Warning: That Facebook ad I spent $500 on got me 0 sales

I run a small online store for handmade leather wallets out of Austin, and last month I dumped $500 into a single Facebook ad campaign. I thought I had it all figured out with a good image and targeting people into outdoor gear. After 3 days, I had 120 clicks to my site but zero purchases. Turns out my landing page was slow and my checkout button was broken on mobile. Has anyone else wasted money on ads only to find the real problem was your own site?

2 comments

2 Comments

lopez.brooke1mo ago

120 clicks and zero sales is a brutal wake up call. I've seen this exact thing with a friend who ran a Shopify store for custom dog leashes. He spent $800 on ads, got tons of traffic, but his site had a popup that covered the entire checkout button on iPhone. The real kicker was that Facebook's ad platform actually shows you a "Page Load Time" metric in the backend. Check your Facebook Ads Manager report and look for that number. If it's over 3 seconds, you're basically burning cash.

patriciam221mo ago

Not sure I totally buy that page load time is the main reason people aren't buying. I've seen plenty of slow sites that still make sales just because the product is good enough or the price is right. People will wait a few extra seconds if they really want something, especially if it's something unique like custom dog leashes. Plus, that popup issue sounds more like a design problem than a speed problem, you could fix that in like ten minutes. Blaming Facebook's algorithm or load times feels like an easy excuse when the real issue might be the product itself or the ad targeting being off.

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