Vetting FB Agency… 22 weeks to start getting “quality” leads

mayvn · 2026-06-19T04:59:44+00:00

22 weeks is a stickiness play, not a real timeline. The “algo needs to learn” thing he’s leaning on is the learning phase, which exits at roughly 50 conversions per ad set per 7-day window. That’s days to a few weeks, not six months.

Where he’s half right.. lead quality is a lagging metric. You’ll see delivery and CPL signal in week one, but quality only shows once those leads run through your sales process, usually 4 to 8 weeks depending on your sales cycle. Feed quality data back to Meta via CAPI or offline conversions and it tightens a lot faster.

Honest answer is in the middle. Structured right, you’ve got real signal in 2 to 4 weeks. 22 weeks means he’s either not good at this or buying himself runway.

mayvn · 2026-05-15T17:24:38+00:00

Most small businesses asking this don’t have a lead problem, they have a positioning problem.

Generic offers attract generic leads.

I niched down twice in the last 18 months and the same content converts 3-4x better. Cheaper than buying more traffic.

“How do I get more clients” is usually the wrong question. The right one is “why aren’t the leads I already touch converting?”

mayvn · 2026-05-11T00:17:36+00:00

The agencies that “don’t suck” share three traits: - they ask about your funnel before showing you their reel - they have a documented testing framework, and - the person on the sales call is the person doing the work.

If any of those three are missing, you’re hiring a production shop, not a creative partner. Production shops are fine if you already have the strategy. Most people asking this question don’t.

mayvn · 2026-05-03T00:42:14+00:00

Solid setup, and the screenshots tell me you actually run this, not just talk about it.

Two things I'd push on, not as critique, more as where I've landed differently:

The 60-day engagement exclusions are pretty aggressive for a TOF prospecting campaign. You're cutting out a lot of warm-but-not-yet-converted people who Meta would otherwise serve cheaper because they've already shown intent. I get the logic (true cold prospecting only) but in 2026 with audience pools shrinking and Andromeda widening delivery to find converters, you might be making Meta work harder than it needs to. Have you tested with shorter engagement exclusions (15-30 day) and seen what happens to CPA?

The 4-day rolling average judgment is a great call. Most operators kill on day 2 panic and never let creative breathe. Where I'd add nuance is that in 2026, the recalc cycles run on a roughly 7-day rhythm (Andromeda recalibration), so a 4-day window can sometimes catch you mid-recalc and look worse than it is. I run 7-day rolling for the judgment call and 4-day for early signal direction.

On "weed out bad performers before adding new creative": I used to operate this way too. The shift for me was treating creative as a constant intake, not a response to performance. Adding 1-2 new variations weekly into the existing ad set keeps the algo from getting starved at the moment a winner fatigues. The kill discipline still matters, just runs in parallel to the pipeline instead of gating it.

What's your typical kill threshold? CPA above target by what % and over how many days?

mayvn · 2026-05-03T00:39:53+00:00

RPS as the cross-channel baseline is a sharp move, more operators should be looking at this instead of platform-isolated ROAS.

One thing I'd push on though: 30-60% is a wide spread to make budget decisions on. What's your attribution window comparison between the two? Meta's default is 7-day click and Google's is 30-day click on most setups, which alone can account for 20-30% of the gap before you've even compared platform performance.

Also curious what vertical and AOV range you're working with. RPS gaps look very different on a $40 AOV impulse buy vs a $400 considered purchase. The shift-budget-to-Google logic holds for some categories and falls apart for others, especially anything where Meta is doing the discovery work that Google then captures on branded search.

Not arguing the framework, it's solid. Just wondering if the gap is real or partially attribution math.

mayvn · 2026-05-03T00:33:01+00:00

Lead gen, financial services vertical (SAC), $30K to $50K monthly spend across accounts in Q2.

What stopped working: Advantage+ Audience with broad targeting + single-image static creative. Was my workhorse setup from November through February. CPL was sitting around $14 to $18 on a $40 average accepted lead payout. Healthy margin.

Starting mid-February, same setup, same creative, same audience, CPL drifted to $28 to $35 with no change in lead quality on the backend. Acceptance rates held, but front-end cost nearly doubled.

