Over the last year, Facebook ad performance has taken a nosedive that's hard to overstate. After a decade running profitable campaigns on the platform-with all the attribution headaches from the early 2020s-nothing compares to this mess. It genuinely feels like the platform is broken.
i know plenty of people moan about poor results, and yeah, some are running cheap products on a fiver-a-day budget. but I've spent ten years scaling profitable ad spend on Meta, so I reckon I've got some ground to stand on here.
Here's my theory, and it might sound a bit out there.
First, there's a structural problem. A new wave of advertisers has flooded the auction over the last couple of years-companies with no real budget ceiling and zero sensitivity to cost per acquisition. AI outfits like Anthropic, which just raised money at near a trillion valuation and crossed $47bn in annual revenue, run consumer acquisition campaigns constantly. Same story with OpenAI, Perplexity, and Gemini. then you've got online gambling and prediction platforms like Kalshi and DraftKings, spending aggressively on user acquisition no matter the short-term efficiency. when those kinds of players compete alongside small businesses, the small businesses lose. The economics simply don't stack up anymore at the CPA levels a real business needs to stay profitable.
Second, Meta itself is making things worse. They've rolled out AI-powered creative tools that are genuinely dreadful. you get Indian music slapped onto ads targeting American audiences. translations randomly switch to Spanish. AI-generated product images that I thought I'd turned off show up with a bloke wearing a shirt with four legs. this stuff happens constantly, and it's hammering performance in ways we've got little control over.
the real kicker is that Meta can't admit any of this. they've spent the last two years telling shareholders they're an AI company-that narrative props up their stock. Rolling back these tools, or even acknowledging they're causing problems, would blow that story apart. So they keep pushing an ad product that's actively getting worse, because the alternative is a Wall Street nightmare they can't afford.
And those massive advertisers i mentioned? they don't give a toss about ad quality. They just want eyeballs.
After ten-plus years on the platform, it's hard to know what to do. The levers that used to work don't work anymore. and the company running the show has no real incentive to fix it.
