u/growxme

Hey fellow agency founders, hope your week had a great start!

We're a growth marketing agency with a core focus on performance marketing. This year, as part of the lead generation plan, we've started to focus on improving the website overall while also launching "academy" blog posts as part of the content and discovery plan.

I have been working on this for about a month only but we're starting to see our pages resulting on the first SERP for multiple queries, both long and medium tail keywords. But these clicks don't yet generate leads and lead generation is our primary objective right now.

I'm okay if this effort doesn't bear immediate/short term results but I wanna hear what are the thoughts of other agency founders here who took the time to invest in SEO rather than pure outbound.

Why your ROAS drops in Meta Ads

I see one new article on meta ads tanking for a new user almost every day. Many of these folks repeat the same pattern: ROAS is stable then you scale and performance drops/CPA rose drastically.

And reading that everyday makes me kinda uncomfortable. Not gonna claim, I haven't seen ad accounts tank for real but I disagree on some points.

Many people blame audience fatigue, creatives, seasonality, and the "Meta being Meta” explanations. While there's some weight to it, ngl, but they don’t explain *why it dropped right then*. It's almost always posted as a "sudden death" event.

What I think is actually happening:

My team and I have been working on breaking down and formalizing our observations for a couple of months (honestly, for a while much longer than that but we consciously have been at it for these past couple of months)

From what I’ve seen across accounts, ROAS drops usually come down to 3 things:

1. Signal breakdown

Meta optimizes based on conversion signals (purchase, atc, installs,etc). So when those become inconsistent (even slightly), performance doesn’t collapse, it becomes unpredictable.

That’s what a ROAS drop often is: not a failure but a degradation in learning quality.

2. You scaled into a different audience

When you increase budget, you’re not just reaching more of the same people (hopefully).

You start hitting: lower intent users, less aware buyers, and slower converters. Your marginal effieciency of results per dollar spent also drops.

Maybe you were spending 500$ a day reaching enough audience to maintain 25 conversions a day, giving you a CPA of 20$ and that was maintaining a healthy ROAS for you. But once you scale from 500 to lets say 1000$ a day (don't make such a huge jump at once btw), you expect the system to penetrate new audience with similar purchase affinities but the number of users that were ready that day to buy from you was hardly 40 (read: demand), effectively increasing your CPA 25 from 20.

Maybe there are more opportunities available but they are in a different mindset, react differently to the offer/copy you're running correctly and so your CPA is going to take a hit. This is an oversimplified example but I hope you got the idea.

So ROAS drops because you’re measuring a new audience with old expectations.

3. You scaled faster than the system can learn

If spend increases faster than your signal quality can keep up, the system starts making worse decisions.

You’ll usually see rising CPA, volatility, inconsistent results and with how Meta ads work, even a learning reset.

I was auditing a client's account and the previous agency was tanking their performance making huge jumps in budget both ways (1300-100-500$, and in another campaign 300-500-700$) all within 3-5 days. That is definitely gonna create a system shock.

From the outside it looks like scaling broke performance. Internally, the system just ran ahead of its learning capacity. Both campaigns collapsed in on themselves. The campaign that had failed to scale just died out at those budget cuts while the winner campaign lost its direction with such frequent changes.

Here's a sanity check

If your ROAS dropped, ask yourself these questions:

Did conversions drop or become inconsistent? Didd I recently increase budget or expand targeting? Did performance dip right after scaling?

If yes, it’s probably not “fatigue.” It’s a system issue. Most people try to fix ROAS directly. The better move is to fix what’s happening underneath it. We also tried to break all this down into an HVR Calculator that can help guide you where your account might be falling short. I will add the link in the comment if the mods allow it.

Why your ROAS drops in Meta Ads

I see one new article on meta ads tanking for a new user almost every day. Many of these folks repeat the same pattern: ROAS is stable then you scale and performance drops/CPA rose drastically.

And reading that everyday makes me kinda uncomfortable. Not gonna claim, I haven't seen ad accounts tank for real but I disagree on some points.

Many people blame audience fatigue, creatives, seasonality, and the "Meta being Meta” explanations. While there's some weight to it, ngl, but they don’t explain *why it dropped right then*. It's almost always posted as a "sudden death" event.

What I think is actually happening:

My team and I have been working on breaking down and formalizing our observations for a couple of months (honestly, for a while much longer than that but we consciously have been at it for these past couple of months)

From what I’ve seen across accounts, ROAS drops usually come down to 3 things:

1. Signal breakdown

Meta optimizes based on conversion signals (purchase, atc, installs,etc). So when those become inconsistent (even slightly), performance doesn’t collapse, it becomes unpredictable.

That’s what a ROAS drop often is: not a failure but a degradation in learning quality.

