The most common message I get after someone launches their first real ad campaign is some version of "it's been a day and it hasn't spent anything, is it broken?" Close second: "it spent $80 and I got nothing." Those are two completely different problems, and most artists treat them as the same one, which is how you end up killing a campaign that was working and babying one that never would.
I'll go through it in the order I actually walk people through it.
First, are you stuck or are you learning?
Two situations that look identical from the outside and need opposite responses.
Stuck: $0 spent, zero impressions, after a full 24 hours. That's not the learning phase. Nothing is happening at all. Something's blocking delivery and you need to go find it.
Learning: the campaign IS spending, but the numbers are jumpy, ugly, and expensive, and cost per result swings around hour to hour. That's normal. Meta is figuring out who to show the ad to, and the right move is to leave it completely alone for four to seven days. Every edit restarts the learning. Duplicating a campaign that's already spending is how you pay for the same lesson twice.
If you only take one thing from this post: don't touch a spending campaign in its first few days, no matter how bad it looks.
The un-stick checklist for a true $0 campaign
Walk it in order. Nine times out of ten it's one of the first two.
Status: In Review or Active? New ad accounts can sit in review for up to a day. If it says In Review, wait it out.
Payment method verified? An unconfirmed card won't spend, and Meta doesn't always shout about it. Go check.
Start date in the future? Sounds dumb. Happens constantly.
Daily budget at least $5? Under that, delivery gets weird.
Audience impossibly narrow? Stack five interests and one city and there may be nobody left to show it to.
All clean and still $0? Duplicate the ad set and delete the original. I can't fully explain why, but a fresh duplicate genuinely un-sticks stalled campaigns. Still dead after that plus another eight to twelve hours, it's almost always payment verification or a first review that hasn't cleared.
The setup mistakes that make Phase 1 useless
If you're running the two-phase play (cheap video views first, retarget the watchers second), three settings quietly wreck it.
Run it in Ads Manager, not the Boost button in the app. Boost forces a "View Profile" call to action and picks the wrong goal. In Ads Manager you want the Awareness objective with ThruPlay as the goal.
Set the call to action to "No Button." Phase 1 isn't sending anyone anywhere. The "Sponsored" label can't be removed and doesn't matter; the button is the thing you're removing.
Use manual placements and turn Audience Network off. Automatic placements pull cheap junk views from random third-party apps, and those people retarget like garbage in Phase 2. You want actual Instagram and Facebook watchers in the pool.
And when you're 48 hours in and the ad has thousands of views and zero likes, that's correct. It's a views campaign. Meta shows it to people likely to watch, not people likely to react. The number that matters is hold rate, meaning video plays at 50 percent versus 3-second plays. If half the people who start it get to the middle, your hook works and the retargetable pool is building. If almost nobody passes three seconds you've got a clip problem, and no budget fixes that.
Now the expensive one: starving budgets
The silent killer of Phase 2, and almost nobody talks about it.
Meta's conversion optimization needs roughly 50 conversion events a week to learn. If your budget can't feed that, the machine never leaves the guessing phase. Do the math on your own campaign: $10 a day at $11 per result is about six results a week, so Meta guesses forever and you pay for the privilege.
Under about $15 to $20 a day, optimize for a higher-volume event instead. Landing Page Views usually does it. Once click volume can support a deeper event, move down to it. Or stay on video views and keep growing the warm pool until you can afford to feed a conversion campaign properly. An underfed conversion campaign is the most expensive way to buy nothing.
Related: at small spend, run one campaign, one ad set, all the budget in it. Don't split "sales" and "traffic" in parallel and hope. And once a conversion event actually works, kill the cheap-click Traffic ads, they were only ever a placeholder.
Pixel plumbing, because this is where the rest of the money goes
If your ad reports link clicks but landing page views sit at zero, your pixel isn't firing on the destination. Usually the ad points straight at Spotify (no pixel there) or the page is missing a PageView event.
Don't trust settings screens. Verify live in Events Manager under Test Events: click your own ad and watch the events come in. If you built a custom event it has to be configured as a custom conversion, or the ad set sits there saying "may not deliver" and you'll think it's stuck when it's actually misconfigured.
The honest bit
Ads amplify a song people already respond to. If a track isn't landing organically, the ad just shows more people something they skip. Fix the clip, fix the first three seconds, then spend. And before any targeting mechanics, know who the music is for: the genre, the established artists whose fans would love you, roughly where those people are. Show the wrong people the right song and you get zero fans no matter how clean the setup is.
Nobody's going to run this for you, and you shouldn't want them to, because the campaign that teaches you the most is the one you set up yourself. Musuni coaches you through your own Ads Manager step by step, walks the un-stick checklist when things stall, and its smart link already fires the pixel events you need, so you can point ads at it and actually see the click-outs instead of squinting at two graphs.