Why your CPL went up (and why it's not Meta's fault)

If your cost per lead jumped 40% in the last 60 days, your media buyer is probably about to send you a deck explaining why it's not their fault. Here's what's actually going on.

Every quarter, like clockwork, we get the same call. A founder of a $5M-$50M service business, frustrated, screen-sharing a Meta dashboard. CPL is up 40, sometimes 80 percent. The agency on the other end of the contract has a polished deck explaining that the algorithm changed, that iOS killed attribution, that Q4 is just hard.

Almost none of that is the actual reason. We've audited a few hundred of these accounts now. The pattern is so consistent it's almost boring.

There are exactly four things that drive CPL on a service-business ad account, and only one of them is the algorithm. In order of how often we see it as the actual culprit: