Facebook Ads Not Working? 9 Things to Check Before You Panic

If your Facebook ads are not working, first identify what stopped: delivery, website visits, recorded conversions or actual sales. These are different problems. Check payment and delivery errors, the destination page and tracking before changing your targeting or creative.

Facebook ads getting clicks but no conversions: where to look

An example: clicks are not the whole diagnosis

Imagine 120 link clicks, 75 landing-page views, eight checkout starts and no purchases. Those are illustrative figures. First verify whether the store really has zero orders. Then test the mobile checkout and inspect the difference between clicks and visits. Do not label the creative a winner solely because it generated clicks, or blame the landing page without checking whether the ad attracted suitable buyers.

If you're already running campaigns and want help interpreting your own numbers, Breakthrough Sessions provide personal feedback and a testing plan. You or your team implement the changes.

When to act immediately and when to wait

Fix a broken destination, payment failure, incorrect conversion event or uncontrolled spend promptly. Waiting will not repair those problems. If the customer journey works and only performance has fluctuated, review a period long enough to reflect your usual sales cycle and conversion volume. One expensive day is rarely enough evidence for a complete rebuild.

Record recent changes and compare like-for-like periods. Your loss limit still applies while you collect evidence. There is no universal 48-hour waiting rule that overrides an identifiable fault.

1. Your Tracking Is Broken

This is check #1 because it's the most common and most damaging issue, and the one that makes every other problem impossible to diagnose. If your Meta Pixel isn't firing correctly, or your conversion events aren't being recorded, the algorithm is optimizing blind. It doesn't know what success looks like to you, it doesn't know what actions people need to take, and cannot find more people who are likely to complete this action.

How to check: Open Meta Events Manager (business.facebook.com → Events Manager). Look at your Pixel's recent activity. You should see events (PageView, AddToCart, Purchase, Lead, etc.) firing in real-time or within the last few hours. If the last activity was days ago, or if key events are missing, your tracking is broken.

Common tracking problems:

Your Pixel code was removed during a website update. This happens more often than you'd think, especially on platforms like Shopify, WordPress, or Wix where theme updates or plugin changes can break the Pixel integration.

Conversion events are set up incorrectly. You might be tracking PageViews but not Purchases. Or your Purchase event fires on the wrong page (like a product page instead of the order confirmation page). Check that each event fires on the correct page by using the Meta Pixel Helper Chrome extension.

iOS privacy settings are blocking data. After Apple's iOS 14.5+ changes, a significant portion of conversions aren't reported. This doesn't mean your ads aren't working. It means Meta can't see all the results. Check whether your browser and server-side event setup is complete and whether both sources count the same purchase only once. Missing data is not a fixed percentage across accounts. For Pixel + CAPI setup, follow Step 1 in how to run Facebook ads.

The fix: Verify your Pixel is active in Events Manager. Install the Meta Pixel Helper Chrome extension and visit key pages on your site (product page, cart page, checkout, thank-you page) to confirm each event fires correctly. If you don't have Conversions API set up, prioritize it immediately! It's the single biggest tracking upgrade you can make in 2026.

---

2. Your Creative Is Fatigued

This is the #1 reason previously successful campaigns start declining. Creative fatigue happens when your audience has seen your ad too many times. They stop noticing it, stop clicking, and start scrolling past, or worst case scenario, they "hide" your ads and mark them as spam.

How to check: In Ads Manager, look at your Frequency metric. Frequency = impressions ÷ reach, meaning the average number of times each person has seen your ad. Review frequency alongside response, acquisition cost and recent changes over the same period. Rising frequency with weaker results is a reason to investigate fatigue, not proof on its own. There is no universal frequency cutoff for every audience.

Why it happens: Back in 2021, you could run the same ad for months before seeing fatigue. Today, I've seen ads start fatiguing within a week in competitive industries. The combination of smaller audiences and higher ad volumes means people see your ads more frequently than ever.

The fix: Replace your creative. But not by just tweaking the headline, genuinely new creative concepts and new creative angles — see the Facebook ad creative framework for the 5-act structure, four categories, and testing discipline that produces them consistently. For a structured account review beyond creative, use the Facebook ads audit framework. Different hook, different visual, different angle. I recommend launching 3-4 new creative concepts every 1-2 weeks to stay ahead of fatigue. Your best-performing ad is always temporary. Build a system for continuous creative production. For creative structure and hooks, see how to run Facebook ads (creative step). For vertical format specs (Stories/Reels), see how to create Instagram Story ads. For placement strategy and when Instagram's Promote button is the wrong tool, see the Instagram ads setup guide. For how targeting interacts with creative, see Facebook ads targeting.

