Hey everyone, the feeling of going mad pushed me to write my first post so I can look for answers. This is my Hail Mary, if you will.

I am a complete noob — just a son doing his best to help his mother sell her kindergarten teachers’ handbook.

The Downward Spiral

First Ad
Nov - one 5min video

Back in November, we published the first ad and it started converting INSTANTLY. I remember it clearly — it was nearing midnight when I pressed publish, and not more than 15 min later we had our first sale! The cost per result kept going down and down like a rock tossed into a canyon. The lowest it got was $0.25.

The ad budget was set to €10 per day and the product costs ±10 euro, so we are talking about ~40x ROAS.

Because my mom and I are goody two-shoes, we stopped the ad after some time — the law here in Bulgaria says that you can’t have your product on sale for more than 30 days or that would mean the sale price is the actual price.

With Christmas around the corner, we decided to stop the sale and renew it in December.

Second Ad
Dec - one 5min video

I copied the ad set and published the ad. That ad performed slightly worse, but still very satisfactorily — $0.87 per purchase on a €10 per day budget. In exactly one month, we had 428 sales.

Third Ad
Jan—Feb - 99% same creative

Because we didn’t want the product to be constantly on sale, we paused ads for 20 days and started again on Jan 20th with the same 5 min video — the only difference was that we had to remove the mention of Christmas at the very end. I copied the ad set from Nov or Dec btw and swapped the video.

Yet again, performance fell. $1.79 per purchase. Now I see that the trend was downward throughout the whole month — from Jan 20th to Feb 21st.

Fourth Ad
Apr - 99% same creative

This one was live for only a few days — seeing $3.34 per purchase scared me, so I…

Fifth Ad
Apr - 99% same creative

I copied the December ad inside Ads Manager and just changed the video — and as I said, the video is basically the exact same, only without the Christmas mention.

I didn’t realise it at the time, but this ad did pretty well with 104 sales at $2.86 per purchase. But because I was spoiled by the results at the very beginning, I stopped it and…

Sixth Ad
May - 8 new creatives

I researched what people say and learned about the Andromeda update and how there need to be a few creatives for the AI to choose from. Because I felt like the old campaign had gone downhill, I created a whole new campaign inside Ads Manager with a bunch of creatives — the old 5 min video, a new 20 sec video, and a few images.

We started that ad on May 1st and so far we’ve had 11 purchases at $7.06 per result.

The Creative

I am a graphic designer with an interest in marketing, so I’d like to think the creatives I come up with are at least average and usable. Because of the early results, I’m looking for the fault in Meta Ads Manager, but I don’t know it well enough.

I’ve tried adjusting a bunch of settings, and I’ve tried being patient, but it feels like nothing is working.

All the ads lead to the website - a one-page funnel that I created in Wordpress, and that has remained unchanged throughout good and bad ad performance.

The Product

It’s a handbook for kindergarten teachers. Mom has sold over 1,200 in less than six months with a $10 daily budget.

The market is Bulgaria.

She says there are tens of thousands more kindergarten teachers and university students, so the market shouldn’t be exhausted.

There truly is no equivalent to her handbook being advertised on Facebook — we would’ve seen it.

Next Steps — do you have any advice?

I feel like I should stop the new campaign, go back, make a new copy of the November/December ad set, and try again.

My mom really doesn’t want to increase the budget because she feels like Facebook is doing this on purpose so we start spending more. With the initial results, it’s a bit hard to argue with that.

I know some people have said the AI gets tired of the same creative, but how come the 5 or 6 new creatives I put in are barely converting either? I can’t be that bad.

I feel like I’m missing something. Do you have any ideas what that might be?

Thank you for your attention.