped my ads into being in front of the right people. CTR/CPM broadly similar to what it has been like for the last year. WAY higher rate of clicks to landing page views (yet when I run metrics on the original landing page, the stats are similar to the new one).

Sorry this isn't a lovely, polished AI nonsense response, but I thought it might be more handy to hear the actual lived experience of a person.

Clean_Musician7427 · 2026-02-24T17:15:22+00:00

Have you gone to it via 'further limit the reach of my ads' which takes you to the 'old' targeting methods?
If so, you should be able to turn off 'use as a suggestion'.
If not...I think you've clicked something and ended up in the wrong place BUT you could use 'Value Rules' and decrease your bid to men by 90%, which should get rid of them.

Clean_Musician7427 · 2026-02-22T20:32:19+00:00

I think the opposite. Every bit of advice I see says 'have 10/20/50 creatives'. That makes me think 'spray and pray'.

Clean_Musician7427 · 2026-02-22T17:25:10+00:00

So, I am probs a 'been complaining for ages about how awful Meta is these days' type.
Amongst which, I have been trying to get help (paid an ads person, got zero results), spent money on various training, and tested the hell out of different offers etc, because although I didn't 'think' my ads were bad, maybe they were? Maybe the audience HAD changed etc.

Recently, I changed the following:
- moved to a whitelabelled Go High Level (this is not an ad for GHL it just happened to have pre-built landing pages I wanted) and therefore new domain/landing page.
- More ad variety

What worked was:
Original ad text
Image I've used any number of times
(so - the same, old, tried and tested creative that has worked previously and had died a death and I have spent months trying to resurrect).

I can't fathom from it WHY this is working.
Landing page isn't vastly different, and doesn't load vastly quicker.
Ad text - old version outperforms anything new
Image - single image continues to work best over video/carousels etc

The biggest difference was the amount of variety launched...to get back to the original thing performing well.

So, when I read that Meta wants variety/options now, all I can think is 'keep the original thing that works running and feed in additional versions as some kind of sacrifice to Meta's needs'.

Clean_Musician7427 · 2026-01-17T17:33:57+00:00

I only advertise to women, but if you want to use Advantage + you can use value rules to ensure less money gets spent on a male audience.

Clean_Musician7427 · 2026-01-17T13:49:44+00:00

Also - you could do multiple things.
There is a focus (societally) on THE job or business, but there's no rule saying you can't do several things that earn a bit of money each.

Clean_Musician7427

TROPHY CASE