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Meta always has days where performance across the board for a majority of businesses is bad. So we built a tool that tells you when Meta had a bad day. And in this episode, I'm going to teach you how to optimize a campaign when Meta has a bad day. My name's Dylan. I'm one of the hosts here at the e commerce Alley podcast. And this is an audio only solo episode. It's just me. Josh isn't here today. I'm not sure if you guys noticed, but last week on Thursday, Josh dropped a solo episode, audio only. And this is kind of something that we're starting to do just as our thank you for audio listeners. We just wanted to give you some things, some content that you can't get anywhere else. It's exclusive to audio, just as our thank you for being audio listeners. And I just wanted to make a request before we get into this episode. If you like this episode, if you've been a longtime listener, maybe you just found us recently, we're trying to become the number one e-commerce podcast in the world. And a review would help us a ton to get to that. So if you if you'd be willing to leave us a review, it would mean the world. So the the team over at Breezeway, which is a software that we are co-founders in, built the bad day detector. And it's based on Reddit. And it's funny because we kept seeing posts on Reddit all the time where people would ask, hey, are other people experiencing issues? Is Meta having a bad day? And it was pretty much every other day. And in coaching, we we coach a lot of e-commerce brands. And there were times where I would coach, I coach on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. And on Tuesday, I would coach some brands and I'd be like, this is really strange. Like these brands all had high CPAs on these two days. And it was like the first time, the first brand that I coached was like, this is weird. Maybe something's wrong. I'd go look at their website, look at their stuff, and be like, well, I don't know. There's it doesn't seem like there's anything wrong here, but yes, your CPAs were high, but they came back down. That's really strange. And then the next brand I would coach, same issue. And then by the third brand, when all three brands had the same issue, I would start to be like, okay, so this was like a widespread issue. So then when I went into coaching on Wednesday, I kind of went in expecting people to be like, what happened on Tuesday and Wednesday last week? And I would be able to tell them at that point, yeah, Meta just had some issues. But now we have the bad day detector where we can know the day after because it looks at all the aggregate data like I used to do in coaching, but it looks at it live time and makes the decisions for us. So the team at Breezeway built the bad day detector based on aggregate data inside of Breezeway. It basically uses statistical significance and a bunch of other stuff I'm not really qualified to talk about in order to tell you if Meta actually had a statistically, statistically significant bad day or not. Now, you may have a bad day that doesn't get reported on the bad day detector, but that's because the bad day detector is looking at over 50 e-commerce businesses inside of Breezeway spending over $500 a day to make sure that a bad day actually was a bad day. We don't want to flag every single day that has slightly worse CPAs as a bad day. We want it to actually be a genuine report of a bad day. Now, here's the problem. A lot of time business owners kill campaigns or or even winning ads, winning ad sets because performance tanked. I'd see this all the time in coaching, where I would be looking at a campaign that had been doing so well and the brand owner killed it. And I was like, why did you kill this? And they're like, well, all of a sudden it just kind of fell off. So I thought maybe, you know, insert reason here, whatever that is, create a fatigued audience, whatever. And I would typically ask that person, so what what are the odds that all of a sudden you you had a winning campaign, a winning ad set, a winning ad, a winning creative, winning message, winning style, winning something, and it just fell off a cliff. Because these are not like slow increases of CPA. It's not like you go from a $20 CPA to a 23 the next day to a 25 to a 27 to a 30 to a 35 over a week. It's like you go from a 20 to a 35 in a day, sometimes even like 20 to 70. It's crazy. And the the hard part, like I explained earlier, is before the bad day detector, you really didn't know. It really came down to, for me, I was able to kind of figure it out by a process of elimination or just by exposure of seeing multiple brand accounts in a week, where I would be able to start to tell, okay, I think Metam might be having some issues today, but as a solo owner running your own ads, you don't probably have the insights that I do when I'm looking at multiple brand accounts to say, okay, everyone had a bad day this day. So it makes sense. So now before we dive into this episode, I want to, like I said, give you the three things that we do to optimize a campaign when Meta has a bad day. But I wanted to let you guys know next Tuesday, May 26th, 2026, we are doing state of meta ads, Q2, and Breezeway. Breezeway is going to come with new features and data. And the e-commerce alley is going to come with what's working on Meta right now. Whether you're already using Breezeway, maybe you've considered using Breezeway, you've just heard of Breezeway, or you just like to attend events for some reason, uh, we'd love to have you attend this event. Uh we're like I said, we're going to share data that Breezeway's been curating for meta ads, as well as what we're currently seeing work on Meta. We're