Meta Ads: ₹400/day chaos, friend's ₹300 smooth - wtf?

trafficcop

I love marketing... but I hate working in marketing when your ad account pulls a f*cking Houdini act while your mate's runs like a dream. Here's my mess:

Setup: Messaging objective, ₹400/day, Housing category (commercial real estate), single Reel, audience in Dehradun + surroundings (_3M+). Fresh account. All rankings 'Above Average'. Cost per lead is a laughable ₹9.

The drama: Spend bounces like a toddler on sugar - Day 1 ₹257, Day 2 missing, Day 3 ₹258, Day 4 ₹60, Day 5 ₹231, Day 6 ₹0. Frequency 1.2, so no saturation. Meanwhile my mate runs ₹300/day in the same category and gets consistent delivery every single day. Same country, similar ad. What am I doing wrong?

I've ruled out spending limits, billing, audience size, policy flags. The only theory left: Housing category throttles delivery in smaller Indian markets like Dehradun, especially on a fresh account. Messaging objective might also be flakier than Conversions. And maybe single Reel is fine, but Meta just doesn't have enough eligible inventory to spend ₹400/day consistently in a restricted pool.

Someone in another thread said it's mostly 'pacing noise' from a new account - the first 7-10 days are jittery because the system is learning within the Housing auction. They suggested duplicating into a Conversions test first, then trying Cost Cap only if it stays lumpy. Another guy brutally told me my 1.07% CTR is shit and I need at least 2% - fair point, my creative probably sucks.

So, experienced folks: is this just baby account blues in a special ad category, or am I missing something dumb? Should I widen geo more, add more creatives, or switch objectives? The unit economics are gold, but scaling feels impossible when delivery is a coin flip.

datanerd

Short answer: pacing noise from a fresh ad account on ₹400/day combined with Messaging objective in Housing-not a broken setup. New accounts can make ₹300/day and ₹400/day look wildly different day to day because Housing auctions are non-linear.

Your CTR of 1.07% and frequency of 1.2 tell me the audience isn't saturated. In this objective, delivery is mostly conversation intent plus policy review, so fresh accounts often stay in pre-scale mode and bounce between zero spend and full-day burn.

I keep seeing this pattern in India Housing: account-age jitter the first 7-10 days, special-category policy scoring drift, and a low budget causing sparse response events. A single Reel is fine at this level. Test one variable at a time-duplicate the campaign into a Conversions test, then try Cost Cap only if the same setup still jitters.

Do you have Messenger open rates and first-response timing from the chat side? That usually separates objective friction from ad account trust issues.

cyberpunk

Sorry for being blunt, but a 1.07% CTR means your creative is genuinely bad. In my experience, if you're not hitting at least 2% CTR, don't bother optimising anything else until you fix the assets themselves.

I'd aim for a Hook Rate above 35-40% and a Body Rate above 8-10%. Produce 5-10 new creatives and see if you can push past those thresholds. That's where the real gap is, not the budget difference.

communityfirst

Oh, this is such a classic trap - and it's maddening when you see a friend getting better results with less budget. From what I've seen across different platforms, the housing special ad category is almost definitely the issue here. Meta throttles those campaigns hard, especially in smaller regional markets like Dehradun/Haridwar where eligible inventory just isn't deep enough, even with an estimated 3M+ reach. Your friend running ₹300/day without SAC restrictions has way more auction access - it's not a fair comparison at all.

The zero-spend day and missing day 2 suggest Meta is hitting inventory walls and pausing entirely, rather than gradually under-delivering. One thing that's helped me in similar situations: widen the geo a bit more, or add fresh creative variations so the system has more combinations to test within that restricted pool. Also, messaging conversations as an objective is already a narrower optimisation event - stacking SAC on top of that is a double constraint on who the algorithm can even show your ad to. It's a tough spot, but you're not missing some simple trick; it's the system working as designed, unfortunately.