There has been a lot of talk on Twitter/X about Meta Ads being “broken”. This has happened before, but it’s never lasted longer than a few weeks. This time, many brands have seen soft performance for all of Q1.
Typically these periods of soft Meta performance are tied to a code update that makes the ad targeting algorithm less effective. One example: Meta usually pushes a big code update to prepare for Q4, so brands see 1-2 weeks of soft performance some time in October or early November. Think of this as Meta kicking its own core algo into “learning mode”
That’s not what’s happening this time. There have been several platform outages and bugs since the start of 2024. And Meta did push some new business manager features live in Q1. But there is no obvious cause/effect relationship between poor performance and a specific code push or platform outage on Meta’s side.
To complicate things further: only some brands are seeing poor performance. Others are doing fine. But there isn’t a pattern that separates the winners from the losers.
The brands experiencing the “brokenness” are typically seeing at least one of these things:
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- CPMs that are much higher than they’ve ever been historically
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- CVRs that are much lower than they’ve ever been historically
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- Cost Cap campaigns over-spending, or spending above their CPA targets
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- Volatile performance–3x ROAS on Monday, 0.4x ROAS on Tuesday
This volatility is making it really hard for brands to hit their profitability targets and decide how much to spend on ads. Some brands have been able to manage volatility by reducing spend, while other brands have turned ads off entirely.
Based on what the community has been sharing, there are three possibilities for what’s going on here:
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- Meta’s algorithm is losing effectiveness and the company doesn’t know why. They’ve been struggling to fix the issue for months.
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- Something is wrong with Meta’s algo or ops and they don’t care, because most advertisers are still spending. DTC brands and small businesses are actually a small fraction of Meta’s revenue by dollar volume. The big boys are still spending on pageview campaigns or whatever, so why worry?
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- The macro environment is changing. We’re entering a recession or reaching a tipping point re: the number of brands in the market. Either way, total in-market demand is in decline.
What all three of these possibilities have in common: they’re outside of our control, there is no way to predict an end date, and no one is coming to save us (sorry!).
What Can I Do Today?
If you’ve seen inconsistent Meta performance in Q1, or you can’t hit your KPIs, here are some things you can do right now: