Why MCA Meta ads stop working, and what to do about it

If you’re running Meta ads for your merchant cash advance shop and everything is sunshine and rainbows — you’re getting good-quality merchants, you have a good cost per lead, you’re funding deals, everything is great — I’m sorry to break it to you, but it’s not always going to be like that. That campaign that is working very well will eventually stop working. And it is extremely important that you understand why it stops working, because it is completely natural for it to stop working and gradually taper off in terms of quality and cost per lead — and what to do in order to always have a steady stream and a steady pipeline of new leads coming in from your Meta advertising. So in this video I’m going to go over why the Meta ads for your merchant cash advance shop stopped working all of a sudden, and what to do to fix it. Now, real quick, just so you can trust anything I’m going to tell you: my name is Alex

Makowski. I run Infinite Bookings, which is an MCA lead aggregator, or lead generation company. We’ve been around for just over three years at this point, and we’re based out of New Jersey. We have every type of lead under the sun at this point, and a lot of connections and expertise in the space that allow us to get the highest-quality data for the best price and supply that to our clients. We have real-time exclusive leads, real-time shared leads, live submission data, aged leads — every type of lead under the sun. We process close to 1,000 net new leads every single week: all types of industries, all types of revenues, anything you’re looking for. We work with 50 different brokerages nationwide, and here you can see my other social channels. Now, getting into the meat of the video: what kills a campaign that used to work? Most

of the time, it’s one of these five things. Tired, fatigued ad creatives. A starved budget, meaning your budget is too low for the amount of leads you want to be getting or the creatives you have. It’s stuck in the learning phase, which I’ll go over. A pixel learning on the wrong leads and sending that data back to Facebook. And a burned-out audience, which ties in with frequency. Number one: more budget equals more creatives. You’ll see here that it is a balancing act. The more budget you spend on your Facebook ads, the higher the level of creative output it requires. You need to have a system. If you’re spending $100 a day, you don’t need a crazy amount of creatives — you maybe need ten to fifteen, maybe twenty — but you can’t have too many. So there is a sweet spot

between the amount of creatives and the budget you’re spending. Meta can’t test all of them if there are too many creatives and not enough budget, so it never finds the winner, or it takes such a long time that it becomes not worth it. So this is a balancing act, the amount of creatives you have and the budget you’re spending, and I’ll go through that a little more in depth. Now, number two: $100 is really the floor. You will not get any results if you’re running anything less than that. Even $100 is the bare minimum I would start a campaign at. Ideally you’re at $200, $300, $500, and you’re able to scale that to a few thousand a day. And the thing here is that even though $100 is the bare minimum, let’s say you’re spending $1,000: you need more creatives. You need more

creatives the more you spend, and it’s pretty much one to one. This graph doesn’t do the best job of showing that off, but it’s pretty much a 1:1, if not a 1:1.5 ratio. The more budget you spend, the exponentially quicker your ads are going to fatigue. They’re going to be run through, and the quicker you’re going to need a system to produce more high-quality ads. If you’re spending more, they’re going to fatigue faster. So: more budget equals more creatives and faster fatigue. Now, number three: Meta needs 50 conversion events a week. People talk about this all the time. Some people say it’s a myth; some people say it’s true. I will tell you first-hand, after spending literally multiple six figures on ads for myself and for clients: you need 50 conversion events a week, and

you just need to figure out how to do that. At low budgets it’s harder; at higher budgets it’s much easier. But the main thing is that your lead event — whatever that is, and there are multiple ways to set up a lead event — has to be getting 50 a week, or 200 a month. So the actual math on that: let’s say this is your lead event. It’s basically a verified phone number lead, with a six-digit passcode. You need 200 of these a month. So if you’re spending $100 a day, or $3K a month, you need to be paying at most $15 a lead. If you’re not doing that — if you’re getting $20 or $30 leads, which is very possible — you’re stuck in learning, and your campaign is never going to be able to scale. So it’s important that, even though you start out at $100 a day, you slowly and gradually increase your budget by 10 to 15% every three days on your

ad campaigns. And the moment you hit 50 a week, that’s when you should get into scaling. Now, if you have lower traffic, you need to fire this lead event earlier. If you have a lot of traffic — let’s say you’re getting a thousand conversion events a month — you need to fire it deeper in the process: maybe offline events, CRM events, all those things, which I’ll go into. Number four: your pixel isn’t a scoreboard. It’s only meant to tell Meta who to find next, in the next seven to ten days. That’s how it works. And it is a very slippery slope, because a lot of people think of their dataset or their pixel as just counting how many leads they got. That is not what it is for. What a pixel is for is this: when a lead fires, you want to be reporting back the good leads, the

role-model leads, the leads you want more of, back to Meta. And that’s why it’s a slippery slope, because it cuts both ways. If you start reporting bad leads back to Meta — low-revenue leads, leads that have defaulted on loans, leads that aren’t from your ideal industry — that is what Meta is going to find more of, and next week’s leads are going to be bad. If you do the opposite, and you send good leads and increasingly raise the revenue criteria, it’s going to keep getting better and better leads without dramatically increasing your cost per lead. You want to raise the bar as you go. This is what I alluded to before: I always start all of my brand-new pixels — on new ad accounts, for new clients, all these different things — at $20,000 a month for the merchant. That’s

