Let’s be real, Meta ads are a massive Catch-22. To get the results you actually want, you need data. But to get that data in the first place, you have to spend money on ads that… well, usually don’t work right away.
If you’ve just opened a brand-new Meta ad account, you’ve likely noticed that the performance feels… “sticky.” It’s slower, more expensive, and less predictable than the accounts you see the gurus bragging about. It is undeniably harder to succeed with a new account in 2026, but it is far from impossible 🙂
I’ll be blunt here: there isn’t some “magic button” or hidden setting buried in Ads Manager that’s going to suddenly wake up a cold account. Success isn’t about hacks. It’s about actually getting how Meta’s brain works. And honestly? It’s about learning to ignore the “best practices” and total noise people throw around this industry that just doesn’t work in the real world.
Meta’s AI just watches who buys. It builds a profile of your customers by looking for weird habits or interests you’d never think of.
Imagine your account discovers that women aged 42 who love cats and trampolining are your best buyers. Moving forward, the AI will hunt for that exact demographic. It also learns the nuances: what time of day they buy, how many times they need to see an ad before clicking, and which headlines stop their scroll.
A new account has no history. Meta has no idea who you are or who should be seeing your ads yet. You’re starting from zero. Don’t sit back and expect things to figure themselves out. You have to feed it the right information first, otherwise it’s never going to find the right people for you.
When results don’t come instantly, many advertisers suggest switching your goal. They’ll tell you: “Since you aren’t getting sales, just run a Traffic campaign to get some activity on the account.”
This is some of the worst advice you could take.
Look at it this way. If you’re trying to finish a marathon but your cardio is trashed, you wouldn’t head to the local pool to do laps, right? I mean, sure, swimming is great exercise for the whole body, but it’s not going to teach your legs how to survive 26 miles of hot pavement.
It’s the same thing here. If you optimize for clicks because sales feel too expensive, you’re just training the account to find people who click but never buy. You’re teaching it the wrong skill.
You’re getting “traffic fitness” but zero real-world results.
It’s all about what you’re telling the algorithm to do. When you set up a Traffic campaign, Meta basically goes out and finds “click-happy” people. These are the folks who spend their entire day tapping on links but almost never actually buy a thing.
Sales campaigns are a different beast entirely. They go after “buyers”, people who have a real, proven track record of actually hitting that “complete purchase” button.
The problem is that if you ask Meta for clicks, it’s going to give you the cheapest, lowest-quality traffic it can find. You’ll end up paying for “serial clickers” or people who just accidentally tapped your ad while scrolling. If you want sales, you have to tell the machine you want sales from the very first second. Even if things feel slow at the start, having three real customers who show the pixel what a buyer looks like is a million times better than getting 3,000 junk clicks that just leave the machine confused.
You’ve got zero history to work with, so the account needs a push. Set it up like this for the first month or so:
Experienced accounts with millions of data points can often use “Open Targeting” (no interests, just age/gender/location) because the pixel already knows who to find. On a new account, Open is often too broad. Meta will waste your budget testing random groups of people because it has no “starting point.”
The biggest mistake I see is people taking a tiny budget and trying to smear it across 15 campaigns and 50 different ads. All that does is dilute your data until it’s useless.
Advantage+ Shopping campaigns are a “set it and forget it” dream for established brands, but they are a nightmare for new accounts. ASC thrives on automated, open targeting. If Meta doesn’t know who your customer is, it will spend your budget recklessly trying to find them.
It’s tempting to throw $1,000 a day at a new account to “force” it to work. Don’t! A new account is like a high-performance engine that hasn’t been broken in yet and if you redline it too early, you’ll just blow the motor.
I’m on your side, remember? Just start with 10 bucks. It’s enough to test your hooks without the stress of blowing a month’s rent in 48 hours.
The most successful advertisers I know aren’t the ones with the most complex “hacks”; they are the ones who can hold their nerve. When you launch a new Meta ad account, the first 72 hours are almost always “red.” You’ll see high costs or zero sales.
I’ve been there and that “itchy finger” feeling is real. But honestly? Don’t be that person who panics and starts clicking buttons the second things look slow.
Changing your targeting or cutting an ad set mid-run does more harm than good. You’re basically forcing everything to reset and start from scratch.
If you’re getting even two sales a day, leave it alone. On a fresh account, that’s a goldmine. It’s the only way the system actually figures things out.
With small and medium size businesses, building a strategy around advertising on Meta can be challenging. If you’re just starting out with Meta ads, it can feel like you’re constantly guessing: budgets stall, results fluctuate, dashboards don’t match reality, and you have no idea if it’s your creative, your targeting, or just the platform acting weird again.
AdForce was built to remove that chaos.
It gives you a clean, centralized workspace where everything from funding to campaign setup to spend tracking just makes sense. No messy handoffs. No scrambling through disconnected tools. No wondering if your setup is the reason results aren’t showing up.
You can plug in, fund your wallet, open a brand new business manager and ad accounts with high trust score, and get live with campaigns, without fighting 10 different tabs or worrying about hidden platform quirks.
Whether you’re spending $50/day or gearing up to scale past $5k/day, AdForce gives you the stability and clarity to actually focus on performance, not platform problems.
If you’re ready to stop battling the setup and start testing real offers, real creative, and real data you can actually book a free 30 min consultation and see how you can leverage Meta advertising and gather all data to help you scale.