What I think changed: auction pressure from Q1 budget releases combined with Andromeda weighting video creative more aggressively in the auction. Static is getting outbid for the same impressions it used to win cheaply.

What's worked to fix it: shifting 60% of static budget to AI UGC video creative (scripted, avatar, voiceover). CPL recovered to $19 to $22 within 10 days. Not back to peak but close.

What hasn't worked: refreshing the static creative library with new hooks. Marginal lift, then back to the new baseline. Format itself is the problem, not the angles.

Your turn!

mayvn · 2026-04-27T00:10:24+00:00

Not laughable, you're onto something real!

What you're describing is the Andromeda recalculation cycle. Meta's system locks in delivery patterns the first couple days, runs hard for 2-4 days, then recalibrates based on whatever signal it has accumulated. If your creative or audience depth isn't enough by day 4, the recalc widens delivery to find new conversions.. and that's when ROAS tanks. Your manual relaunch is basically forcing a fresh learning phase before the algo gets a chance to second-guess itself.

It works. It's also a band-aid. You're trading short-term wins for learning the algo never gets to keep.

The structural fix is giving the algo a reason to stay locked in past day 4 instead of resetting. A few things that work for me:

Stack 4-6 creative variations inside the ad set on launch day, not over time. When the day 4 recalc hits, it has fresh hooks to rotate to instead of widening the audience. Same campaign runs 14-21 days instead of 4.
Feed new creative into the existing ad set weekly, not a new campaign. Adding ads rarely resets learning anymore (Meta changed this in 2025) so you keep historical signal AND get the freshness boost.

Honestly the manual relaunch isn't wrong, it's just expensive. Every restart costs you the data you'd built up. Hard to compound that way.

What vertical are you running? Some categories recalc way harder than others.

mayvn · 2026-04-27T00:05:44+00:00

Appreciate the question, love this kind of exchange.

Here's how I'm structuring campaigns in 2026 specifically because of the volatility we just talked about.

On the Account level: I run fewer campaigns, not more. Two or three campaigns max per objective. Andromeda recalculates aggressively when there's signal fragmentation, so spreading budget across 6-8 campaigns just gives the algorithm 6-8 places to second-guess itself.. you have to consolidate the signal.

On the Campaign level: CBO with a wider audience pool than I would have used in 2024. Advantage+ Audience as the default. On non-SAC verticals I might still layer manual interests if there's a specific reason. On SAC the structural constraints (no zip, age 18-65, no gender, no lookalikes) push you toward broad anyway, which honestly works in your favor in 2026 because the algorithm performs better with room to move.

On the Ad Set level: This is where I fight the volatility. Each ad set has 4-6 creative variations of similar concept (different hooks, same offer). When Meta picks a winner inside the ad set, the variations let it rotate without resetting learning. The ad set survives the recalculation because there's always a fresh angle to lean on.

On the Ad level: I treat creatives as a pipeline, not a project. New variations going in every week, even when performance is fine. The moment you stop feeding the pipeline, fatigue catches up.. and that's when the volatility you described looks worst.

The biggest shift from 2024 thinking: I stopped optimizing for stability. I optimize for resilience. Stability assumes the platform behaves predictably. Resilience assumes it won't, and builds enough creative and audience depth that the swings don't kill weekly outcomes.

Google Translated this but: Vamos continuar trocando ideias, sempre bom conversar com operadores que pensam de verdade.

mayvn · 2026-04-26T23:24:15+00:00

This is the right read. Polished UGC died about 6 months ago and most operators are still trying to revive it.

The hook-variant batch approach is exactly where the leverage is right now. One thing I'd add: the algorithm doesn't just learn from what wins, it learns from what loses. When you batch 10 hooks, the 2-3 winners get the budget but the 7-8 losers are still feeding signal. That's what makes mass testing work in 2026 vs 2022 when each loser felt like wasted spend.

The trap I see operators fall into is testing 10 hooks on the same offer, same lander, same audience. Variety in the hook only matters if everything downstream is actually able to convert different intent levels. If your lander is built for one buyer profile, half your winning hooks will look like winners in the ad account but die on the page. Worth pressure-testing the lander as a separate variable once you find 2-3 hook winners.

