Your Facebook Ads Aren't Delivering — Here's the Step-by-Step Diagnostic.

Your campaign launched, but Meta is barely spending: impressions are low, leads are zero, and you don't know why. Work through these checks in order and stop at the first one that matches.

Check the ad's status in Ads Manager. 'In review' means it hasn't been approved yet; review usually takes up to a day but can run longer. 'Rejected' is a different problem (see the guide on rejected Facebook ads (/guides/facebook-ad-rejected-what-to-do)). If it's 'Active' with no impressions, keep going.

Open Account Quality (business.facebook.com/accountquality). It lists restrictions, rejected ads and policy issues for your ad accounts, Pages and business. A restricted ad account can't run ads normally until the issue is resolved, so fix anything flagged here first, or request a review if you think it's a mistake.

A declined card or a reached spending limit stops delivery. Look for a billing banner or a 'Not delivering' status, check Billing and Payments for failed charges, and check both the account spending limit and any campaign spending limit.

Ads Manager shows an estimated audience size for each ad set and warns when the audience is too narrow to deliver well. If you see that warning, broaden it: a wider area, fewer detailed-targeting layers, or no interests at all. If your ads fall under the Housing special ad category (which covers housing repairs), you'll have fewer targeting options to narrow with anyway, so start broad.

A bid cap or cost cap set below what the auction needs means Meta can't win enough impressions at your price. If you're using one and delivery is low, switch to the default highest-volume bid strategy until you have stable results to set a cap from.

Meta says an ad set exits the learning phase after about 50 optimization events in a week. On contractor budgets many ad sets never get there and show 'Learning limited'. That's normal and doesn't stop delivery on its own; results are just noisier.

If you optimize for a Pixel or Conversions API event that hasn't been recorded recently, Ads Manager warns you and delivery suffers, because Meta has nothing to optimize toward. In Events Manager, check that the event you optimize for is still being received. If it isn't, fix tracking before anything else.

A daily budget far below your cost per lead means only a handful of results a week, so delivery and results swing a lot. Meta doesn't publish a minimum effective budget, but as a rule of thumb a daily budget that can't buy about one result a day is hard to read. Consolidate into fewer ad sets, raise the budget, or accept slower, noisier results.

Ad scheduling (running only on certain days or hours) is available with lifetime budgets. Narrow windows force the whole budget into fewer hours, which can raise costs and leave budget unspent near the end date. Widen the schedule.

When several of your ad sets target the same people, Meta enters only one of them in each auction, so the others under-deliver. If you run several ad sets at similar audiences, consolidate them so one ad set gets the delivery.

Check the quality ranking and the 7-day frequency for each ad. Quality ranking compares your ad's perceived quality with ads competing for the same audience; Meta says rankings are diagnostics, not auction inputs, and they appear only after an ad has enough impressions (so an ad that barely delivers may show none). Meta says below-average rankings can point to lower performance. As a rule of thumb, frequency around 3.5 with falling click-through means fatigue. Replace fatigued or low-ranked ads.

Significant edits, such as a big budget change or new targeting, creative or optimization event, can restart the learning phase, and results are less stable until it settles. If you edited recently, give it at least a week (a rule of thumb) before changing anything else.

Then the cause is often outside the campaign settings: payment, identity or business verification, or an account-level restriction. Contact Meta Business Support (via Meta Business Support Home in your Business portfolio); they can see account issues that Ads Manager doesn't show.