An advert that was running suddenly stopped. What do we check, in order

It happens in almost every account, at some point. An ad that was consistently bringing in orders starts performing worse, even though no one has changed anything. The client's first reaction is "the algorithm". Sometimes it really is, but more often the cause is more mundane.

The order in which we check, so we don't change several things simultaneously and end up understanding nothing:

Delivery, not creative

First, we check if the ad is actually being delivered. Budget exhausted earlier than usual, a new campaign in the same account competing for the same audience, a rejected card – all look like "the ad is no longer working".

Frequency and how long it runs for the same audience

For a limited local audience, the same ad seen too often wears out. Here, the solution isn't necessarily a completely new creative; sometimes, a variant filmed on another day, with a different opening shot, or expanding the audience is enough.

What changed outside the account

The season, a competitor who launched a promotion, out-of-stock product in the ad, a landing page modified by someone else. We lost two days searching the platform for a furniture client until we discovered that the product in the ad appeared "out of stock" on the website. There was nothing to fix in the account.

Measurement

We check if conversion events are still coming through. A code changed during a website update can make results appear to have vanished, even though orders are coming in normally. That's why we always compare what the platform says with what the client says has been delivered.

What we do next

We change one thing and wait long enough for the data to mean something. The temptation is to rebuild everything in one day. When we do that, we no longer know what helped.

We don't know exactly how long a good ad lasts – it depends on the audience size and how quickly the niche becomes saturated. For a local audience, less than we'd expect. Other agencies rotate creatives according to a fixed calendar; we prefer to look at frequency and cost per result, then decide.

If you have an account where results have dropped and you can't find the cause, we'll take a look at it together.

The order in which we check, in a table

We keep a short list on paper, so we don't get lost in assumptions when the client calls in a panic. It's not sacred, but it has saved us many hours lost on creatives when the problem was elsewhere.

We added the measurement row after losing almost two days looking for a problem that didn't exist: orders were coming in, only the reporting was broken after a shop update.

What we tell the client on the day it stops

The first discussion is more important than the first test. If the client thinks we've "broken" something, any change we make afterwards reads as an excuse. So we simply say: we don't know yet what has changed, we have an order in which we check, we'll get back to you in 48 hours with our first conclusion. Sometimes the conclusion is that there was nothing to fix.

What we don't do: we don't stop the entire account and we don't launch three new campaigns on the same day. When you change five things simultaneously, there's no way to know which one mattered.

How long we keep a piece of content before declaring it finished

It depends on the client's audience size. For a small audience, it gets consumed quickly; for a large one, it can run for weeks. We don't have a fixed rule and we don't believe in the round numbers you see in groups – what we do is look if the cost per result is consistently increasing, not just on a bad day.

"The ad is no longer working" means, in half the cases, that the audience has seen enough. In the other half, someone changed something outside the account and didn't tell us.

If you have a campaign that has stopped and you don't know why, send us read access and we'll look at it with the list above in front of us.

How we know we're done

Not by a ticked list, but by a simple question: if a new client were to come in tomorrow on this subject, would they find the answer here that would change their decision? If not, something is still missing and it's usually a practical detail, not an entire section. We revisit texts after a few months, when we see what people ask us on the phone and what wasn't written anywhere.