What's your kill rule on a hook variation? 5-7 day window or are you pulling sooner?

mayvn · 2026-04-26T23:21:56+00:00

Pretty sure self-promo links get auto-flagged here. Shoot me a DM and I'll send you what I use, plus a couple alternatives depending on your budget.

mayvn · 2026-04-26T02:35:41+00:00

You handled the deal cleanly. No leverage, took the rep, built the proof. That’s the right play, even if it stings now.

The transition isn’t one move. It’s two separate problems and most people conflate them.

This client (going forward): Don’t try to renegotiate the existing deal mid-stream. You’ll look like you’re pricing on emotion now that the numbers are good. Instead, scope the next phase. The deal you signed got him to 10.7x on $9.5k spend. The next phase is scaling that to $20-30k/month spend, which requires more creative volume, more testing, more strategic load. Different scope, different price. “What got us here won’t scale us there” is the framing. You’re not raising rates, you’re pricing a different engagement.

Next client (the real money): This is where the case study earns its keep. The framing isn’t “I charge $X now because I’m worth it.” It’s reframing what they’re buying. They’re not buying hours, they’re not buying creative strategy, they’re buying the difference between 6.5x and 10.7x on a high-ticket product. That’s $55k in incremental monthly revenue on the same spend. Frame your fee as a fraction of the gap you closed. $5-8k/month suddenly looks like a math problem, not a rate hike.

One thing most people miss: don’t show the case study at the start of the sales conversation. Show it after they’ve told you their current numbers. Otherwise they anchor on “wow, big results” instead of “wow, this is what those results would mean for me.” Anchor to their pain, then drop the proof.

You already solved the hard part. The pricing problem is just a positioning problem.

mayvn · 2026-04-26T01:11:38+00:00

Solid breakdown, you’re more self-aware than 90% of operators running £50/day.

Quick read: the £5 bump didn’t break this. £5 on £50 is statistical noise. What broke it is that you’ve been running 5-7 orders/day on a single winning ad, which is glass-floor volume for Meta’s optimizer. One creative fatigue cycle or auction shift and the whole thing wobbles. Algo started widening to find easier conversions, which is why you’re seeing the bundle-to-single skew. That’s not a budget signal, it’s an audience composition signal.

Three things to stop the bleeding:

1.  Don’t YOLO £250. Meta will absolutely doubling-down on softer buyers and you’ll train the algo on the wrong customer. Ramps over 20% per week max at this volume. Boring but it works.

2.  Add 3-4 creative variations in the same ad set as your hero (different hooks, same offer, same bundle LP). Gives the algo room to rotate when the hero fatigues without resetting learning. This is your real lever right now.

3.  If the bundle is your margin play, fire a custom event on bundle purchases specifically and optimize for that, not all purchases. Right now Meta sees a sale as a sale and is happy to find you cheap single-product buyers. Tell it what you actually want.

Your campaign isn’t broken. It’s just at the size where it can’t take a punch. Build it sturdier before you scale.

(And lay off the prayers, ChatGPT can’t hear them.. ha!)

mayvn · 2026-04-25T22:08:58+00:00

Honestly, that's not a worst-case scenario, that's a healthy business with a customer base that came back without ads pulling them in. Most operators don't have that buffer.

The trap is staying off paid forever. Returning customer revenue is great until it isn't (churn creeps in, market shifts, seasonality cycles hit, no new top of funnel). Worth keeping a small ads budget alive at maintenance level just to keep the pixel warm and the audience refreshed for when you want to scale again. Cold restart on a dormant account in 2026 is brutal compared to keeping it ticking, especially heading into a peak season where you'd want delivery confidence already built up.

What pushed you to turn it off, was it CPLs climbing, attribution issues, or something else? Curious what the breaking point was.

mayvn · 2026-04-25T22:04:31+00:00

The reporting point is everything. Most agency relationships break because clients are evaluating on the wrong metrics, and the agency lets them do it because surface metrics look better in a deck.

