How media buyers are navigating higher ad prices on Meta

It feels like everything is getting more expensive these days. For some advertisers, Meta ads are among them.

In recent months, CPMs and PPAs on Meta, which is investing heavily in AI models and data centers, have increased for various ad formats, according to several marketers we spoke to. Meta’s earnings reports note that average price per ad, a benchmark that takes total advertising revenue and divides it by the number of ads delivered, increased 12% YoY in Q1 and in Q2.

Max Nelson, Meta spokesperson, said in an email that while average price per ad may have increased, the company believes advertisers are benefiting from Meta’s investments in its products like Andromeda that optimize campaigns and seeing results, citing an internal analysis, which looked at over 1 million campaigns and was published in June, indicated that advertisers saw $4.13 in revenue on average for each dollar they spent on Meta, a 25% increase since 2022.

Some media buyers told us that select clients are planning to purchase ads during the “Q5” period that runs from late December into January, rather than spending during the holidays. They’re also leveraging specific Meta ad units and tweaking their ad creative in an effort to improve campaign performance.

“If we can dial in the messaging and the audience, that 12% is not that big of a deal at the end of the day,” Ankit Jadav, associate director, paid social at Rain, said.

Take a new approach: The cost of CPMs, coupled with smaller margins that some brands may see when they offer discounts around Black Friday or other sales windows, have discouraged certain clients from participating in advertising heavily around the holidays in recent years, according to Farhad Divecha, founder and group CEO of the agency Accuracast.

“The same people who weren’t doing a big push around Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the whole November to December time period are actually looking at post-Christmas as an attractive new option,” he said. Typically at that time, “those really peak CPMs do come down.”

Other advertisers are seeking to make the most of their Meta ad campaigns to help offset the higher CPMs, including by buying more “high-impact products like Advantage+ and specific ad units, doing iterative creative testing, and A/B testing,” Jadav said. They’re also honing their ad creative to cater to Meta’s AI-driven algorithms that prioritize creative diversification.

“[Meta is] really pushing on [the idea that] ‘creative is the new targeting,’” he said. “That’s been the common theme we’ve been telling clients in general with these AI-based algorithms and broad targeting: the creative has to do the heavy lifting.”

Back up: Meta executives have been touting their efforts. Susan Li, company CFO, noted during Meta’s Q4 2025 earnings call that monetization efficiency from “optimizing the level of ads” in organic user engagement has been critical to revenue performance. That investment appears to be paying off: Advantage+ solutions delivered “over $75 billion in annual revenue run rate” in Q2 2026, Li noted on that quarter’s call.

But Meta is also spending huge sums on its AI endeavors. That includes developing new data centers, including one announced in July to be built in El Paso, Texas, in partnership with BlackRock. It’s also putting out new consumer AI products, including Muse, its personal agent that debuted earlier in September.

Meta’s capital expenditures are expected to range from $130 billion to $145 billion this year alone, the company has disclosed to investors.