Honestly, I think the real issue is we're all trying to force a drunk elephant to do ballet. Meta is not a stable scaling machine right now-it's a mess of broken optimisation, random UI bugs, and support that's basically a chatbot on its last legs. App advertisers got absolutely shafted by ATT and the aggressive automation. You're not crazy, the platform has become brutal if your event data isn't squeaky clean.
But I've seen the same pattern play out. A wellness app I was messing with spent about five to seven grand monthly, watched their ROAS tank from around 2.4 down to 0.7 over three months, while TikTok suddenly looked like a miracle worker. They had identical headaches: ad reviews stuck in limbo, event prioritisation broken, partner publishing errors. Instead of ditching Meta, they rebuilt their entire event stack around high-quality retained subscription signals (not just trial starts) and split acquisition by platform intent. TikTok got the top-of-funnel emotional discovery job, Meta focused on retargeting and higher intent. Within eight weeks Meta clawed back to about 1.9 ROAS, TikTok stayed profitable around 2.6, blended CAC dropped nearly 40%, and retained subscribers jumped from around 400 to over 1,100. Turns out they were fighting for the same role instead of making each platform do what it's actually good at.
But honestly, that fix involved rebuilding your entire attribution flow from scratch. Who has time for that when you're already drowning? So the real question is: are your TikTok users actually sticking around and converting better downstream, or is it just cheaper top-funnel traffic that looks good on a dashboard? Because if it's the latter, give it a few months-TikTok's optimisation gremlins will find you too.
