What failed my first paid ad campaign

I spent $800 on Meta ads before anyone had organically converted. Creative looked fine—problem, solution, CTA. Landing page had a 2% trial start rate from email, so I assumed ads would work. Click-through was okay. Trial starts were almost zero. The audience was broad; the message was generic. I paused after five days, rewatched session recordings, and realized ad traffic landed cold on a page written for people who already knew the category. Ads didn't fail—timing did. We retried six months later with a comparison landing page and tighter targeting. Same budget, ten trials. Still not amazing, but at least measurable.