What do you do if your Facebook ads stop converting?
Meta is having a moment. And not the good kind. If you’ve been running Meta ads and feeling like something fundamental has shifted – like you’re suddenly playing a completely different game – you’re not imagining it. Meta has essentially staged an algorithm coup, and a lot of brands are scrambling.
Now, before we dive in, full disclosure: this is an evolving situation. Meta is still making updates, things are still shifting, and what I’m sharing in this article is based on what we’re seeing right now, in October 2025. So this is not the final word – it’s a status report from the trenches.
Let’s decode what’s actually happening with Facebook ads not converting right now.
Act 1: What’s Changed (Reality Check)
Break down the changes in plain language:
The Creative Control Grab
Meta has decided they know better than you how your ads should look. They’re applying automatic creative optimisations to live campaigns without warning.
You wake up one morning and your carefully crafted ad has been… well, Meta-fied. Text has been moved around. Images have been cropped differently. Your brand aesthetic? Meta doesn’t really care about your brand aesthetic.
The Volume Demand
They want more. More creatives. More angles. More concepts. And they want them constantly. We’re talking multiple new creatives weekly, not monthly.
If you were already stretched trying to produce one solid creative per week, welcome to your new nightmare. The brands that can’t keep up with this production demand are getting left behind.
The Similarity Problem
Here’s where it gets weird. Meta’s algorithm is essentially ‘filing’ similar-looking creatives together. If your new creative looks too much like your last creative, it’s not getting spend. It’s being treated as the same asset.
So you need volume, but you also need remarkable differentiation. Every. Single. Time.
The Targeting Illusion
Remember targeting? Remember carefully building audiences based on demographics, interests, behaviours? Yeah, Meta’s basically said ‘cute, but we’re doing broad now.’
Everything’s been pushed toward broad targeting, with Meta claiming the creative does the targeting by pulling in the right eyeballs.
In theory, brilliant. In practice? It takes ages to optimise, and you’re burning budget while it figures itself out.
The Scalability Crisis
With new creatives being added constantly and the algorithm constantly relearning, nothing seems to scale anymore. You find a winner, you scale it, and… it stops working because Meta wants fresh content.
It’s like trying to build a house on quicksand.
The Brand Erosion
And here’s what really concerns me: all these automatic optimisations are making everyone’s ads look the same. Boring. Generic. Irrelevant.
My own newsfeed has become a wasteland of bland, algorithm-optimised content that all looks like it came from the same template. If you’re building a premium brand with a distinctive voice and aesthetic, watching Meta homogenise your ads is genuinely painful.
Act 2: Why This Is Happening
Help them understand Meta’s motivations:
Meta’s Business Model Shift
Meta needs to prove to advertisers that their AI is smarter than human decision-making. They’re competing with TikTok’s algorithm, with Google’s Performance Max, with everyone else who’s promising ‘just give us your money and our AI will figure it out.’
So they’re pushing everyone toward this black-box approach where you feed in creative and budget, and they handle everything else.
The Data Reality
Privacy changes have decimated Meta’s ability to track users across the internet. They’ve lost so much signal. So they’re trying to replace human targeting intelligence with algorithmic learning, but they need massive volumes of data to make it work.
Hence the demand for constant creative testing. You’re not just a client anymore – you’re a data provider training their algorithm.
The Creative Arms Race
TikTok proved that fast-moving, diverse, native-looking content performs. Meta’s trying to force advertisers to create TikTok-style volume, but on a platform that’s fundamentally different.
It’s like asking someone to write haiku with the same volume as novels.
Act 3: The Strategic Response (This is where you give them control)
Decision Point 1: Surrender or Resist?
First, you need to make a philosophical decision. Are you going to surrender to Meta’s automatic optimisations, or are you going to resist them? There’s no right answer here – it depends on your brand.
Option A: Full Surrender
You go all-in with Meta’s automation. You accept that your ads will be Meta-fied. You optimise for volume and speed of creative production over brand consistency. You use their Advantage+ campaigns, you let them control placements, you feed the machine.
The upside: You might see improved performance metrics because you’re working with the algorithm instead of against it.
