i've had a version of the same conversation three times this month.
someone messages me: "our ads have suddenly got worse. we haven't changed anything. can you take a look?" and they're braced for bad news — a fatigued account, a broken funnel, an expensive rebuild.
and three times in july, the honest answer was: your ads are mostly fine. your dashboard isn't.
the month meta moved the furniture
meta shipped three changes recently that don't announce themselves anywhere in ads manager. no banner, no notification. they just quietly move the numbers you rely on.
one: the off-meta opt-out is gone. there used to be a setting that let people disconnect their off-platform activity — purchases, browsing — from their meta profile. as of july, it's being removed. people who had opted out are visible to your retargeting again. which means your retargeting audiences grew, on their own, without you touching a thing.
why that matters: a bigger audience changes your frequency and your ROAS on those campaigns. and the way it changes them looks exactly like creative fatigue. i watched someone nearly bin their best-performing creative over this. the ad hadn't worn out — the audience underneath it had changed shape.
two: the UK location fee. since 1 july, ads served to people in the UK carry a 2% fee (more in some EU countries). here's the sneaky part: it appears on your invoice as a separate line — it never shows up in ads manager. your dashboard ROAS now flatters you by about 2% on UK spend. if your margins are tight, that's not nothing, and no amount of staring at the dashboard will reveal it.
three: the metrics themselves changed. in mid-june, meta retired the old impressions and reach metrics and moved to a "views" model. the new numbers count differently — views can include the same person twice. so if your impressions "jumped" or your reach "fell" across june into july, there's a decent chance you're comparing two different measurements and calling it a trend.
why this is the part of the job nobody sees
here's what i keep coming back to: none of these three changes is hard to handle once you know it's there. the damage comes from not knowing — because every one of them impersonates a performance problem.
audience grew silently → looks like fatigue → you refresh creative that was working.
fee lands on the invoice → looks like the auction got expensive → you cut budget on a healthy campaign.
metric definition changed → looks like a delivery swing → you draw conclusions from a number that isn't real.
three wrong fixes, each one made confidently, each one making things genuinely worse. the account didn't have a performance problem until somebody "fixed" it.
the question that saves you money
before you change anything in your ad account — this month or any month — ask one question first:
did i change something, or did meta?
it sounds almost too simple. but most expensive mistakes i see in small and mid-size accounts aren't bad ads. they're good ads getting panic-edited because a number moved and nobody checked why it moved.
our monday routine with client accounts starts with the platform, not the account: what did meta change recently, which numbers does that touch, reset those baselines — and only then look at what's left. whatever's still unexplained after that is the real work. it's usually a much shorter list than the panic suggested.
if your numbers went weird this month
start your comparisons from mid-june, not may. pull your actual invoice and add the 2% to your UK cost maths. and if retargeting frequency crept up while your audience size grew — that's probably meta, not your creative.
and if you'd rather someone else kept track of which numbers mean what this month — that's roughly what i do all day. no pitch, the door's just open.
— alex
slac marketing · meta ads for uk businesses
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