Meta ad costs just hit a record high and most ecom brands are still running the same strategy
I was looking through Triple Whale's latest ad spend report the other day and one stat stopped me cold. CPM on Meta rose over 20% in 2025 across every single industry. And I mean every single one. There was not a single category that was spared.
That means you are paying 20% more to reach the exact same people you were reaching last year. Same audience, same placements, same competition, just a bigger bill at the end of the month.
The brands that are going to feel this the most are the ones running ads with a weak backend. If your retention system isn't doing serious work, every dollar you spend acquiring a customer has to work harder than it did a year ago just to break even. That math gets ugly fast.
The brands I've seen handle rising ad costs the best all did the same thing. They stopped treating ads as the whole business and started treating them as the top of a funnel that actually converts and retains. Your ad gets someone to the store. Everything that happens after that determines whether you ever see that person again.
Triple Whale also flagged something worth paying attention to. The report pointed to building owned channel infrastructure as one of the main ways brands can protect themselves from what the auction environment does next. Email lists, communities, SMS. Channels you actually own and that don't get 20% more expensive every year because some algorithm decided so.
Meta still works. It's still where a massive chunk of ecom spend goes and it still drives real volume. But if your cost to acquire is going up and your backend isn't keeping up, you're going to feel it.