Most weeks someone sends me an ad account with the same message: "we've tried everything, meta ads just don't work for us."
I get why it feels that way. you've spent real money. you've watched the numbers not move. maybe you've been through an agency or two. at some point "the ads don't work" becomes the obvious conclusion.
but here's what years inside UK ad accounts has taught me: the ad is almost never the thing that's broken. it's just the thing that gets blamed, because it's the thing everyone's looking at.
the £2k a month account
quick story. last month I looked at an account spending £2k a month with barely a sale. three agencies in twelve months. each one rebuilt the campaigns from scratch. each rebuild "worked" for about a week, then didn't.
the ads were fine. genuinely — decent creative, sensible structure. what nobody had checked: the landing page took six seconds to load and asked for a phone number before it showed a price.
every agency had been paid to look at ads manager. so ads manager is where everyone looked. fix the page, restart the same ads, sales in week one.
the four things I check before I touch an ad
when an account isn't working, this is the actual order i look, and the ad itself is last.
the offer. would a stranger stop scrolling for it? "10% off your first order" isn't an offer, it's wallpaper. if the offer is weak, better ads just show more people something they don't want.
after the click. slow pages, hidden prices, forms that ask for too much too soon. the ad gets billed for every sale the page kills. this is the most common one and it's completely invisible inside ads manager.
the first two seconds. most people scroll with sound off and thumb moving. If the opening frame doesn't instantly say who this is for and why they should care, the ad isn't bad — it's invisible. those are different problems with different fixes.
the maths. cost per sale versus actual margin. some accounts don't have an ads problem, they have a price problem. no media buyer can fix a product that loses money on every order — and honestly, anyone who says they can is about to spend a lot of your money proving they can't.
"but what about targeting?"
you'll notice targeting isn't on the list. That's deliberate. meta's AI mostly does targeting for u now — it reads the creative and finds the buyer, and it's genuinely good at it. which has a brutal side effect: the oldest excuse in advertising is gone. if the ads aren't working in 2026, the answer is almost always in that list of four, not in some secret audience setting.
what this means for u
before u rebuild anything, or hire anyone, or write ads off entirely — run those four checks. They're free, they take an afternoon, and in my experience one of them is the answer more often than not.
and if u run the checks and still can't see it, that's the point where a second pair of eyes actually earns its keep. DM me if you have any questions — happy to point u at the right thing to look at.
— Alex