There’s a specific kind of frustration that comes with running ads.
You set the campaign up. You write the copy, design the creative, pick the audience
You hit publish and watch the spend go out
And then nothing comes back or not enough
Or just enough to keep you confused about whether to scale or cut it
So you change the creative
Adjust the audience
Tweak the budget
Try a different objective, read threads, watch videos, test more or even spend more money figuring out what the first money couldn’t tell you
Most media buyers assume it’s the creative, the offer Or the targeting
They keep pulling those levers because those are the levers they can see
What they don’t see is that Facebook and TikTok are making decisions about their campaigns based on partial information
Your pixel fires in the browser
But browsers are unreliable now, iOS privacy changes, Safari’s ITP, ad blockers — between all of them, a significant chunk of your conversions never get reported back to the platform
Facebook thinks those sales didn’t happen
So it doesn’t learn from them. It keeps optimising toward the signals it does have, which are incomplete, which is why your targeting never quite feels right no matter how much you adjust it
You’re not failing at running ads. Your tracking is failing, and taking your campaigns down with it.