---

3. Your Campaign Structure Is Fragmented

I see this in almost every account audit: 15 campaigns, 40 ad sets, 200 ads — all competing against each other. The advertiser thinks more campaigns = more coverage. In reality, fragmentation = worse performance.

How to check: Count your active campaigns and ad sets. If you have more than 3-5 active campaigns, and if any single ad set is spending less than $20/day, you likely have a fragmentation problem.

Why it hurts performance: Each ad set needs approximately 20-50 conversion events per week to exit the learning phase. If your total daily budget is $100 and you're splitting it across 10 ad sets, each ad set gets $10/day — which might only generate 1-2 conversions per week. The algorithm never learns, performance stays inconsistent, and you blame "the algorithm" when the problem is your structure.

The fix: Consolidate. Most businesses should have 1-3 campaigns: one broad prospecting campaign (70-80% of budget), one retargeting campaign (15-25%), and optionally one testing campaign (5-10%). Within each campaign, use fewer ad sets with broader targeting. Let Meta's algorithm do the targeting work through your creative, it's better at it than manual interest-based targeting in 2026.

Also confirm you are running real Ads Manager campaigns, not boosted posts. Boosting fragments learning and hides real conversion optimization; see Facebook ads vs boosted posts.

---

4. You're Optimizing for the Wrong Event

This is subtle but devastating. If you tell Meta to optimize for "link clicks," the algorithm finds people who click. Not people who buy. Not people who submit forms. People who click. Those are often very different audiences.

How to check: Open your campaign settings and check the "Optimization for Ad Delivery" field. If it says "Link Clicks" or "Landing Page Views" when your actual goal is purchases or leads, this is your problem.

Why it matters: The algorithm optimizes exactly for what you tell it. If you optimize for clicks, you get clickers — many of whom have no intention of buying. If you optimize for purchases, you get buyers. The difference in conversion rate can be 5-10x.

The fix: Always optimize for the event closest to revenue that you can still generate 50+ of per week. For e-commerce, optimize for Purchase (or AddToCart if you can't get 50 purchases/week). For lead gen, optimize for Lead (or a custom conversion for qualified leads if volume supports it).

I once worked with a client whose video ads were consistently underperforming. When we dug deeper, we realized they were optimizing for purchases when they had a 30-day sales cycle. No creative in the world could fix that mismatch. We switched to optimizing for a higher-funnel event, the qualified lead, and performance improved dramatically.

---

5. Your Landing Page Is Killing Conversions

Your ads might be working perfectly, great CTR, strong engagement, people are clicking. But then they land on your website and leave without converting. The ad isn't the problem, but the landing page is.

How to check: Compare your Link CTR (how many people click your ad) to your Conversion Rate (how many of those clickers actually convert). If your CTR is healthy (above 1.5%) but your CVR is below 1%, the disconnect is on your landing page.

Also check your Click-to-PageView ratio in Ads Manager. If you're getting 100 link clicks but only 60-70 page views, 30-40% of people who clicked are bouncing before your page even loads. That's almost always a page speed problem.

Common landing page killers:

Slow load time can stop visitors reaching your offer. Test the destination on a real mobile connection and use PageSpeed Insights to investigate loading problems. A lab score alone does not establish the cause of lost sales.

Message mismatch. Your ad promises "50% off summer collection" but the landing page shows your full-price homepage. The visitor expected a specific offer and got a generic experience. The landing page must deliver exactly what the ad promised.

Too many choices. If you send people to your homepage with 50 products and 12 navigation links, they're paralyzed. Send them to a specific product page or a focused landing page with one clear action.

No trust signals. Especially for newer brands; if there are no reviews, no social proof, no return policy, and no security indicators, people don't trust you with their credit card.

The fix: Match your landing page to your ad promise. One ad = one specific landing page with one clear CTA. Speed up your page (compress images, reduce scripts). Add social proof (reviews, testimonials, trust badges). Test your page on mobile, over 80% of Meta traffic is mobile.

---

6. Your Audience Is Too Narrow (Or Too Broad)

Targeting is the most over-obsessed-over variable in Meta ads, but it does matter at the extremes.

Too narrow: If your potential reach shows under 100,000 people, the algorithm doesn't have enough people to optimize with. It's like fishing in a puddle: costs spike, delivery becomes inconsistent, and the learning phase never completes.

Too broad without good creative: If you target "everyone ages 18-65" but your creative is generic, the algorithm doesn't have clear signals about who to show your ad to. Broad targeting works brilliantly; but only when your creative does the targeting work by clearly identifying who the ad is for.

How to check: In Ads Manager, look at your ad set's estimated audience size. Under 100,000 is concerning for most businesses. Also check your Audience Saturation metric, if it's above 70-80%, you've exhausted your audience and need to expand.

