When installs drop and nothing changed

Launch week works, week two collapses, and the team spends a month looking at creative. Sometimes the cause is mechanical.

6 August 2026 · PAD team

1. The traffic mix changed even though the campaigns did not

Launch traffic is heavy on direct shares, press links and desktop visits, all of which open in real browsers where store links work. Week two shifts toward paid social on iOS, where they do not.

Nothing in your setup changed. The share of traffic hitting the broken path did.

2. Placement mix inside the same campaign

Meta reallocates between feed, stories and audience network as it learns. Those placements have different browser behaviour, so the arrival rate moves without any decision on your side.

3. An app update on the platform side

Escape routes are undocumented and change with app versions. A rollout reaching your audience over a few days looks exactly like a gradual performance decline.

4. The store page, honestly

Sometimes it really is the product page or the novelty wearing off. Check it, but check it after ruling out the three above, because those are cheaper to test.

The order to check

• Tap a live ad from inside the app on a phone
• Compare arrival rate week over week if you measure it
• Compare install objectives against traffic objectives
• Compare iOS with Android for the same creative
• Only then look at the store page

Why the mechanical causes come first

They are testable in minutes and fixable in hours. Creative and product hypotheses take weeks to test and cannot be ruled out quickly, so investigating them first guarantees a slow month.