this month meta quietly changed two things that affect every UK business running ads. neither made the news your customers read, but both change the maths of your ad account. here's the plain-english version, and what i'd do about it this week.
change one: the UK location fee
since 1 july, ads delivered in the UK (and a handful of other countries) carry an extra fee of a few percent — and it's billed on top of your budget, not taken out of it. set £1,000 a month and you'll now pay £1,000 plus the fee.
a few percent sounds like nothing. but it compounds with the thing nobody talks about: waste.
most self-managed accounts i open are quietly wasting 20-40% of spend. dead creatives left running. retargeting aimed at people who already bought. campaigns pointing at pages that broke in a site update months ago. that waste used to cost a pound per pound. now it costs slightly more than a pound per pound — the fee applies to the wasted spend too.
the fee isn't the problem. it's a price rise on not paying attention.
change two: meta's targeting data just got better
mid-july, meta removed the setting that let people disconnect their off-site activity from their account. without getting into the privacy debate — the practical effect for advertisers is that meta's algorithm now sees more, matches better, and targets with fewer blind spots than it did in june.
that's genuinely good news for your results. but it also quietly removes the last good excuse. for years, "the targeting must be off" was where underperforming ads went to hide. meta's AI now finds your buyer better than any interest stack u could build by hand. if the ads still don't sell, the answer is in your offer, your creative, your landing page, or your maths — not in some setting.
a smarter algorithm is a rising tide. it lifts well-run accounts first.
what i'd do this week (takes about 30 minutes)
nothing here needs an agency. open ads manager and check three things.
first, every live ad: has it produced a sale (or lead) in the last 30 days? if not, pause it. sentimentality is expensive now.
second, retargeting: are u paying to show ads to people who already bought? exclude recent purchasers. they were coming back anyway, and the new fee applies to those impressions too.
third, every destination link: click it yourself, on your phone. Broken, bad and slow pages are the most common leaks I find, and they're invisible from inside ads manager.
that half hour of boring maintenance is worth more right now than any clever strategy — because the cost of skipping it just went up.
the honest bit
if u run the checks and everything's clean — great, u didn't need anyone. if u find £300 a month of waste and a page that's been broken since easter, that's worth knowing too. it usually means the account needs eyes on it more than once a quarter, whether those eyes are yours or someone's whose job it is.
either way: don't let a price rise on waste be the thing that finally makes u look. DM me if u have any questions — happy to point u at the right thing to check first.
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