2. You scaled into a different audience

When you increase budget, you’re not just reaching more of the same people (hopefully).

You start hitting: lower intent users, less aware buyers, and slower converters. Your marginal effieciency of results per dollar spent also drops.

Maybe you were spending 500$ a day reaching enough audience to maintain 25 conversions a day, giving you a CPA of 20$ and that was maintaining a healthy ROAS for you. But once you scale from 500 to lets say 1000$ a day (don't make such a huge jump at once btw), you expect the system to penetrate new audience with similar purchase affinities but the number of users that were ready that day to buy from you was hardly 40 (read: demand), effectively increasing your CPA 25 from 20.

Maybe there are more opportunities available but they are in a different mindset, react differently to the offer/copy you're running correctly and so your CPA is going to take a hit. This is an oversimplified example but I hope you got the idea.

So ROAS drops because you’re measuring a new audience with old expectations.

3. You scaled faster than the system can learn

If spend increases faster than your signal quality can keep up, the system starts making worse decisions.

You’ll usually see rising CPA, volatility, inconsistent results and with how Meta ads work, even a learning reset.

I was auditing a client's account and the previous agency was tanking their performance making huge jumps in budget both ways (1300-100-500$, and in another campaign 300-500-700$) all within 3-5 days. That is definitely gonna create a system shock.

From the outside it looks like scaling broke performance. Internally, the system just ran ahead of its learning capacity. Both campaigns collapsed in on themselves. The campaign that had failed to scale just died out at those budget cuts while the winner campaign lost its direction with such frequent changes.

Here's a sanity check

If your ROAS dropped, ask yourself these questions:

Did conversions drop or become inconsistent? Didd I recently increase budget or expand targeting? Did performance dip right after scaling?

If yes, it’s probably not “fatigue.” It’s a system issue.

Most people try to fix ROAS directly. The better move is to fix what’s happening underneath it.

I see one new article on meta ads tanking for a new user almost every day. Many of these folks repeat the same pattern: ROAS is stable then you scale and performance drops/CPA rose drastically.

And reading that everyday makes me kinda uncomfortable. Not gonna claim, I haven't seen ad accounts tank for real but I disagree on some points.

Many people blame audience fatigue, creatives, seasonality, and the "Meta being Meta” explanations. While there's some weight to it, ngl, but they don’t explain why it dropped right then. It's almost always posted as a "sudden death" event.

What I think is actually happening:

My team and I have been working on breaking down and formalizing our observations for a couple of months (honestly, for a while much longer than that but we consciously have been at it for these past couple of months)
From what I’ve seen across accounts, ROAS drops usually come down to 3 things:

1. Signal breakdown

Meta optimizes based on conversion signals (purchase, atc, installs,etc). So when those become inconsistent (even slightly), performance doesn’t collapse, it becomes unpredictable.

That’s what a ROAS drop often is: not a failure but a degradation in learning quality.

2. You scaled into a different audience

When you increase budget, you’re not just reaching more of the same people (hopefully).

You start hitting: lower intent users, less aware buyers, and slower converters. Your marginal effieciency of results per dollar spent also drops.

Maybe you were spending 500$ a day reaching enough audience to maintain 25 conversions a day, giving you a CPA of 20$ and that was maintaining a healthy ROAS for you. But once you scale from 500 to lets say 1000$ a day (don't make such a huge jump at once btw), you expect the system to penetrate new audience with similar purchase affinities but the number of users that were ready that day to buy from you was hardly 40 (read: demand), effectively increasing your CPA 25 from 20.

Maybe there are more opportunities available but they are in a different mindset, react differently to the offer/copy you're running correctly and so your CPA is going to take a hit. This is an oversimplified example but I hope you got the idea.

So ROAS drops because you’re measuring a new audience with old expectations.

3. You scaled faster than the system can learn

If spend increases faster than your signal quality can keep up, the system starts making worse decisions.

You’ll usually see rising CPA, volatility, inconsistent results and with how Meta ads work, even a learning reset.

I was auditing a client's account and the previous agency was tanking their performance making huge jumps in budget both ways (1300-100-500$, and in another campaign 300-500-700$) all within 3-5 days. That is definitely gonna create a system shock.

From the outside it looks like scaling broke performance. Internally, the system just ran ahead of its learning capacity. Both campaigns collapsed in on themselves. The campaign that had failed to scale just died out at those budget cuts while the winner campaign lost its direction with such frequent changes.

Here's a sanity check:

If your ROAS dropped, ask yourself:

Did conversions drop or become inconsistent? Didd I recently increase budget or expand targeting? Did performance dip right after scaling?

If yes, it’s probably not “fatigue.” It’s a system issue.

Most people try to fix ROAS directly. The better move is to fix what’s happening underneath it.