Debate: Did Facebook ads get way worse after IOS 14 or am I just bad at targeting?

I run a small shop selling handmade candles in Austin, and before Apple's privacy update last year, I was getting a solid 3x return on my Facebook ad spend. Now I'm barely breaking even. Some people say the platform is dead for small business, but I've seen other candle brands still crushing it-what's the secret here?

3 comments

3 Comments

reese_lee91mo ago

My buddy runs a vintage shop in Portland and swore by those old retargeting ads before the update. He switched to just making really good creative with clear offers and manually building lookalike audiences off his email list. It took him like 3 months to get back to a decent ROAS but he's doing okay now.

king.val1mo ago

Oh man, tell me about it lol. My candle biz in Austin went from feeling like a genius to just throwing cash into a bonfire overnight. @reese_lee9's buddy has the right idea though - I swapped to building audiences off my email list and it's slowly coming back, but man it's a grind. Your old audiences are probably trash now unless you kept buying from them, so yeah, @laura_chen41 nailed it.

laura_chen411mo ago

Are you running the exact same ads you were before the update? I bet your old audiences got hit hard with the tracking changes. What kind of custom audiences are you using now or did you just reset everything?