The downside: Your ads will look like everyone else’s. Your brand distinctiveness gets sacrificed. You lose control and visibility over what’s actually working.
This might work if you’re selling commodity products where brand isn’t your main differentiator. If you’re competing primarily on offer, on price, on immediate conversion, this could be your path.
Option B: Strategic Resistance
You maintain tighter control over your creative. You might limit some of the automatic optimisations. You’re more selective about which campaigns get which level of automation.
The upside: Your brand looks like YOUR brand. You maintain aesthetic control. You know what’s being shown to customers.
Accuracy of product portrayal…
The downside: You might be fighting the algorithm. Performance might suffer. You’re manually doing things Meta wants to automate.
This makes sense if brand is your moat. If you’re building something premium where the look, feel, and message consistency is crucial to the customer experience.
It also makes sense if there might be legal ramifications or customer backlash if your product is misrepresented by Meta in some way.
Decision Point 2: The Creative Production Challenge
Okay, let’s say you’ve decided you need to produce at scale. Here are your options:
In-House Content Factory
Build a system for rapid creative production. This might mean:
- User-generated content programmes where customers create content for you
- Simpler creative formats that you can template and produce quickly
- iPhone-shot content that feels native and can be produced daily
- A content calendar that’s planned weeks ahead with batch shooting days
Example: Instead of one polished studio shoot per month, you do weekly iPhone shoots with different angles. ‘Ingredient spotlight Monday, Behind-the-scenes Wednesday, Customer testimonial Friday.’ Less polished, more authentic, higher volume.
Creative Partners
Work with an agency or creative partner who can handle the volume. But here’s the catch – they need to really understand your brand.
This is where a lot of brands get burned. They outsource to someone who can produce volume but doesn’t get the nuance of what makes their brand unique. You end up with volume that’s on-brand in name only.
Hybrid Approach
Core brand creatives produced in-house with high quality. Volume testing creatives produced through faster, lower-cost methods. You protect your brand with the core assets but feed Meta’s appetite for volume with the test creatives.
Decision Point 3: The Campaign Structure Question
Meta’s pushing Advantage+ shopping campaigns hard. Should you use them?
The Case For
If you’re going to surrender to the algorithm, Advantage+ is the ultimate surrender. It’s completely black box – Meta controls targeting, placements, creative optimisation, everything. But some brands are seeing it work once it’s been fed enough data.
The Case Against
You have zero visibility into what’s working. Zero control over the customer experience. And if your brand requires education or a specific customer journey, Advantage+ just… doesn’t care about that.
The Middle Path
One example might be to Run Advantage+ for top-of-funnel volume, but maintain controlled campaigns for strategic products, specific segments, or key customer journeys where you need more precision. Multi-campaign strategy, each with different levels of automation.
Decision Point 4: The Multi-Channel Reality
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: Meta might not be able to be your entire strategy anymore. Not because Meta’s dead – it’s not – but because the way Meta works now, you need other channels to complete the picture.
Build the Full Funnel Elsewhere
Maybe Meta becomes your top-of-funnel awareness play, but you’re doing the heavy lifting of conversion and retention through:
- Email and SMS where you control the message and aesthetic completely
- Google Shopping and Search where intent is higher
- Pinterest where visual control and buyer intent meet together
- Organic social where you build brand properly
- SEO and content where you educate customers on your terms
- Partnerships and collaborations where you reach audiences through trusted voices
The Portfolio Approach
Think of Meta as one position in your marketing portfolio. Not the entire portfolio. You’re diversifying risk, diversifying creative approaches, diversifying customer touchpoints. Some channels will be more profitable, some will be more brand-building, some will be more data-gathering.
Act 4: What We’re Testing Right Now
Here are some examples of what we’re testing in my own brand and with clients:
- Segmented Advantage+ campaigns by product category to see if we can maintain some control while feeding the automation
- Using engagement campaigns to build engaged audiences and increase consumer demand, and retarget elsewhere to drive purchases
- Rapid creative production using phones and simple editing to meet the volume demand
- Broader campaigns for awareness, manual campaigns for high-value customer journeys
- Increased investment in email and SMS to compensate for Meta’s unreliability
- Google Performance Max as a comparison point to Meta’s approach
Some of this is working. Some isn’t, at least not across the board. The reality is that the makeup of each brands’ traffic strategy looks different from brand to brand. There is no one-size-fits-all approach.