where I start, because it’s a low revenue criterion. And as soon as I have more than double the required conversion events a week — which is 400 leads a month — I raise it. I can do this a bit quicker as well, and I keep raising the criteria. Not only revenue, because that’s just one thing, but, for example, whether they’ve ever had a default, what state they’re in, what industry they’re in, what their credit score is. The stricter the criteria, the better the leads you’re going to have next week. But again, it’s a balancing act between how much you’re spending, how many creatives you have and how many leads — how many conversion events — you’re getting. So it is very important that you take all of these factors into account. Now, the real asset is in your pixel. That’s why I have no problem — and

you’ll see it on my Instagram and on my YouTube — sharing what creatives I’m using, because that is not the secret to winning with MCA Meta ads. Creatives can be copied. I’m sure you’ve done this before: you can go to the ad library and copy straight up what these people are putting into their ad accounts. I share mine. You can copy them. You’re not going to get the same results as me, because the real asset within your ad account is the pixel and its data. That is something you can’t copy. That is the true substance of the ad account, and it’s what lets us generate high-quality leads, because we literally get thousands of conversion events a week. And that is what separates the big advertisers — and we’re not even that big. Think about businessloans.com, think about NerdWallet, think about all these big advertisers spending millions of dollars a month. That’s what

separates the big advertisers from the people spending $100 a day. They cannot compete. And the whole thing here is that your creative engine can never stop making ad creatives. You should always be testing new variants, taking the winners and making ten more of them, new concepts, new messaging, new angles. You always need to be testing new angles to find more winners, because the more you’re spending, the faster you’re going to burn through creatives and the more you’re going to need. The worst thing you can do is see that your campaigns aren’t performing anymore and scramble to make new creatives and launch new campaigns to figure it out, because then you’re going to take shortcuts. You’re going to be acting from a place of scarcity instead of a place of

abundance. You want to be testing new things when things are going well, because things will start to go wrong for the campaign that’s working, and you’re already going to have the next solution. You cannot be frugal. You have to put in the budget. You have to throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks. That is all this is. And this goes with that: you should always be testing. Today’s winner is working well; over time, it’s going to die off. It’s a given. I can guarantee you that whatever campaign you’re running right now is going to die off eventually. So you need to start testing your next winners right now. That’s how you get this wave where, even though some campaigns start dying, you have the next winner already winning. Ads die and then you scramble — that’s not the way to do

it. Your next winner already has to be running. And on a side note, that’s how we’re able to send our clients consistent leads: even if one of our main campaigns goes bad and starts to not work, we already have the next campaign sending our clients new leads. Now, this is what I mentioned about the audience burning out. This is really a general marketing thing, but it applies to MCA too. Your frequency, which is a metric in your ads manager, should not be over two. Once it’s over two, if you’re still getting leads, that’s fine, but it is a very good indicator that the campaign is slowly going to start burning out, and that audience is going to start burning out. So you want to be in that one-to-two range, because then you have good frequency for the

most part, but it’s not too high. Like I said, everything in this video comes down to the fact that it is a balancing act, an act of equilibrium. In this red zone, they’ve seen it and they didn’t click, and they most likely won’t click. And honestly, you want to be optimizing for first-time click conversions — who doesn’t want that? You want people who saw your ad for the first time, clicked, and right away submitted an application. That’s who you should be optimizing your pixel for. So: new ad sets, fresh creatives and new audiences. And like I said, this is a metric within the ads manager. So when your ads start to die — your cost per lead starts going up, your merchant quality starts going down — check: do I need fresh creatives? How long have I been running these creatives? What’s my CPM, my link

click-through rate, my frequency? Do I have new creatives testing right now? The answer should be yes. If not, you have some work to do: you need more creatives. Does my budget fit the current creative count? Do I have 100 creatives on a $100-a-day budget? That’s obviously not going to work. Do I have too few creatives for more budget? You need to find that balance. And do you have 50 lead events per week? If you don’t, you have to do something on the pixel and conversion side of things so you get to those 50 a week. Maybe you have to increase the budget — that’s all you have to do. That’s usually what it is. Is your pixel firing only on good leads? If your merchant quality starts to go down, are those negative merchants being reported back to Meta?

If they are, turn off the pixel, fix that, fix the quality of the leads coming through, and then turn it back on so you start sending back good data. And lastly: is your frequency under two? That’s what you’re looking for. If it’s 2.2 or 2.3 but you’re still getting a good cost per lead, you can expect that campaign to start dying out sometime soon. Now, if you watched until this part of the video and found it valuable, and you don’t want to run all these campaigns on your own, or you want to diversify your lead portfolio and your lead vendors, and you’re looking for high-quality real-time exclusive or shared MCA merchants doing $30K to $100K a month in revenue, in all the top industries — restaurants, medical, landscaping, HVAC — requesting $15K

bare minimum, with phone numbers verified with a six-digit passcode and no previous defaults: book a call with the link in the description. We’ll hop on a call and see how we can help. Maybe it’s aged leads, maybe it’s live submissions, maybe it’s real-time leads — whatever it is, we have the lead solution for you. Thanks for watching. Hopefully you found something valuable in this video. And like I said, don’t just watch this video and think, “Oh, that’s good to know.” Act on it. Implement it, so you can actually see the fruits of this fourteen-minute video and actually make some more.