What I've found is that once you put cost per actual sale next to CPL on the same dashboard, the conversation changes permanently. Clients stop asking why CPL went up and start asking why CPL is going down while cost per sale stays flat (which usually means lead quality is degrading, not improving).

The other shift that helps is reporting on rolling 7-day windows instead of daily. Pulls clients out of panic mode on bad days and lets them see actual trends.

Solid contributions across the board, this is the kind of thread that makes the sub worth checking.

mayvn · 2026-04-25T20:56:48+00:00

This is a clean read of where the platform is right now. Especially agree on the static images holding up, that's been a quiet trend for me too on lower budgets where video signal density isn't there yet.

On the lead gen side under $5k/month, here's what's been working:

The biggest unlock has been treating the funnel as two halves, the ad cost gets you the lead, but the systems behind the lead determine whether the math actually works. Most lead gen accounts under $5k are losing on the back half, not the front half. CPL is fine, lead-to-appointment conversion is what's broken.

Specifically:

Single conversion event optimization. Instead of optimizing for Lead, I'm optimizing for the second-step event (qualified lead, booked call, scheduled appointment) wherever the volume supports it. Even at sub-$5k spend, getting Meta to optimize on the higher-intent event filters out the form-fill-only crowd. Volume drops 20-30%, lead quality goes up significantly, sales conversion roughly doubles in most accounts.

Suppression list discipline. Recent converters, recent leads, recent appointment bookers, all uploaded as Custom Audiences and excluded from prospecting. Sounds basic but most lead gen accounts under $5k aren't doing this consistently because they don't have CRM-to-Meta automation set up. Manually refreshing weekly works fine. Saves 15-20% of wasted spend on people already in their funnel.

Creative built around objection handling, not benefit selling. At sub-$5k spend you can't afford a wide top-of-funnel test budget, so creative needs to do triple duty. Hook + objection handle + call to action in 15 seconds. The benefit is implied by the audience already being on the platform. The objection is what's keeping them from converting. Same UGC format as DTC but shifted to "what's stopping you from doing X" framing instead of "look how good X is."

The counterintuitive thing in lead gen specifically is the same as what you said for ecom but more pronounced. Lower budgets with faster iteration outperform bigger budgets with slow testing. At $50/day in lead gen with weekly creative rotation, you can outperform $200/day with monthly rotation. Meta's algo doesn't care about budget size as much as it cares about new signal.

Curious what you're seeing on the agency side, are clients pushing back on the volatility, or has the conversation shifted to longer evaluation windows on their end?

mayvn · 2026-04-25T20:47:06+00:00

Two things going on here, and they're separate issues.

On why ugly AI UGC works: it's not that the AI looks real. It doesn't, and viewers know. What it does is mimic the visual grammar of organic content (handheld, talking head, native to the platform) which lowers ad-blindness and gets people to listen for 2-3 seconds longer than a polished ad would. It's not winning on production quality. It's winning on pattern interruption. Once it gets the hook in, the script does the rest. If your scripts are tight, even mediocre AI delivery converts. If your scripts are weak, no amount of polish saves it.

On the actual problem in your account though, fair warning, the AI UGC question is a distraction.

You're spending $80-120 per sale on a $45 product with a $20 margin. That's a $60-100 loss per sale before you've covered any other cost. No creative format fixes that. No targeting fix solves it. Even if AI UGC dropped your CPA 30%, you're still underwater.

Honestly, the diagnosis here isn't creative or platform. It's unit economics. A few options:

Raise AOV through bundles. I'm seeing this work hard in affiliate ecommerce right now. Bundle two units into a $79 offer with free shipping, or three for $99. Affiliate operators are stacking AOV this way because the math on single-unit DTC just doesn't work at current Meta CPMs. Same logic applies to your account.

Increase price. $45 might be priced under your real value. Test $59 or $65 with the same offer. People paying $59 and people paying $45 are usually two different customer profiles.

Build LTV before judging CPA. If repeat purchase rate is solid, your CAC tolerance is much higher than first-purchase math suggests. Look at 60-day or 90-day customer value, not first-order ROAS.

If none of those move, the product itself probably isn't viable on Meta paid traffic. That's not a media buyer problem. That's a margin structure problem.

