We have taken over a number of carrier ad accounts, and the same five problems appear in nearly all of them. None are exotic. All of them are expensive.
1. Optimising for the wrong conversion event
This is the big one. The campaign is set to optimise for link clicks or landing page views, so Meta finds the people most likely to click — a group that overlaps only loosely with people likely to complete an application.
Set the optimisation event to the completed application. Volume will drop. Cost per application will drop further, and the applications that arrive will be from people who intended to apply.
2. Too many ad sets splitting the budget
A common structure looks like nine ad sets, one per state, each with a small daily budget. It feels organised. It performs badly.
Meta's delivery system needs a certain volume of conversions per ad set per week before it exits the learning phase and optimises properly. Split a modest budget nine ways and no ad set ever reaches that threshold. All nine stay in learning, permanently.
Worse, ad sets from the same account compete against each other in the auction, so you bid up your own costs.
Consolidate. One ad set with a budget large enough to produce real conversion volume beats nine starved ones almost every time.
3. Over-restricted targeting
Interest targeting for driver recruiting is usually counterproductive. The available interest categories are broad and imprecise, and every restriction shrinks the pool Meta can optimise within.
Meta's delivery system, given a clear conversion event and enough budget, finds the people who convert. It is better at this than manual interest selection. Give it room.
The exception is geography, and even there the sensible radius is usually wider than instinct suggests. Drivers relocate for the right package far more readily than most local hiring assumes.
4. Creative that never rotates
Recruitment audiences are finite. Run one ad long enough and frequency climbs, the same drivers see it repeatedly, performance decays and cost per application rises.
Two or three creative variants in rotation, refreshed regularly, keeps frequency manageable. This does not require expensive production — a phone video from the yard often outperforms a polished studio piece, because it looks like the actual company.
5. No tracking past the lead
Meta reports what happened inside Meta. Whether those applications turned into hires happens in your system, and unless someone connects the two, every optimisation decision is made blind.
The connection does not need to be sophisticated. A source field on the application, recorded through to hire, in a spreadsheet, is enough to tell you which campaign produced drivers who are still with you in ninety days. That is the number that should drive budget allocation.
The pattern underneath
Four of these five are the same error in different clothing: the account was set up to produce a metric that is easy to report rather than the outcome the carrier actually needs. Fix the objective and most of the rest follows.