Over the summer, Big Little Cities progress was growing at a terrific rate. I started running Facebook/Meta ads in June, and over July and August, things were trending upward month over month. But like someone flipped a switch, on or around September 1st, all the traffic took a nosedive. Looking at my analytics dashboard, the story is written in a steep blue line that plummets like a cliff: 53,814 sessions over four months, with a dramatic crash in September that took my traffic from a steady 15K sessions to 7K almost overnight. If you've ever relied heavily on Facebook ads for traffic, this chart probably gives you nightmares.
The Setup: What Was Working
For months, Facebook ads had been my reliable traffic workhorse. From June through August, I maintained a consistent plateau around 15K sessions per month from my single ad campaign that used Advantage+ to pull in my products from Shopify. I found this to return the best ROAS versus any other content or ads that I created manually. I was letting Facebook handle all of the targeting and what products to display. It was working great, until it died.
The conversion metrics looked solid during those good months. I was seeing a decent 3x ROAS—not great by any means, but it wasn't bad. Facebook ads had become such a reliable channel that I'd started to depend on it as my primary traffic driver. In hindsight, that was mistake number one.
The Drop: September's Sudden Decline
The decline felt like it happened overnight, swift enough to be alarming. Around early September, I started noticing sessions dropping day by day. At first, I thought it was just normal fluctuation with the ads that happens all the time. But when the decline continued for over a week, I knew something was up. I didn't change anything or touch anything that would have caused this change to happen.
The analytics told a clear story: Facebook traffic was disappearing, and I just wasn't getting the traffic I was before.
Possible Cause
Ad Fatigue: Had my audience simply seen my ads too many times? Even great creative gets stale after enough impressions, so I thought this could be one of the issues. But it seemed to be too sudden for this.
Algorithm Changes: Facebook constantly tweaks their algorithm, and I started to see other people online complain that their ad traffic took a dump in September as well. It's looking more and more like my drop in traffic is part of the Meta Ads Andromeda Algorithm update. From everything that I've read, this update changes how Facebook AI manages ads and how your content is displayed to potential buyers. Had there been an update that affected how my ads were being served to my audience?
Creative Performance: Perhaps my ad creative had simply stopped resonating with the audience?
My research is leading me to believe that this drop is due to the Andromeda AI update Facebook recently rolled out. The update changes the structure and learning Facebook AI does to get your content out to potential buyers. It sounds like the best creative is going to win. Since my ads were only product flat lays from our Shopify site, it would make sense that the AI does not consider this "killer content" and therefore was not getting our content in front of the correct buyers.
This is really unfortunate as I am very busy with client work and was hoping that ads would be a lot easier to set up. Right now I don't have the bandwidth to learn this entirely new advertising platform as well as come up with new creatives to test.