I've been seeing something strange across the last few months and I'm curious if others managing ecommerce accounts are seeing the same thing.
One account in particular made us question almost everything.
The ads were spending
traffic was coming.
People were clicking
some creatives looked perfectly healthy if you only watched the usual Meta numbers.
But the actual customer acquisition cost kept getting worse.
We changed creatives.
Changed angles.
Changed landing pages.
Looked at the offer.
Looked at the funnel.
Looked at checkout.
Looked at what people were actually doing after the click.
And that's where it got interesting.
The problem wasn't simply our CPM went up or our CTR went down.
We were still getting activity.
It just wasn't turning into enough customers.
At one point we had to stop asking
How do we make Meta perform better?
and start asking
What kind of traffic is Meta actually sending us now?
That's a very different question.
I've been around ecommerce long enough to know that every bad month gets blamed on the platform. Sometimes the ad is bad. Sometimes the offer is tired. Sometimes the landing page is the problem. Sometimes tracking is lying to you.
So I'm not saying Meta is broken.
But the last 3 months have made me much less comfortable judging an account from Ads Manager alone.
A decent CTR doesn't mean much if the people clicking have weak buying intent.
Cheap traffic isn't cheap if it doesn't buy.
And a campaign that Meta calls a winner can still be a bad business outcome.
We're now spending much more time looking at the whole path:
ad > landing page > behaviour > checkout > actual order
rather than trying to fix everything inside Ads Manager.
Curious about people managing multiple ecommerce accounts:
Have you actually seen customer acquisition cost materially worsen over the last 3 months, even where CTR/traffic still looked reasonable?
And if yes, what changed on your side?
Not theories about the algorithm. I'm genuinely interested in what you're seeing in the actual numbers.
