Question

I set up a manual campaign a few weeks ago with a low budget (20$/day). It was selling ok (x2) so I doubled the budget (now I know this was a mistake and should have done it different), it stopped selling. And hasn’t recovered since. Tried lowering the budget again, not selling. Tried duplicating it, not selling. Tried similar campaign with Advantage settings, not selling.

Is there anything I can do about this or do I just have to wait for the gods of meta to forgive my mistake?

Answer 1

This is a classic case of breaking the learning phase by making a rapid budget increase. Here's how you can potentially revive your results:

1) Duplicate the original setup exactly
Use the same creative, ad copy, audience, and placements.
Start with the original winning budget ($20/day).
Let it re-learn and stabilize over 5–7 days.

2) Use slow, incremental scaling next time
Increase the budget by 15–20% every 3–4 days.
Or, duplicate the ad set with higher budget if you're short on time and want to test scaling in parallel.

3) Check for post-budget-change issues
Did your CPM or CTR change drastically?
Was your audience overlap higher?
Did you enter auction competition with bigger advertisers due to time-of-day or region?

4) Test CBO (Campaign Budget Optimization)
Let Meta allocate budget flexibly across ad sets.

5) Use Value-Based Lookalikes (if you have purchase data)
They may help restore targeting efficiency