Ashvin Melwani’s Post

The biggest Meta issue we faced at Obvi is something I’ve never seen anyone talk about... It took us weeks to diagnose and a year to fix. And It wasn’t about our ads or landing pages or any of that typical stuff. I want to share the story in case it can help anyone else struggling with poor performance. First, we had to diagnose the problem. Why was it suddenly impossible to make FB ads work? The culprit was a surprising one. This issue hit us through a trojan horse → we ran a big campaign with a major influencer. Sales jumped 300%. But there was a catch... Meta's algorithm latched onto that influencer's audience and wouldn't let go. For an entire YEAR, our ads kept targeting people who looked nothing like our core customers. We tried everything to get the account back on track. New campaigns. Fresh creative. New landing pages. Different objectives. Nothing worked. Our pixel was "seasoned" with the wrong data, and Meta kept optimizing for that audience. The world’s most powerful advertising engine was quickly driving us off a cliff. We had to take drastic measures or our primary acquisition channel was going to sink us. Here are the 4 actions we took to save our media buying (and the company): - Start from scratch with a new pixel - Run ads to a new website - Test custom audiences - Switch to cost caps As you can imagine, this was a radical step. Ditching years of “seasoning” and firing up a new pixel and website experience felt like such a huge step back for us.  But we knew starting fresh was the only way to “clean up” the foundation of our marketing. Now we could retrain Meta on who to target, even though we’d already done tens of millions in sales. We also found out about Proxima and their audience targeting tech around this time. They promised they could find high-intent ICP customers on Meta using data-enriched audiences, so we gave them a shot. Both of these fixes started to work. We were converting the “right” people, and Meta was re-calibrating its targeting with this data.  Once we got back on our feet, I moved our ad account over to cost caps.  Instead of just giving Meta a flat budget every day, I wanted to “build in” profitability with CPA and ROAS targets. There’s actually more to this story, but these are the main steps. I plan to share all of the details of how we pulled off this radical change and how it eventually led to some of the most profitable months in Obvi’s history. Stay tuned! For now, if you’re looking for a way to break through a plateau on Meta, Proxima might be able to help you. Their team is honestly one of the best I’ve come across – we’re always taken care of. Since onboarding, we’ve been able to scale our ad spend +2x…while beating our efficiency targets and acquiring new ICP customers. I can’t guarantee it will work for you, but Alex Song can – he'll reimburse you if they can’t beat your top-performing campaign. Want to give Proxima a try? → https://shorturl.at/RTYpv