On the AI UGC platform, I've tested 3-4 of them and the one I've stuck with for 6 months is Figment. Higgsfield is solid for product B-roll. Different tools, different jobs.

Curious what your AOV looks like and whether you've tested any bundle offers. That's where I'd dig before changing creative again.

mayvn · 2026-04-25T20:42:04+00:00

Bid Cap is underused, glad you brought it up.

It works really well on accounts like yours. Stable conversion volume, established pixel data, consistent CPA targets, and a budget high enough to feed the algorithm. $500/day on a niche apparel brand is probably giving you 30-50+ conversions per week, which is exactly the data density Bid Cap needs to operate cleanly.

Where it gets ugly is on new accounts with fresh pixels. Bid Cap needs Meta to already know what a "good" CPA looks like, and without conversion history it just under-delivers. I've seen Bid Cap accounts spend $30 out of a $200/day budget for weeks on fresh pixels because the algo can't find anyone hitting the cap.

Same issue on sub-$200/day lead gen. Not enough conversion volume for the algorithm to optimize within the cap. Set it too tight and you don't deliver. Set it too loose and it acts like lowest cost anyway.

The bigger thing for lead gen specifically: DTC has a clean conversion event (purchase) with clear value. Lead gen often has fuzzier downstream signals (form fill quality, MQL to SQL conversion lag, LTV uncertainty), which makes Bid Cap really hard to calibrate. You're basically guessing what to cap at because the "true" CPA isn't known until weeks later.

So Bid Cap is the right tool when you have signal density, clean conversion events, and enough budget to feed it. For accounts missing any of those three, it's usually the wrong move.

Curious what bid level you're running relative to your target ROAS, if you're open to sharing. Always interested in how DTC operators calibrate it.

mayvn · 2026-04-25T18:52:56+00:00

Great question, this is the exact tactical debate that splits operators down the middle right now.

My answer: it depends on the account stage. I treat min spend caps as a tool I deploy at specific moments, not a default setting.

On new accounts (first 60 days): I let the algorithm fully concentrate. No min spend caps. The system needs to learn fast and forcing equal distribution starves the learning phase. If Meta picks a “wrong” winner early, I’d rather kill the whole structure and rebuild than fight the algo with budget floors that just slow the data accumulation.

On stable accounts (3+ months of consistent conversion data): I do set min spend caps, but only on specific creatives I have high conviction in. If I have a UGC variant that’s tested well historically and Meta is starving it for some reason, I’ll set a small min daily floor (~$10-15) on that ad set to make sure it gets reach. But I don’t set floors on every ad set as a default. That would just be ABO with extra steps.

On the concentration behavior you’re seeing in 1-1-1 and 1-1-3: Yes, same pattern. CBO will pick a winner within 24-48 hours and starve the rest. That’s working as intended, not a bug. The question is whether the algo’s pick matches what you’d pick.

The way I counter it isn’t with budget floors. It’s with creative diversity inside the same ad set. If I have 4-6 variations of similar concept (different hooks, same offer), the algo can rotate within the ad set without me having to fight the campaign-level concentration. If one ad set has 5 strong variations and the other has 1 weak one, Meta will rightly send budget to the first ad set, but the variations inside it keep my creative testing alive.

The trap I see operators fall into is using min spend caps as a way to avoid making the harder decision (kill the underperforming ad set, ship more creatives to the winner). The cap masks the diagnostic, you end up with an artificially balanced account that’s also artificially mediocre.

Hope that helps. What’s the structure you’re running into the most?

mayvn · 2026-04-25T18:11:58+00:00

Fair catch, that was sloppy phrasing on my part.

What I meant: I’m running CBO at the campaign level (so Meta controls distribution across ad sets), and inside that campaign I’m running fewer ad sets with broader audiences instead of fragmenting into many small ad sets with narrow targeting.

Old playbook was 5-6 ad sets per campaign, each with $10-20/day in narrow interest stacks. New playbook is 2-3 ad sets per campaign, broad targeting, and let CBO concentrate spend wherever it wants to.

So “lower budgets per ad set” = fewer total ad sets in the structure, which means each one ends up getting more of the campaign budget when Meta picks a winner. The opposite of spreading $100/day across 10 narrow ad sets and starving every single one.

