First off, you can’t look at lead flow from a few days perspective. In most cases, you should look at average lead flow over a minimum of a week’s period, but ideally over 2-4 weeks. Fluctuations absolutely happen with Facebook and it does NOT spend your ad monkey evenly throughout all days. It withholds budget as necessary if the ‘right people’ aren’t available to serve ads to and spends more on some days when appropriate.
Secondly, any time we make a change or update there is likely to be a temporary slow-down in leads. Changes reset Facebook’s ‘smart learning algorithm’ to a certain degree. Facebook typically takes 1-2 weeks to stabilize. This is also WHY you should avoid making frequent change requests and having large breaks in ads not running (try to avoid more than 3 days gap). We will inherently make updates as time goes on to improve the performance of a campaign, even without your request. But we also know when it’s the right time to do it and not do it as opposed to when you may make a request.
Thirdly, lead costs (advertising costs in general) do increase during the fourth quarter of the year and often when there are elections. There is only so much advertising space available on Facebook, and you are still in competition with your industry and other industries to gain ad space.
Lastly, if a change is made, like the creation of a new ad (which you may request or we may do as part of our optimization process) there will be bigger dips as the ad gets reviewed by Facebook for approval (often 24-48 hours) and then for the algorithms to start their learning process (which is typically a 7-14 day period).