The fix: For most businesses in 2026, I recommend broad targeting (wide age range, minimal interest restrictions, let the creative do the targeting) combined with strong creative that clearly identifies your audience in the first second. The algorithm is better at finding buyers through creative signals than through interest-based targeting. If you've been stacking 15 interest layers, try removing them and going broader. If your default cold audience is still a 1% lookalike of website visitors, Facebook lookalike audiences in 2026 explains why that is often the first test to run.

---

7. Your Budget Is Too Low for Your Optimization Event

If you're optimizing for purchases and your average cost per purchase is $30, but your daily budget is $15 — the algorithm literally can't generate enough data to learn. You might see one purchase every two days, or none for three days, then two in one day. It looks random because the algorithm is starved of data.

How to check: Divide your daily budget by your average cost per conversion. If the result is less than 1, you're under-budgeted. Meta recommends generating at least 50 conversion events per week per ad set for stable optimization. If your cost per conversion is $25, that means you need $25 × 50 ÷ 7 = $178/day per ad set.

The fix: If you can't afford enough budget for purchase optimization, move up the funnel. Optimize for AddToCart (which happens more frequently and costs less per event) until you build enough data. Or consolidate your ad sets so budget concentrates into fewer, larger ad sets. A single ad set spending $50/day will outperform five ad sets spending $10/day each. For how small budgets should think about structure, learning windows, and creative before you declare Meta "broken," read the small business Meta ads strategy.

For typical CPM/CPC/CPL ranges by industry, see how much Facebook ads cost. If the primary symptom is specifically high CPM, the 5-root-cause diagnostic is here.

---

8. You Scaled Too Fast

You found a winner. It was doing $50/day at 3x ROAS. Exciting! So you bumped it to $200/day overnight. And performance collapsed. This is one of the most common and most preventable Facebook ads problems.

Why it happens: When you dramatically increase budget, the algorithm has to re-enter the learning phase. It needs to find 4x more people to show your ad to, and those additional people might not be as receptive as your original audience. The algorithm was optimized for $50/day delivery — at $200/day, it's essentially starting over.

How to check: If your costs spiked within 24-48 hours of a budget increase, this is likely the cause. Look for the "Learning" or "Learning Limited" indicator in your ad set status.

The fix: Choose a controlled budget change, a review point based on conversion volume and a maximum acceptable loss. A 15–20% step can be a working example, but no percentage guarantees stable performance or prevents re-entry into learning. See the scaling decision framework.

---

9. Your Offer Isn't Compelling Enough

If you've checked tracking, creative, structure, optimization event, landing page, audience, budget, and scaling, and everything is technically correct, the problem might be the most fundamental one: your offer isn't strong enough.

No amount of advertising sophistication can sell a product nobody wants, at a price nobody will pay, with a value proposition nobody believes.

How to check: This is the hardest one to diagnose objectively because it's emotional. It's your product, your business. But look at the data honestly. If you're getting decent traffic to a well-built landing page and nobody is converting, the market might be telling you something about your offer.

Signs your offer needs work:

High CTR (people are curious) but zero conversions (nobody buys). The ad does its job, but the product/price/offer doesn't close.

High add-to-cart but low purchase rate. People want the product but something stops them at checkout; usually price, shipping cost, or lack of trust.

Good performance on discounted offers but zero results at full price. The product has appeal, but not at the current price point.

The fix: Test different offers before blaming the ads. Add a discount or free shipping and see if conversions jump. If they do, you have a pricing/offer problem, not an advertising problem. Simplify your value proposition. Add social proof. Remove friction from the buying process. Sometimes the best "ad optimization" is improving what you're actually selling.

---

The Diagnostic Flowchart: Where to Start

If you're not sure which of these 9 issues is your problem, follow this decision tree:

Step 1: Check Events Manager → Is your Pixel firing? Are conversion events recording? If NO → Fix tracking first (Issue #1). Everything else is unreliable until tracking works.

Step 2: Check Frequency alongside response and acquisition cost → Are repeated exposures rising while results worsen? Investigate creative fatigue alongside other changes (Issue #2).

Step 3: Check campaign count → More than 5 active campaigns? Ad sets spending less than $20/day each? If YES → Consolidate (Issue #3).

Step 4: Check optimization event → Are you optimizing for clicks when you want purchases? If YES → Change to the right event (Issue #4).

Step 5: Check CTR vs CVR → High CTR but low conversion rate? If YES → Fix your landing page (Issue #5).

Step 6: If none of the above → Check audience size, budget adequacy, recent scaling changes, and finally your offer itself (Issues #6-9).

If your honest answer is that you've run out of ideas and need help, think carefully about whether that help should be an agency, a consultant, or DIY — here's the framework.

---

Need someone to do this for you? Hire me as your consultant →