also going to be going over new features that have been released to Breezeway in the past few months. And then most importantly, we're going to show how we use Breezeway to optimize and make data-driven decisions for e-commerce brands. And now, if you attend this event, we are going to be giving everyone on the call a limited three-week Breezeway trial. So if you go to the Breezeway website right now, you'll only be able to get 10 days. So you'll get 11 extra days of trying Breezeway, just as our thank you for attending. The link is below in the show notes to RSVP and add it to your calendar. And just as a note, this will not be recorded. So you do have to be live to get it. So I'm going to go over three things that we do to optimize campaigns when Meta is having a bad day. One, our exact step-by-step flow for optimizing when meta has a bad day. Two, how to read the bad day detector. And three, how to not lose profits when meta has a bad day. So let's start with reading the bad day detector. It's a pretty simple tool. It has some hidden nuances that are a little hard to visualize that I want to talk through. Here's what I would recommend go to breezeway.co slash bad day detector. Links in the description to go take a look at it while I'm kind of talking through it here. So we work with over 200 e-commerce brands and we we truly rely now on the bad day detector to tell them how to make good decisions. As I as I explained with coaching in the past, I kind of had to make my own inferences in the past, but now I have the bad data detector to make good decisions. And what I've learned after a few years of doing this, bad days impact accounts on different days. This is this is this is a key. So for instance, there actually was a bad day reported on May 11th. But I've actually noticed that if a bad day was reported on May 11th, it could be plus or minus one to two days per brand, which makes this really tricky because each each ad account is a little bit different. And you may see a bad day on the 12th, but the bad day detector reports one on the 11th. So the bad day detector is really great for understanding if there is a bad day in the vicinity of time you're looking at, plus or minus one or two days from the reported day. Now, a lot of times the bad days are reported on the same days. And I was actually talking to Cliff about this a few weeks ago. He said something that was really interesting where a lot of times a bad day is actually created by meta underspending one day and then the next day wanting to spend the rest of your budget, so overspending, but then not having the audience to hit when it overspends. So it goes to a worse audience, essentially, which then means you're getting poor quality traffic. And if Meta does that for multiple brands at a time, which it typically does, that's what causes a bad day. Back in January and February, we had red dots going up into like the negative six range, which is like really, really, really bad, which I think a lot of people here probably felt that. And that is what actually caused us to want to make the bad day detector. I think we we finished it around mid-March, maybe end of March. So that's what made us want to do it because January and February was just so rough. You can go and look and say, oh, turns out that bad week, two weeks that I had in January and February were not my fault. It was actually Meta. So now I want to talk about how we actually optimize a campaign when Meta has a bad day. So the first thing we do pretty much every morning is open the bad day detector because that sets our expectation for what to expect when we then open the ads manager. A lot of times, and and this is what we've we've seen in the past, you you're used to like a CPA of 20 bucks. Like you're just living at $20. And then overnight it turns to 35, which understandably most business owners' reaction at that point is to cut back on spend or turn things off or or try to, you know, do whatever's in their control to fix it. But unfortunately, this can make a bad day even worse. And I saw this so much before we had the bad day detector where something would happen, people would would kind of freak out and make like rash decisions that then extended a one or two day bad day into like a week plus. Like it can really, really hurt your account. Now, before the bad day detector existed, you were left looking at your ad manager and wondering did Meta start targeting a worse audience? Did my creative fatigue, did my offer die? Is there now like a technical issue on my landing page or my website? But now that we have the bad day detector, we don't have to assume it was us anymore and we don't have to go into panic mode. We can say, oh, meta had a bad day, and then the way we optimize the campaign is waited out, unfortunately. The only thing you can do is wait it out because you don't have control. It's not like you can send an email to Meta and say, hey, don't have bad days anymore. It just doesn't work. So you don't have control over Meta having a bad day or not. Now, what I am going to talk about here in just a second is what you do have control over, how to not lose profits when Meta is having a bad day. But here's here's a big caveat to the bad day detector. This is not a cop-out. We tell our clients that yes, Meta may be having a bad day, but it doesn't mean you should just throw your hands in the air and say, oh well. It might be hard to not do that. But here's the thing: a lot of times you might think you have a bad day, but then you go to the bad day detector and there were no bad days in the vicinity. And now you're like, well, maybe the bad day detector is wrong. No, you can't use the bad day detector as a cop-out for not looking