u/kthshawon

A guy reached out. He had a Shopify dropshipping store, decent product, real demand. He spend already more than $1800+ on ads . got only few orders but not in near profitable. he was losing money in both ads in shipping products.

He knocked me. looked like he was confused as people were clicking, but sales were not coming.

I asked him to give me the screenshot of the store URL, then I asked for access.

Spent a couple of hours finding out where the problem is.

The first thing I noticed — he was running three campaigns at the same time all targeting the same product.

Three separate campaigns. Three separate budgets. All competing against each other in the same auction.

They were literally bidding against themselves. Splitting the budget so thin that none of the campaigns had enough spend to get through the learning phase properly. The algorithm was confused. Nothing had enough data to actually optimize.

When you're running on a tight budget and you fragment it across three campaigns — you're not testing three things. You're just running three half-dead campaigns that never learn.

I killed all of them immediately.

Second thing —

He had only 3 creatives. all are in same angle just hook are changed. in andromeda this was not gonna work so i talked to him and make a stragey 1st .then I built five new creatives with completely different angles and hooks. Not the same video with a different intro — genuinely different approaches. One led with the problem, one showed the result, one was more UGC style, one was direct offer focused.

Gave the algorithm real variety to test with.

in meantime i also did run Remarketing ads.

Third thing — the landing page was doing him no favours.

He was sending cold traffic directly to the Shopify product page. Which was fine design-wise but the reviews were buried, the page loaded slow on mobile, and there was no strong hook above the fold.

First impression on mobile was basically just the product image and a price. Nothing that built desire or trust before asking for money.

Fixed the page structure. Got the strongest review above the fold. Tightened the headline. Made the CTA more visible.

What happened after:

First two weeks — still finding its feet. A few sales coming in but not profitable yet. He was patient which helped.

Week three — the pixel had enough data now. Purchases started coming in more consistently. The algorithm had found an audience that actually converted.

Week four to six — hit profitable ROAS. Scaled the daily budget slowly. also in meantime launched others campaing too.

He went from spending money with almost nothing to show for it to running a profitable campaign within about 5–6 weeks.

None of this is secret knowledge. But most people running their own ads for the first time don't know what to look for. They assume if the ad is spending it must be working. It's not always the case.

If your dropshipping ads are spending but not converting — go through these things before you change anything else. The answer is usually in there.

Lately on Reddit, I keep seeing the same type of posts again and again—people saying Meta ads are dead, nothing converts, costs are too high, everything is broken. But if you take a step back and actually look at what’s happening, the story doesn’t really match that narrative. Meta Platforms just reported their Q1 2026 numbers, and revenue jumped to $56.31 billion, up 33% year-over-year. That kind of growth doesn’t happen if advertisers are losing money and quitting. It happens when more people are spending, not less.

Even if you ignore the numbers and just open the Meta Ads Library for a minute, you’ll see it yourself. In almost any niche, there are thousands of ads running right now. Not just random tests, but ads that have clearly been running for weeks or months. That alone should tell you something simple—Meta ads are still working. Just not for everyone.

Recently, yes, performance has been a bit unpredictable. Some days campaigns perform really well, other days they don’t. But instead of accepting that as part of the system, most of us start overthinking everything. We jump into fixing technical things—changing campaign structures, testing new targeting, duplicating ad sets, trying different “strategies.” The problem is, while we’re busy doing all that, we often ignore the most important part.

Content.

In paid media, we get so focused on the technical side that we forget what actually makes someone stop, pay attention, and take action. You can have the best targeting, the cleanest setup, the most optimized funnel—but if your content doesn’t connect with the person seeing it, none of it really matters.

And content isn’t just a photo or a video. Its job is much deeper than that. It has to explain why the product matters, why someone should care, how it relates to their situation, and most importantly, why they should trust you. If that part is missing, no “hack” or setup will fix the results.

At the end of the day, ads don’t sell anything on their own. They just put your message in front of people. It’s the content that does the selling. That’s why instead of constantly chasing new tricks or blaming the platform, it makes more sense to focus on understanding people better—what they feel, what they want, what makes them stop scrolling.

Meta ads aren’t perfect right now, and they probably never will be. But this isn’t the real problem. The real issue is that we’re trying to fix performance from the outside, while the actual problem is often inside the message itself.

I tested a lot of Meta ad setups after Andromeda across different client accounts, with around $100K–$200K total ad spend.

Many people will say the funnel is not needed now. just creative need, but that's wrong, the funnel is still there, just you need to know which one needs to run and which one is called which funnel.

• Path 1: New Account (No Pixel Data)

For fresh stores or new products, I stopped launching full funnels from day one.

• Broad audience.
• Different angles.
• Different hooks.
• No complicated targeting.

This is what everyone is running and trying to scale, and thinking this is the BOFU. Yes, you can think of BOFU, but for me, it's BOFU and TOFU both if you don't have any pixel data.
Most of the advertisers run these ads and see for 5-7 days if no result comes, then kill the creatives, add new creatives if some results come, trying to scale, but this is wrong for me. The pixel is a new pixel, doesn't have 50 conversion per week to get scaling.

That's why I let these ads run for 1-2 weeks (in here I also run some page likes and PPE campaign) so that the pixel can gather data, whether a purchase comes or not. ( if you're running ecom). If VC, ATC etc coming, that's enough.

Once the data starts building, I expand gradually:

• ✅ Add remarketing campaigns (warm audience)
• ✅ Add BOFU campaigns (cart + checkout users)
• ✅ Identify winning creatives

After that, I move into retention + scaling.

When all this campaign running all at once, the result you will see in your eyes. But most of the people don't run remarketing, BOFU, or retention. They just launched the CBO with 1 Adset with 5-7 Creatives, let it run if no results come, they just kill, they don't analyse other data, they don't make that other data useful for future campaigns.

• Path 2: Account With Existing Data

If the account already has 30-50 per week purchase data, I don’t wait.

I launch the full funnel immediately:

• Prospecting → New customer acquisition
• Remarketing → Engagers + visitors
• BOFU → Add-to-cart & checkout users
• Retention → Past buyers
• Scaling → Only proven winners

Because the pixel already understands the audience, performance stabilizes faster.

The main rule I follow is simple:

Don’t scale random ads.

Only scale ads that have already proved themselves for a few days.

Also, I don’t touch budgets every few days anymore. That used to mess things up. I give the system some space and only increase slowly when the ad is stable.

This setup is not fancy, but it worked better for me than other campaign structures.

Curious if anyone else is using a similar 2-path setup after Andromeda?

*I am not here for marketing, just shared what worked for me*