Before You Blame Meta, Read This
A rough fortnight on Meta ads is rarely only Meta. Run the five-minute checks first. Then the bigger shift: most Google searches now end without a click, so getting found means being the answer, not the link.
Your Meta ads probably had a brutal fortnight
Cost per result doubling or tripling in days. Traffic that converts like nobody is home. The creeping feeling: is it me, or is it Meta? If that has been you, do not rip the account apart yet. It is partly Meta. It is never only Meta.
Before you touch a budget or kill a campaign, run the cheap checks. Three of them take five minutes.
- Check for auto-applied changes. Google and Meta both quietly help by re-broadening targeting. That is how a tight campaign starts buying junk clicks overnight. Turn auto-apply off and read what it changed.
- Look at where the clicks come from. A spike in clicks from places you do not sell to is invalid traffic, not demand. Document it: you can often get it credited.
- Do not change five things at once. When a week goes bad, the instinct is to rebuild everything. Then you have learned nothing. Change one variable, give it real data, then judge.
Check before you cut. These three are the five-minute version of what we run on a client account before we will ever blame a platform.
Most Google searches now end without a click
SparkToro crunched the numbers: 68% of US Google searches now end without a single click. Two years ago it was 60%. Only 276 of every 1,000 searches send a click to the open web.
Google did not stop sending traffic because your content got worse. It started keeping the click because it can. So stop optimising for the visit. The prize now is being the name inside the answer, not the link under it.
The May core update finished, so now you can diagnose
Google’s May core update finished rolling out on 2 June, the second core update of the year. If your traffic moved any time since 21 May, that is why, not your latest tweaks. Open Search Console before you change a single headline. Panic-editing mid-rollout is how small sites dig deeper holes.
ChatGPT’s memory just got a lot better
OpenAI rebuilt memory. It now auto-learns your brand voice, your audience and your past campaigns across chats, no “remember this” needed, with a reviewable summary page you can edit. It reached paid users first and is rolling out to free accounts over time. The boring win: stop re-pasting your brand brief into every chat. The catch: it remembers your sloppy half-thoughts too. Spend ten minutes reviewing what it holds about you once it lands.
Your one job this week
Pick one question your customers ask you all the time. Something like “how much does it cost?”, “how long does it take?”, or “is this right for someone like me?”. Write a short, honest answer, two or three sentences, the way you would say it out loud.
Put it on your website as its own question-and-answer: a new line on your FAQ page, or a short post with that exact question as the title. The question goes as the heading, the answer sits right underneath. That is the whole job.
When someone asks Google or ChatGPT that same question, plain, clear answers like yours are exactly what they pull from and name.
Do one this week, another next week. Bit by bit, you become the brand that keeps coming up.