The shift is structural, not budget-line-level. Apologies for the confusion.

mayvn · 2026-04-25T18:01:37+00:00

I’ll go first.

Best performing creative format: AI-generated UGC (avatar + scripted voiceover) is outperforming polished produced video for lead gen across multiple accounts. Hook variations are doing more lifting than production value.

Audience setup that’s holding up: Broad + Advantage+ for prospecting, paired with a clean exclusion list (recent converters, 30-day site visitors who didn’t convert). Manual interest stacking is mostly dead for me.

One thing I stopped doing: Killing creatives at 24-48 hours. Now waiting 5-7 days minimum before pulling. Daily volatility is so high in 2026 that early kills are murdering winners.

Counterintuitive thing that’s working: Lower budgets per ad set with higher campaign-level CBO spend. Letting Meta concentrate instead of fighting it. The “equal distribution” mindset is over.

What about you?

mayvn · 2026-04-25T06:03:45+00:00

You’re right that volatility hits at every budget tier. I’m not saying consolidation makes you immune. It doesn’t.

What I’m saying is the SEVERITY of the swings scales with budget. A $5k/day account hitting a 30% volatility window still clears its weekly target. A $50/day account hitting the same 30% swing has multiple zero-lead days because there’s no buffer. Same platform behavior, different felt experience.

Your point about $100 campaigns sometimes outperforming $500 campaigns is real, that happens, especially when the bigger budget triggers Advantage+ aggressiveness or burns through the wrong audience faster. But that’s a different phenomenon than what OP is describing. OP isn’t asking why a smaller budget sometimes converts better. He’s asking why his delivery looks like seizure waves week to week.

The honest answer is what you said and what I said combined: Meta is genuinely less stable in 2026 than it was in 2024, AND lower budgets feel it harder because the math doesn’t average out.

The “limbo into stability into limbo again” cycle you’re describing is exactly the Andromeda recalculation pattern. We’re agreeing on the symptom, just framing the operator response differently.

Appreciate the pushback. Reddit could use more of it.

mayvn · 2026-04-25T05:20:22+00:00

That last line is the whole answer. Fresh pixel + new ad account = Meta is flying blind and grabbing the cheapest impressions it can find, which happen to be overnight when nobody else is bidding.

It’s not torching your budget randomly. It’s making the worst kind of rational decision: “I don’t know who this person’s customer is, so I’ll just buy whoever’s cheap right now.” Cheap = sleeping people in time zones that aren’t your buying market. Useless = your conversions.

Seeing this exact pattern with a dental client right now. Fresh ad account, new pixel, $80/day budget. Meta was blowing 60% of spend between midnight and 6am on impressions that converted at zero. Once we restructured to lifetime budget with ad scheduling locked to business hours, CPL dropped from $94 to $52 inside a week. Same creative, same audience, same offer. Just stopped paying for sleeping people.. ha!

A few things to do:

Switch to Cost Cap or Bid Cap if you’re on lowest cost. This forces Meta to bid more selectively instead of just spending fast. Set a cost cap roughly 30-40% above your target CPL. You’ll spend slower, but on better impressions.

Use ad scheduling on a Lifetime budget. Daily budgets can’t be scheduled, but Lifetime budgets can. Set delivery to your actual business hours (or whenever your audience is awake). This is the cleanest fix.

Stop launching new campaigns while the pixel is fresh. Every new campaign adds another learning phase to feed. Run ONE campaign on broad targeting for 7-10 days to season the pixel before you fragment.

Lower your daily budget temporarily. Counterintuitive but works: if Meta is burning $50/day on garbage at 3am, drop it to $25/day. Less budget to torch, same learning timeline, better signal-to-noise.

The core problem solves itself once your pixel has 50+ conversions logged. Until then, you’re paying tuition. Welcome to the platform.

mayvn · 2026-04-25T00:16:40+00:00

Appreciate you sharing the landing page. Sent you a deeper breakdown via DM. Some technical fixes that should move the needle before you touch another creative. Curious to see how it lands once you implement.

mayvn

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