New Ecommerce Sellers Lost on Meta/Google Ads
First-time ecommerce advertisers are overwhelmed by ad setup complexities, conflicting advice (high budgets vs. targeting), and a lack of clarity on ad performance metrics. They grapple with platform choices (Meta vs. Google), budget allocation, and understanding how to achieve profitability, often feeling lost in the 'black box' of ad algorithms.
SOURCES (60)
“I find that educational content does better than hey buy now. That’s the major point of this note.”
“Do you purely dropship a generic product or did you put together a brand with clean packaging, upsell offers, local delivery capabilities using 3PL”
“Curious what everyone is seeing work right now. There’s so much conflicting information around Meta ads that I thought it would be useful to get a thread going where people can share what’s currently working for them. Would love to see what patterns show up between different accounts. If you’re comfortable sharing: - Product/niche - Monthly ad spend - AOV - CPA/ROAS - Campaign structure (ABO, CBO, Advantage+ Shopping, etc.) - Account age - How many creatives you’re testing - Broad vs interests/l”
“This thinking is archaic. Facebook has an entire algorithm dedicated to the order users see ads and meta knows which ads serve which part of the funnel. Separating campaigns into different adsets or campaigns fragments data and harms learning. Facebook advertising is a data quality race. Don't shoot yourself in the foot by destroying the data.”
“TV ads and no website? It really is wild it there. Let’s assume I want what you have, I go to Google and… nothing. Zilch. Zip. Build your website now. If I saw a TV ad and went looking for you I’d think you were in a different country or a scam if you didn’t have a website. We build websites for small companies, literally plumbers, startups, accountants - we always say having a website might not get you extra business, but not having one will lose you the business.”
“For the people here running FB at serious daily spend on agency ad accounts (not personal BMs): how do you actually vet the providers before you trust them with budget? The market's gotten crowded and the quality is all over the place. A few things I've noticed dealing with it: - The fee model tells you a lot. "0% fee" providers make their money somewhere, usually a spend markup or a cut you don't see, so 0% isn't automatically the better deal. I'd rather know exact”
“Depends how much revenue you’re doing and overall ad performance. If your ads are generally performing well I would say it’s less needed at smaller levels. Since you’re moving to Shopify plus I’m assuming your on the higher end.”
“Sort of, I tried different creatives. For the same ad strategy, Facebook basically started to charge me 2x starting Jan 2026.”
“I would see that as a result of the mass and wide adoption of meta ads as a main driver for cold prospects which is driving prices higher and higher. As a result, as an e-commerce store owners, we have to keep on increasing our offer value and LTV to stay within profit. Since mid 2025, did you improved your offer? Product? Marketing?”
“I think the ui is thrash and there has to be a better way of browsing ads submitted by /u/xaonan [link] [comments]”
“Started running ads new campaign 66 spent 246 impressions 199 reach why is this the campaign is 2 days old but I’ve had campaigns in past do 1.5k with 50 in a day I’m pretty new to meta ads and I’m looking for advice submitted by /u/OkPractice5958 [link] [comments]”
“Here's my situation. I am potentially going to start a US national Facebook campaign for a local services franchise company. There are hundreds of franchises across the country, but there are also large areas geographically (like the Phoenix or Spokane Comscore markets for example) where there are very few dealers and the dealers that are there would not be willing to travel as far as a Comscore market would target for them. Knowing that the visible mapping function caps out at 25 line items”
“Before my ad, I was getting on average 1.5K views on reels, many followers a day. I had a 7 day ad, the CTR was good and I got quite a bit of engagement but now that it’s finished, my views and engagement is really low :( submitted by /u/sighqoticc [link] [comments]”
“So everyone talks about the 10-15% budget creative test campaign, then move the winning creative to the scaled campaign. But in andromeda age doesn’t any change to a campaign (except turning creative off) like adding a new creative trigger the whole ad set back into learning again? What’s the right process here? submitted by /u/crispy88 [link] [comments]”
“From what I've seen, most agencies don't manage everything from one magic tool. They use each ad platform for campaign changes because that's where you get the most control. Then they bring all the data into one dashboard for reporting. The biggest time saver is having a clear process with naming rules, reporting templates, and regular checklists. Once every campaign follows the same system, managing multiple clients becomes much less stressful.”
You could have paid adds they just run off on the side. No algorithms.
“the important part is buried in your own reply: the manual method didn't pull customers either. that's the actual answer. it's not an ads problem or a platform problem, it's that a sweets marketplace is competing with every local shop and everyone already selling sweets on facebook. what does a buyer get from you that they can't get there already? if there's no answer, no channel fixes it.”
“Hey everyone, I’d love to get some feedback from people experienced with Google Ads, especially Search campaigns. I’m currently managing a campaign for an antique/luxury watch repair business. The initial budget was quite small, but after optimizing the campaign, I managed to reduce the cost per acquisition by around 5x . Current results: Around €650 ad spend Around 35 conversions (lead forms) Landing page + tracking setup Campaign is targeting multiple luxury watch brands (Rolex, Omega, Breitli”
“How do you feel about the August 17th Google ads update to how CPA & tROAS will work? submitted by /u/saurabh10chahal [link] [comments]”
“Simply put, it doesn't matter how on top of your negative keywords you are even on a daily basis; for my SaaS company we have thousands upon thousands of negative keywords applied account-wide & even only running [Exact Match] keywords, the platform still allows a bunch of junk variations through. This also includes typos of words you've taken the time to negative out; given it's literally impossible to exclude every miss-spelled version of a word some random fool types into a se”
“Hey everyone, I launched a new Meta lead generation campaign yesterday for a premium wedding catering business. The campaign started at 12 AM with a ₹500/day budget (tight budget), using Instant Forms with 4-5 questions. The audience size was around 340K. By around 5 PM, Meta had already spent over ₹500, and I received only 1 lead, which turned out to be pretty irrelevant/low intent. Some stats at the time I paused it: Spend: ₹700 Impressions: 2,060 Reach: 1,448 CTR (All): 2.09% Link CTR: 1.02%”
“For context, this is how I used to run our Meta Ads account. We sell a €49/month SaaS product for local small businesses in Belgium. Our main conversion is starting a 14-day free trial. My previous setup worked pretty good, but I had about 8 campaigns, with multiple ad sets and different ads. (video, image, carousel) I shifted budgets based on performance of the campaigns/ad sets. Although overall performance was good, 2 problems with that setup: - I had days with very good performance”
“Guys, I'm honestly at my wits' end with Meta Ads and could really use some advice. My ad account was working perfectly fine. I had active campaigns, no policy violations, and everything was running normally. One day I decided to add some funds to my Meta Ads account. When I opened Billing, I noticed there was an outstanding balance, so I clicked **"Pay Due Amount."** I selected the **same verified card** that had already been added as my payment method. The second I clicked **P”
“CBO, $25/day, beauty niche. Last night one of my ads had $5 spend at a $15-17 CPM. Midnight hit and it burned through my entire daily budget almost instantly, CPM shot up to ~$158. Nothing changed. Same campaign, same creatives, same audience. The day before it was running completely fine. Is this a Meta bug or am I missing something? I'm still pretty new to this and I'd rather understand what actually happened before I start randomly touching things and make it worse. submitted by”
“Hi, Im relatively new to meta ads, I created my ad account two days ago. I’ve got my first campaign for my store up and running, I couldn’t help but notice that meta is showing my ad out to an audience other than what I selected. I put down 18-40 age range but for the past day it’s been showing in analytics that it’s sending traffic to 40-45, 65+ and showing it to my selected minimal in very limited numbers. Is there a reason for this? submitted by /u/CremeOk674 [link] [comment”
“Hi everyone. I literally opened my business a month ago and around that time launched my IG account. Before I could even start using it, I received a notification from IG that I have broken some of their rules and have been restricted from running ads. I clicked the appeal button but the app crashed and now it's gone. I've tried everything to no avail. Any thoughts on this? submitted by /u/throw-away25 [link] [comments]”
“Has anyone here managed to get consistently good results using ad scheduling (by day and/or hour)? I tried it years ago, but it’s been so long that I honestly don’t remember how it performed. My general impression is that it never really worked that well, but maybe some of you have had a different experience or have a tip worth sharing. The problem has always been the same for me, though: having to use a lifetime ad set budget instead of a daily budget . submitted by /u/mastropiero44”
“Hello guys. I have 2 campaigns. A testing campaign and a Cost Cap campaign. I want to move 2 of my winners from the testing campaign into my Cost Cap without losing on performance and social proof. Can I just duplicate it and check the 'Show existing reactions, comments and shares on new ads'? Or do I need to do what I've heard about in here with finding and copying the post ID? In which case could you guide me to do that? Thank you guys in advance! submitted by /u/vellac”
“Hey all, hoping someone can help understand this. I’ve got one ad set with 5 different creatives in it. I expected Meta to at least test each one a bit, but instead it’s dumped basically the entire budget into a single ad and left the other four with pennies (or literally $0) in spend. Same audience, same ad set, they’re all just sitting there. Is this normal delivery behavior or did I set something up wrong? A few things I’m trying to understand: Is Meta just picking an early “winner” and starv”
“Hi All, I am still in the early learning stages of Google Ads, but have recently added in a brand search campaign, so PMAX stops claiming cheap traffic and I can see what is really going on. Since establishing it works, I have now done 2 things. Added a brand exclusion to my PMAX campaign (my brand did not autopopulate so I have had to request my brand be made known). In this time, whilst I wait for brand to get added, I was thinking to add some brand negatives as the alternative to this being d”
“Hi All, I am still in the early learning stages of Google Ads, but have recently added in a brand search campaign, so PMAX stops claiming cheap traffic and I can see what is really going on. Since establishing it works, I have now done 2 things. Added a brand exclusion to my PMAX campaign (my brand did not autopopulate so I have had to request my brand be made known). In this time, whilst I wait for brand to get added, I was thinking to add some brand negatives as the alternative to this being d”
“Built a new TOF creative that’s preforming exceptionally well with significant spend. - $14 CPA - 3x ROAS Now I want to scale it with variations but I’m trying to do this correctly and not kill the original in the process. Curious on how some of you run ad variations tailored for ad fatigue post Andromeda. Same hook, different body. Does this work post Andromeda? Same visual hook, different copy overlay? How are you structuring variations of winners right now? For background, I run broad CBO, $5”
“Hey, everyone! Curious what your go-to placements are for maximizing conversion rates on Meta ads. I've always avoided the audience network, but recently, I've also started avoiding reels (at least for messaging ads). We kept getting messaging conversions that would later reply saying "they clicked it by accident." I didn't really get how this was happening so frequently until someone mentioned they click on ads by accident sometimes if the ad is between stories/reels. I re”
“We spent months testing creatives, audiences, and bid strategies trying to fix declining ROAS on a DTC brand. Every week, new hooks, new copy, new formats. Marginal improvements at best. Eventually we ran a full CRO audit on the landing page and found: Mobile load time was 4.8 seconds (industry benchmark is under 2) Product page had 3 competing CTAs No social proof above the fold Add-to-cart button wasn't visible without scrolling on most phones Fixed those 4 things. ROAS improved 31% withou”
“Hello guys! Been running ads for the last 2 days and noticed people have a hard time getting to my landing page even tho i have a fairly high CTR (link). Link clicks: 114 Website landing page views: 46 FYI i dont have alot of apps (4) and only 1 gif on my entire store. When i try an go onto 4G on my phone to see how fast it loads its completely fine (read a comment on here that said i could try that) What do i do? Goes from costing me $0.78 per link click to $1.93 submitted by /u/Ner”
“Dear community, I know this topic has been discussed many times before, but I’m honestly going crazy trying to figure this out. Over the past few days, I’ve been running purchase-optimized Meta campaigns across several countries, different time zones, and very different markets. What I’m consistently seeing is that the campaigns perform relatively well during the first 6–8 hours after launch, and then performance suddenly drops to almost zero . What doesn’t make sense to me is the usual explanat”
“I’m about to give up on Google Ads and my business. I recently started an e-commerce business and launched my Google Ads campaign on 28 June . I started getting impressions and clicks the same day, and I had my first conversion the following day. My daily budget of $50 was being fully utilised, and I was making a sale every two to three days. Unfortunately, my impressions and clicks have dropped significantly, and Google is no longer spending my full daily budget. For the past two days, it has o”
“Hi everyone, I’m planning to launch my first Google Ads Search campaign for a local B2B signage and banner printing business in Texas. Since I have a limited test budget, I want to make sure my strategy is airtight before I hit "publish". I would really appreciate your expert eyes on this structure: The Core Strategy & Value Prop Instead of just competing on "cheap printing," our angle is Business Visibility. We are targeting local SMEs (cafes, auto shops, clinics, retail”
“We are an automotive paint supplier that has recently listed our spray cans online. We custom make these cans to OEM paint codes. Currently we have 15,000 different codes uploaded. I originally ran a Pmax campaign. It worked well for about 4 days and then completely died. (Partly my fault I didn’t have dynamic conversion value set up. So it thought every conversion was worth $1) Tried running another and got heaps of traffic but no conversions at all. I also tried a google shopping ad but haven’”
“Hi All, The account that I ran used to have a very mature campaign that was consistently bringing in leads for the business at a conversion rate of +- 4%. I made a mistake in April by decreasing bids on specific days and that killed volume but kept a decent conversion rate. I tried a few things to get volume back but nothing seemed to work so I decided to duplicate the campaign and with that reset learnings. The first month of running this campaign the conversion rate and volume were the same as”
“Hey I just got the oppurtunity to work with a dropshipping stores meta ads. I'm still farely new to the space and this is a new vertical for me. If any of you vets or media buying killers have any advice or any experiences with ecom brands that would be willing to share anything I'd be happy to take any and all advice! Currently grinding out studying how to diagnose performance and building better campaigns submitted by /u/Spirit-777 [link] [comments]”
“I’ve been working with Meta Ads and Google Ads for several years, primarily on my own businesses and projects. My experience includes dropshipping campaigns, growing Facebook pages, page-like campaigns, engagement and awareness campaigns, and managing paid campaigns for some small business clients. However, most of my experience has come from working independently. I now want to take my performance marketing skills to a much deeper level by working on real campaigns with an experienced agency, m”
“Hey, I want to know how's your ads performing in this month of July for fashion brands. I've a fashion brand and my performance is going toooo horrible. Even new creatives aren't performing the way it should. Nothing is working. Nothingggg. Earlier, my performance was best but from last week its horrible. Everyone please share your experience 🙏 submitted by /u/Embarrassed_Duty_920 [link] [comments]”
“Why is google so annoying and always mix things up and aglomerate all kind of settings, i remember it when it was clean and easy .. I added 1 campaign and it totally screw me over, it linked all my 6 property each other, so all websites was sharing data So campaign goal was linked to all my others analytics tags.... Does anyone encounter this.... I removed all code, from the website and removed the campaigns, but why it linked all does anybody knows? I think there's glitches as they try to i”
“#google #googlemarketinglive #googleads #googleai Are AI-driven ads actually reliable? Why do the keywords recommended to me always seem so broad and unreliable? I suppose the AI still needs a long time to learn. submitted by /u/OnlyConcentrate9508 [link] [comments]”
“I'd be running ads to do conversions for a paid astrology/ tarot consult call of 9.99 USD for 10mins / 999 for 10 mins. Would be targeting people based in USA, UK, INDIA, Australia and Dubai. Very new to Shopify, would appreciate support from community, kindly drop suggestions. submitted by /u/saywhatIneedtosay26 [link] [comments]”
“Hi guys, I created my ad thru meta and scheduled it for 2 days with a budget of 150 QAR per day. Now im getting less reach and less messaging. What i did was i narrowed down my targeted region to a specific region. My audience advantage+ was off, and i only targeted arabic and men only for my ad. I hope anyone can help me submitted by /u/Madhouseee [link] [comments]”
“I just started my dropshipping business, and I'm looking for a Meta certified ad agency. I just need to open up the ad account, no management needed. Please let me know what agency have you guys worked with. submitted by /u/hydra-97 [link] [comments]”
“Not saying feed work is magic. Just saying the account got less chaotic once the inputs stopped fighting us. Image order was inconsistent, some titles were doing too much, a few variants were basically duplicates with different names. Once that got sorted, the ads stopped feeling like random product tiles thrown down a staircase. We’d already been using Marpipe on the creative side, which was solid, but the feed cleanup is what made the whole setup stop arguing with itself. submitted by &#”
“Currently running a cold conversion ad campaign , budget is somewhat lower than usual. $30/day but haven’t gotten any leads yet , no adds to carts or anything but getting decent link clicks. Just wondering if the landing page , offer , creative… This is one of my first ad campaigns , so would love some advice! submitted by /u/Minimum_Push_8842 [link] [comments]”
“Onboarded a new client, got this error when I tried to run ads Ad needs review: It may take up to 5-7 business days to resolve. (#2643186. just says "Delivery error "on any ad that I publish. Been like this for nearly one month! Ad account is healthy, no errors on the account, campaign, or ad set level Spoke to support 4 times already, they say it will be fixed, just wait the first two times. Then the second two times they passed me over to a dedicated team - still nothing. Fixes ive t”
“I run an exterior cleaning company and would like to market with ads but I’m not sure what I should do between google ads or meta ads. Was wondering what people in here have experienced with and which one fits better for service based business submitted by /u/Active_Permission318 [link] [comments]”
“Been seeing the "6% of creatives get most of the spend" stat going around (Motion's 2026 benchmark) and wanted to check what's actually driving it before assuming it's pure creative-picking skill. Pulled a panel of 1,061 live Meta ads, split by format, and measured median days-still-running as a lifespan proxy. Static image: 101 days median. Video: 66 days. Dynamic/DCO: 33 days, despite being 57% of total ad volume in the panel. So a chunk of that "6% concentration&quo”
“Hey everyone, hoping some of you have seen this before. I set up my Meta ad campaign about 3 days ago with a $100/day budget. For the first couple days it basically didn't spend anything, and now it's finally starting to move — but only a few dollars at a time. As of right now it's only spent around $5 total. The campaign is active and approved as far as I can tell. I'm not sure if this is a delivery issue, an audience/targeting problem, my bid strategy, or if I'm just being”
“Hi all, I run ads for a few companies, but the spend is really low, and thus we're never really able to get to the 50 conversion events when we target purchases. If we spent more to get to those 50 conversion events, is our CPA going to be lower, or what does getting to that 50 number really do for us? Additionally, I'm new to this, so how do you guys test creatives/headlines? What is your campaign structure, and what do you do once you find a winning creative/headline? submitted b”
“Hey everyone, I am setting up my first Google Ads Search campaign for a bookkeeping client (a friend of mine) in Australia and would appreciate some advice from people who have managed local service campaigns with a similar budget. The client has submitted their business documents for advertiser verification. Google says the review may take three to five business days. Is that a normal timeframe for a new account, and is that even necessary? Like should I have just gone with Individual account r”
“Just curious Do you get any conversions when you use google shopping ads in INDIA ? i'm starting out in the Beauty / Personal Care niche in india using my own shopify store and google shopping ads with active negative keyword monitoring, So far haven't gotten any sales even with considerable spend. I'm getting a ctr of 3 % btw, which i think is decent for india. submitted by /u/indie-entreprenuer [link] [comments]”