Meta in 2024: The Year Performance Marketing Got Complicated

2024 marked a watershed year for Meta advertisers as the platform underwent significant changes that reshaped how DTC brands approach digital marketing. 

While Meta remained the dominant force in e-commerce advertising, a perfect storm of platform volatility, economic pressures, and measurement challenges pushed brands to fundamentally rethink their digital marketing strategies. 

The result will likely be a seismic shift in how DTC and eCom brands buy media moving forward. And likely a more mature, sophisticated approach to Meta advertising that emphasizes profitability and true incremental growth over pure scale.

Platform Problems

The year started with what many marketers called Meta's "broken" period – a time of extreme volatility that made iOS 14's impact look minor in comparison. Some brands saw campaigns spending $6,000 in a single hour, wiping out entire days of profit. Others reported dramatic CPM increases, with costs rising up to 130% year-over-year in some categories.

"You know Meta is broken when agency people are finally talking about it – they never want to admit performance is off," noted Meredith Erin, founder of gifts company Boredwalk. Unlike previous periods of soft performance that typically lasted a few weeks, these issues persisted through Q1, with no clear pattern separating winners from losers.

The technical problems weren't limited to costs. Meta's own issue tracker noted at least a dozen disruptions to Facebook Ads Manager, with four classified as "major disruptions". Some advertisers saw automated targeting suddenly shift from younger Instagram audiences to 65+ Facebook users, decimating campaign performance [Marketing Brew].

Adding to these challenges, broader economic headwinds intensified the pressure on performance. 

Rising interest rates (up 195%) and persistent inflation squeezed consumer spending, while increased competition drove up advertising costs. The days of cheap money and growth-at-all-costs are officially over.

The Search for Better Signal

The economic pressures of 2024 also transformed incrementality from a "nice to have" into a crucial component of marketing strategy. With rising costs and squeezed margins, brands could no longer afford to rely on basic ROAS metrics that failed to show true business impact.

The push for better measurement coincided with Meta's own moves toward incrementality optimization. The platform began allowing advertisers to optimize campaigns specifically for incremental conversions, with early tests showing significant improvements in true business impact. 

However, Meta warned advertisers they might see higher CPMs as the system got better at identifying valuable conversions.

"No one can actually know which individual conversions are incremental," explained Fred Leach, Meta's VP of product management. "The only way you could is if you have parallel universes where you show an ad in one and not in the other and then see who bought something." 

Despite this fundamental challenge, early tests showed an average improvement of over 20% in incremental conversions when optimizing for these metrics.

Perhaps most significantly (for some), Meta recently announced major restrictions on health-related advertising coming in 2025. 

Starting January, health brands will be limited to top-of-funnel metrics like View Content, losing the ability to optimize for purchases or track add-to-carts. This forced many DTC brands in the category to accelerate their channel diversification plans.

The Adaptation Game

DTC brands have responded with unprecedented levels of creative testing and optimization. With rising competition and increased use of cost caps, some brands found themselves needing to produce 50+ new creative assets weekly to find "winners" that would achieve efficiency targets.

This dynamic emerged because cost caps, while effective at maintaining profitability, inherently restrict spend unless the system believes ads will perform efficiently. Brands that previously relied on a handful of proven concepts found themselves building robust creative testing programs and diverse asset libraries.

Interestingly, 2024 also saw a revival of strategies that had fallen out of favor. 

While broad targeting remained important, some brands found success returning to awareness campaigns and specific audience targeting. Companies like Proxima gained traction by using large cross-store databases and sophisticated AI to build custom audiences that outperformed Meta's native targeting. 

Platform diversification gained momentum as well. AppLovin emerged as a promising alternative, with early campaigns delivering ROAS averaging 1.7x Meta's performance in early tests, though at roughly 1/5 the scale. 

This sparked renewed interest in alternative platforms, with many brands considering a return to marketing and awareness campaign formats, as well as a more balanced approach to channel mix.

Why Obvi supplements its Meta ads strategy with Proxima AI Audiences

After a major influencer campaign skewed their Meta pixel and diluted their targeting, Obvi needed to get their ad targeting back on track. 

After adding Proxima’s data-enriched audiences to their account, Obvi saw a significant performance lift: 

• 26% CPA improvement

• 31% ROAS improvement

Stronger efficiency and targeting enabled the Obvi team to scale up ad spend +2x while beating their performance targets.

Today, Obvi spends over 50% of their Meta budget on Proxima's AI Audiences – driving over 7-figures in revenue versus the 5-to-6 figures they would have managed with their standard broad targeting setup.

In the words of Obvi’s CEO: “The change-up saved our account and maybe the company, but we wouldn’t have found it just by sticking to the basics and trusting the system.”

Is your marketing team fighting performance plateaus?

Claim your Efficiency Guarantee from Proxima today and find out if they can help you profitably double your Meta spend like they did for Obvi. If it doesn’t work, they’ll reimburse you. 

Seriously.

Check out their risk-free deal here before the offer ends.

Looking Ahead

As we enter 2025, Meta remains the cornerstone of most DTC marketing strategies – but the relationship has evolved. 

Successful brands are taking a more measured approach, focusing on profitability over pure growth and building sophisticated measurement frameworks to understand true marketing impact.

The rise of viable alternative channels, combined with Meta's own push toward better measurement and incrementality testing, suggests we're entering a new era of digital marketing. One where success depends not just on mastering a single platform, but on building diverse, measurable, and profitable marketing programs across multiple channels and campaign types.

The era of simply funding Meta campaigns and watching ROAS roll in is over. 

But for brands willing to invest in sophisticated measurement, new audience testing, and diverse prospecting strategies, Meta remains a crucial channel for driving growth – albeit one that requires more attention and expertise than ever before. 

The winners in 2025 will be those who can balance Meta's scale with smart diversification while maintaining a laser focus on profitability and true incremental growth.

Reminder: Sign up for Proxima today and get their Efficiency Guarantee. If they can’t beat your best campaign, they will reimburse your lost revenue.