deeper. Go and look at your cost per click, your add to cart, your conversion rate, your AOV. Figure out did something actually happen? Did something change? Did I turn something off? Did I increase my budget? Did I whatever? Because we always want to assume that the problem is us. We don't want to blame Meta because unfortunately, blaming Meta will get you nowhere. The only thing that it can do, if you look at the bad day detector, is give you confidence or clarity in potentially a bad day. But we always want to assume it's our fault because if you blame Meta for poor results, ultimately your profits will just go down the drain. Which leads me to my last point. If Meta is having a bad day, you can't expect a refund. They will probably say advertising isn't a perfect side, perfect science and skirt responsibility. We love you, Meta, but come on. But this is this is really what Breezeway exists for. We want to expose data, analytics, and information that Meta will never tell you. So uh if you want to learn a little bit more about what Bruceway is exposing, what data, what analytics and everything, I would encourage you to attend our State of Meta ads Q2 next Tuesday, May 26th, and see how we bring this data to life, how we use Bruceway to make better decisions, and what we're seeing with Meta right now. But here's the thing you're responsible for your own profits. And despite what Meta does to your account, you don't have control over that. There are ways that you can regain and protect your profits after Meta has a bad day. I'm gonna give you two. One is keep an eye on your 30-day ad spend percentage. Now, Breezeway has this built in in the CEO dashboard and the metrics tab, where it automatically tracks your 30-day ad spend percentage, shows it to you visually on a graph. It also shows you in the CEO dashboard. We recommend keeping your ad spend percentage of revenue between 20 to 25%. So your revenue, 20% of your revenue is how much you should be spending on ads. And we recommend a range because if you say 20%, I want to be at 20, well, you can't keep it exactly at 20. It will uh move up and down. So pick a range that makes sense for your business. Most businesses are 20 to 25%, but depending on your cost of goods and your profit margin and all of that, you might be able to go a little bit higher. Now, here's the thing: a bad day, you look at your ads manager and you're like, oh my gosh, my CPA in the last seven days is just ridiculously high, which is true. But a bad day only raises your ad spend percentage by like a percentage or two. Your 30-day ad spend percentage will only move by like one or two percent. So if you've been keeping your ad spend percentage in check up to this point, it won't hurt you that bad. It might make your ads look bad for a week, but it's not going to actually hurt your profit. Now, if you're not keeping your ad spend percentage in check within that target range, maybe 20 to 25%, bad day or not, this really doesn't have to apply with a bad day, but it might make it feel a lot worse because one or two percent more over a range you already are outside of can really hurt. We recommend decreasing your spend to where it would comfortably be within that range, despite meta having a bad day or not. This is something that is in your control that will protect your profits. And you need to take control of your ad spend percentage because that is the thing that you you actually have control over, and that's the thing that's going to actually protect your profit. And like I said, a bad day detector is not going to take your ad spend percentage from 20% to 40%. It's not going to do it. It's only a few days. Now, if you go and turn things off and you you do some crazy things in your ad account when Meta has a bad day, that can hurt your admin percentage a whole lot more. But if your ad spent percentage is already in check, a bad day is not going to completely destroy your profits. The second thing that you should do is just fight for better results. Just because Meta is having a bad day doesn't mean you should stop your advertising cadence that you know you should be maintaining. You should still launch ads weekly, you should still send emails weekly. You have to do the things that are in your control. We have an episode of the podcast called Three Things to Do When Your Business Hits a Slow Season. It's episode 240. I'll link that in the notes below. I would recommend listening to that because it's a 20, 30-minute deep dive on even more things that you should do and stay focused on when the business slows down. And we actually talk about the bad day detector in there, where sometimes a slow season is just caused by the season. Sometimes slowness is caused by bad day on meta. Sometimes it's caused by whatever. But anytime that your business slows down or feels like it's not moving, whether it's meta or not, it's the same things that you have to do. That episode goes way more in depth on that if you want to listen to that. So to recap, the bad day detector is a tool, not a cop-out. Use it to make sure you're making the right decision. Don't use it to cast blame on meta for poor results. Secondly, the bad day detector is very valuable because making quick knee-jerk reactions when it was meta and not you can turn a two-day bad day streak into a seven plus day bad day streak. And lastly, you need to keep your focus, put your focus on the things that you actually have control over in your business because focusing on things you can't control, like a few bad days on meta, will cost you a lot more in the long run. Don't forget about the State of Meta Ads Q2 with Breezeway on May 26th. There's a link below to RSUP for that. We'll see you in the next episode.