The Challenge & The Opportunity
Look, I’m not going to sugarcoat this: Meta’s changes are challenging.
They’re forcing a level of creative production that many brands aren’t set up for. They’re taking control away from advertisers who’ve spent years getting good at the platform. They’re making everything look more generic at a time when distinctive brands should be winning.
But here’s the opportunity: most brands are going to struggle with this. Most will either burn out trying to keep up or quit Meta altogether. If you can figure out how to produce volume while maintaining your brand essence, if you can build systems that feed the algorithm without sacrificing what makes you unique, you’ll have an advantage.
You’re not just competing with the algorithm. You’re competing with every other brand that’s struggling with the same challenges. The ones who solve this will win market share from the ones who can’t.
It’s frustrating. I get it. I’m living it too.
But here’s what I want you to take away from this episode: you have more options than you think.
This isn’t a binary choice between “do what Meta wants” or “abandon Meta entirely.” There’s a whole spectrum of strategic responses available to you, and the right answer depends on your specific brand, your specific products, your specific customers, and your specific goals.
The brands that are going to thrive through this aren’t necessarily the ones with the biggest budgets or the fanciest creative teams. They’re going to be the ones who think strategically. The ones who make deliberate choices about where to automate and where to maintain control. The ones who build systems rather than just reacting to algorithm changes.
And here’s the real opportunity: most of your competitors are paralysed right now. They’re either stuck doing what used to work and watching it fail, or they’ve pulled back entirely because they don’t know what else to do.
While they’re frozen, you can be moving forward. Testing. Learning. Building a traffic strategy that’s actually designed for your brand, not just copied from someone else’s playbook.
Because here’s the truth: there is no one-size-fits-all solution. The DTC brand selling $30 products needs a completely different approach than the premium brand selling $200 products.
The brand with a three-week consideration cycle needs different strategies than the impulse purchase brand. The brand with a 60% repeat purchase rate needs different tactics than the brand trying to scale cold acquisition.
Your traffic strategy needs to be architected for YOUR business. Not someone else’s.
Need Some Help?
Now, if you’re listening to this and thinking “okay, I understand the landscape now, but I still don’t know which path is right for my brand” – that’s completely normal. This is complex stuff. And trying to figure it out alone while also running every other aspect of your business is genuinely overwhelming.
This is exactly what we help brands with at Productpreneur Marketing.
We call them Brand Growth Strategy Sessions, and they’re designed specifically for premium, innovative brands who need to decode what’s actually going to work for their unique situation.
We’re not going to give you a generic playbook. We’re not going to tell you to just “do what’s working for other brands.” We’re going to analyse your specific business – your products, your margins, your customers, your current traffic strategy – and map out the specific approach that makes sense for you.
Whether that’s rebuilding your Meta strategy with the new algorithm realities in mind, diversifying into other channels, optimising your creative production systems, or something completely different – we’ll give you a clear roadmap designed around your business, not someone else’s.
These also aren’t just consultations where we tell you what to do and send you on your way. We’re looking at your data, diagnosing the real bottlenecks, and giving you strategic options with the trade-offs clearly laid out so you can make informed decisions. You’re the architect of your strategy – we’re giving you the blueprints and the intelligence you need to build something that actually works.
If you’re ready to move from confusion to clarity, from reacting to leading, you can book a free Growth Strategy Session here. We’ll dive deep into your traffic strategy, decode what’s working and what’s not, and chart the path forward that’s right for your brand.
Not every brand is a fit for how we work – we’re selective about who we take on because we only work with brands building something genuinely innovative and unique. But if that’s you, if you’re committed to building something remarkable and you just need the strategic clarity to know which direction to move, let’s talk.
Click here to book a complimentary Brand Growth Strategy Session
For now, stay strategic, stay flexible, and remember: while everyone else is confused and paralysed by these platform changes, you get to be the one moving forward with clarity and purpose.
