When Should You Cut Underperforming Facebook (Lead) Ads?

This came up with a friend of mine today who is doing his own conversion ads for an indie project.

In other words, when should I turn off low performing ads?

Sadly, there’s no blanket rule that I’ve seen about when to turn things off, but here’s my best shot at giving you a repeatable, logical decision making framework.

1. If you are getting conversions and they are trending down, just lower the budget 20% every 2-3 days.

Most Meta ad buyers use 20% every 2-3 days as a way to scale up or down a campaign. So use this to tame campaigns that start to suck. Sometimes it starts to pick up because you were pushing a particular ad or adset too hard.

For example, you have a promotion for a new course and it’s getting a few conversions a day but once you bump the budget to $100 a day, it struggles. It’s possibly because the market (at that time) doesn’t have enough interest to scale the conversions for that particular creative/messaging combo, for that product, at that much spend per day. So the performance will start to diminish.

2. If you don’t have any conversions, you need to give all ads 3-7 days of data before making a call before turning them off.

3 days is the absolute minimum, and will give you an idea of whether the ad is going to go the right direction in the first few days. E.g. whether you’ll get any conversions with that ad’s combination of creative, messaging, copy, target etc.

👉 Note, this is provided that you’re not spending something silly like $2 a day for conversions that would ordinarily cost $70.

So to that end, make sure you at least spend 2-3x the projected cost per conversion within those 3 days. The rationale is that if the ad was going to work, you’d probably see it convert within that amount of spend.

Why 7 days? Because this gives Facebook a chance to collect more data over every day of the week. You’ll know, for example, that weekends perform poorly. So launching on Friday night, and checking the ads on Monday would be ill-advised. Better to launch on Monday and check the next Monday, so you can see how the ad performs across the whole week.

Enjoy the rollercoaster.

You’ll also be giving Meta a healthier amount of data on time of day. For example, if you launch at 9am in the morning, US Eastern Time, you’ll get more conversions (potentially) in Eastern states, but fewer in Western ones. The ad might over-optimize for Eastern states because of those wins, if the testing window is too short. Versus getting 7 days of data where those differences may be less pronounced than in the short term.

Making a choice between cutting ads earlier rather than later is a question of how much risk you’re willing to take.

There are situations where an ad absolutely tanks for 3 days, but suddenly picks up on day 4, and kills it on day 5, 6 and 7. So if you cut ads early, you’re taking a risk that the ad could have come good on day 4+.

Weigh confidence vs risk + lower costs.

The way I make the decision is as follows:

1. Are there any conversions yet? If yes, follow 1 above.

2. If there are no, how many days has it run?

   1. Less than 3 days, let it go longer, unless it’s spent more than 3x a reasonable approximate cost per lead/conversion (You can benchmark against your other ads).

   2. More than 3 days, decide whether I have the budget / risk tolerance to test longer:

      1. If yes, let it run 7 days then review and cut if necessary.

      2. If low/no risk tolerance, cut it early.

Don’t forget though, cutting ads early in some situations does have the benefit of making faster iterations on the big levers.

For example, cutting a simple body copy variation after 3 days makes sense when you have bigger things to test like ad format. That can really change your ad performance, versus testing whether a different testimonial in the body copy makes your ad perform better.

Phew, there you have it. It’s not an easy question but hopefully this has given you an actionable framework to make a decision on when to cut ads or let them ride.

If you’re doing ads right now, do you decide in a different way to this? Let me know in the comments.

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Want help with Facebook lead gen ads? Here are 3 ways I can help:

1. Drop a comment below if you’ve got a question or want help thinking through your offer - I’m happy to share feedback.

2. Try my DIY course. I made this for my friends who kept asking how to run lead ads. It’s a simple, practical guide to getting up and running fast.

3. Get me to run your ads for you. If you want done-for-you help, that’s what I do, specifically for sales-led and education businesses.