META ADS
AGENCY IN TORONTO.

Meta still delivers, but the easy years are over. Rising costs, degraded tracking and an algorithm that rewards creative volume mean the accounts that work now are run very differently from the accounts that worked five years ago.

Creative Volume Is the Lever That Still Moves

Meta's targeting has been progressively automated. Broad targeting with strong creative now routinely outperforms the granular audience stacking that defined the platform's earlier era, and the practical consequence is that creative has become the primary variable you still control.

Accounts that succeed on Meta today test a lot of creative, systematically. Not minor variations on the same concept, but genuinely different angles, formats and hooks, retired quickly when they fatigue. Agencies still selling audience-building as their core competence are optimising a lever the platform has largely taken away.

Tracking After the Signal Loss

iOS privacy changes and browser restrictions permanently degraded Meta's ability to observe conversions. Accounts still relying on browser-based pixel tracking alone are under-reporting, sometimes severely — which causes the algorithm to optimise against incomplete data and makes performance look worse than it is.

Server-side tracking through the Conversions API is now essential rather than optional. We implement it properly, with event deduplication and CRM connection where the sales cycle warrants, so both the algorithm and your reporting see a fuller picture. This is frequently the single largest performance improvement available in an inherited account.

What We Run

Platform ROAS Is Not Profit

Meta reports on conversions it believes it caused, using an attribution model it defines. That number is useful for optimisation and misleading as a measure of business performance. Reported ROAS routinely diverges from actual contribution, in both directions.

We measure against your real numbers — CRM records, margin after cost of goods, and where budget permits, incrementality testing to establish what Meta genuinely added rather than what it claimed. Several clients have found that their apparently strong platform ROAS was substantially retargeting existing customers who would have purchased anyway.

Where Meta Fits Against Everything Else

Meta rarely deserves the whole budget. It is strong at demand generation and retargeting and weaker at capturing existing high intent, which search does better. Running it in isolation usually means either overspending on a saturated audience or attributing to Meta conversions that other channels initiated.

Because we run search, programmatic, CTV and audio alongside it, we can see where Meta genuinely contributes and size it accordingly. An agency that only runs Meta will always conclude that the answer is more Meta.

Toronto Context

Toronto is a competitive and expensive Meta market, particularly in retail, real estate, home services and direct-to-consumer, where auction pressure from national and US advertisers raises costs for local businesses.

This page argues that platform-reported numbers are unreliable, so we are not going to quote one here. What we will do on your account is reconcile Meta's reported conversions against your CRM in the first month and show you the gap. In our experience that gap is the single most useful number in the account, and most advertisers have never seen it.

How We Work — Fees, Minimums and Commitment

There is no minimum spend. Most agencies publish a floor because small accounts are unprofitable to service. We would rather assess whether paid media can work for your situation and tell you honestly if it cannot, than turn away a business that is a good fit but not yet a large one.

There is no minimum contract. The average engagement runs about twelve months, but that is a pattern we have observed rather than a term we impose. Clients can work month to month and leave whenever they choose. An agency that needs a lock-in to keep your business has already told you something.

We do not charge retainers. Programmatic is priced on a CPM basis, so what you pay tracks the media we actually buy for you rather than a flat fee that stays the same whether we are busy or not.

Creative is available, and it is priced separately. We can produce assets, but it is scoped and quoted to what the account genuinely needs rather than bundled into a headline number. If you already have creative that works, you should not be paying us to remake it.

All campaign work, reporting and communication is delivered in English.

The Benchmarks We Plan Against

We would rather show you the numbers we plan against than ask you to trust ours. We publish our benchmark research openly, and it is the same data we use when building a media plan.

• Blended cost per lead across industries sits near $214 in 2026, with legal running roughly four times what e-commerce pays — see our cost per lead by industry benchmarks.
• Average return on ad spend is around 2.9:1 and has fallen about 10% year over year — the detail is in our average ROAS by industry report.
• Connected TV CPMs span $15 to $85 depending on industry and inventory quality, which we break down in our 2026 CTV CPM benchmarks.
• Display, video and audio rates are covered in our programmatic cost guide.

If a plan we put in front of you assumes performance meaningfully better than these figures, we will say why — and if we cannot justify it, the plan changes.

Frequently Asked Questions