Facebook Ads get sales the first 3 days but then they die

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Topic summary

Issue: Facebook Ads produce sales for ~3 days, then performance drops sharply.

Likely causes discussed:

  • Algorithm dynamics and volatility: Early “cheap” results, followed by natural performance decay; expect day-to-day swings.
  • Ad fatigue and audience saturation: Repeated exposure reduces engagement; overly narrow or overlapping audiences limit scale.
  • Targeting and objectives: Mismatched objectives (e.g., top‑of‑funnel view-content) can dilute purchases; low relevance score increases costs and reduces delivery.
  • Budget and competition: Budgets too low limit reach/frequency; market competition can suppress results.
  • Landing page issues: Poor on-site conversion undermines ad performance despite clicks.

Actionable suggestions:

  • Continuously test new audiences, placements, and creatives to combat fatigue.
  • Focus on purchase conversion campaigns when sales are the goal; avoid audience overlap.
  • Optimize landing pages and adjust budgets to maintain reach and frequency.
  • Diagnose what changed between the initial success and the drop.

Concrete outcome shared: One user turned off top‑of‑funnel “view content” campaigns and ran purchase conversion campaigns, increasing orders to about 10/day.

Other notes: One reply cautions about potential account bans if careless; a few posts include promotional links/tools. One participant suspects Facebook “hooks” users with early sales—this remains an unverified opinion. Status: No single fix; ongoing optimization recommended.

Summarized with AI on December 14. AI used: gpt-5.
5

Hello @Dharma91 ,

Here are some of the reasons why spending a lot on Facebook ad campaigns won’t result in better sales.

  1. You don’t have enough targeted audience.
    Make sure to target the right audience so o that they can receive the most relevant ads. You can target your ads to three types of audiences when you advertise on Facebook: saved audiences, custom audiences, and lookalike audiences.
  2. Your targeting parameters need to optimize properly.
  3. Your Facebook users/friends aren’t shoppers.
  4. You aren’t segmenting ad campaigns. Segmenting helps to target multiple customer segments at the same time with different social media platforms.
  5. Low relevance score
    There are three key advantages of a higher relevance score that advertisers will enjoy:

Reaching more people for less money
Helping advertisers test ad creative options before running a campaign
Optimizing campaigns in progress
Facebook uses its Relevance Score scale (1-10) to rank ads based on how engaging and interesting your ads are to your selected audience. The higher your score, the better. 6. Your ad set budget is too low
If you go too low, this could mean you’re not getting the reach you want to see.

  1. Your audience is too small
    It’s better to put more money into your audience rather than targeting irrelevant audience members just to increase your audience size.
  2. You missed the mark for your target audience
  3. Overlapping audiences
    If you’re targeting the same audience with multiple ads, this can drastically reduce deliverability. Not to mention, it will also raise your costs!

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