Running Too Many Channels at Once

Running six channels with a budget that could properly fund two produces poor results on all six: insufficient creative volume per platform, insufficient audience learning, insufficient data for meaningful optimisation. The result is a portfolio of underfunded, underperforming campaigns that each look marginally active but none of which create real business impact. Identify the two or three channels where your audience demonstrably spends time and where your creative format advantages are strongest. Fund those channels properly — typically $5,000–$15,000 per month on a single Meta campaign set before the algorithm has enough conversion data to optimise meaningfully.

Starving Campaigns of Creative

The most common reason for declining campaign performance over time is creative fatigue. On Meta, effective frequency for most audiences is 2–4 exposures before performance begins to decline. A campaign running to a fixed audience needs new creative roughly weekly — a requirement most brands' creative production processes cannot meet. The mismatch between media velocity and creative velocity is one of the most predictable and consistently underaddressed causes of declining ROAS over a campaign flight. Build creative production as a continuous process, not a campaign event.

Using Platform Attribution Without Validation

Every major advertising platform has a financial incentive to show you favourable attribution numbers. Meta wants you to believe Meta drove your sales. Google wants you to believe Google drove your sales. Both simultaneously claim credit for the same conversions. Budget allocation decisions made on false attribution data are systematically wrong — consistently underinvesting in upper-funnel channels that create demand and overinvesting in lower-funnel channels that merely capture it.

Not Negotiating Media Rates

A significant proportion of media buyers accept the rate card as given. Private marketplace deals, direct publisher buys, and programmatic guaranteed deals all offer negotiated pricing — typically 15–40% below open-auction CPMs for equivalent placements. The leverage for negotiation comes from volume, commitment, and speed of payment. The transparency principle matters: any rate savings negotiated on your behalf should flow to you, not to your agency's margin.