Open Meta Ads Manager and look at what one campaign cost you this time last year. Then look at what one costs now. A study of nearly 629,000 campaigns puts the gap at 47 percent. The uncomfortable part is what came back for the extra money.
Social media
Meta campaigns cost 47 percent more and bring back less
Metricool released its 2026 Social Ads Report on Monday. It covers 628,969 paid campaigns from 44,355 advertisers across Meta and TikTok, worth more than 471 million dollars, comparing January to June last year against the same months this year. Average spend per Meta campaign rose from 489 dollars to 718 dollars, a jump of 47 percent. Over the same period, return on ad spend for Meta sales campaigns fell from 5.48 times to 4.57 times.
TikTok came out cheaper across most of the funnel. A click cost 3 cents there against 7 cents on Meta, and TikTok campaigns generated nearly eight times more clicks each. TikTok cost per lead dropped 33 percent to 2.69 dollars while the Meta figure rose 14 percent to 6 dollars. Even so, 91 percent of advertisers in the study run paid campaigns on Meta and nowhere else.
Why this matters for your business: If your Meta results have softened this year, you are not imagining it. Pull twelve months of spend and cost per lead into one sheet before you approve another increase, because if both climbed together then more money will not fix it. These are global averages, so your own numbers are the only ones that decide anything.
X will tell you when your post was held back in your country
X expanded its Under the Hood report on Monday. It already showed which labels had been applied to your account and posts over the previous month. It now also shows whether visibility was limited to comply with local law, including which country withheld a post. The report is open to any account at least a year old that posted more than ten times last month.
Why this matters for your business: Weak reach usually gets blamed on the algorithm, and that guess can never be tested, so nothing changes. A named restriction is something you can act on. Check the report before rewriting a content plan, because a labelled account and a dull post are two different problems.
Meta also cut Threads ads loose from Instagram this month. Advertisers no longer need matching usernames, and a business with no Instagram account can now advertise on Threads. With 500 million users and a different crowd, it is worth a small test.
Search
Google removed free product listings across Europe
Google has pulled free product listings and the organic popular products carousels out of search results across the European Economic Area, forced by the European Commission under the Digital Markets Act. Hugo Huijer of Productrise tracked drops of roughly 90 to 100 percent across Germany, France, Belgium, Sweden and the Netherlands. Ginny Marvin, the Google Ads Liaison, confirmed the ruling was the reason. The space goes to comparison shopping services instead.
Why this matters for your business: If you sell into Europe, visibility you had for nothing has gone and you must buy it back. South African results are untouched for now, but the lesson travels. A free placement inside somebody else’s search result is a loan, not an asset.
Content and your website
South Africans check what AI tells them, then leave sites that annoy them
VML published its Future Shopper 2026 report and the South African findings cut against the usual story. Fifty nine percent of local respondents use ChatGPT, but 61 percent check an AI product recommendation against another source before buying, and 52 percent say AI generated product imagery reduces their trust in a brand. Ask people what actually influences what they buy and family scores 22 percent, creators 20 percent and AI tools 1.9 percent. Meanwhile 48 percent regularly abandon a purchase because the online experience frustrated them.
Why this matters for your business: Getting recommended by an AI assistant is worth having and it is not the hard part. Nearly half of South African shoppers walk away from a slow checkout. Spend the next month on the boring work. Fix the checkout, use real photographs of real products, and show delivery times and total prices without a click.
The WordPress flaw that turns one admin click into a shell
Patchstack has published the detail behind one of the eleven security fixes in WordPress 7.1.1. Paulos Yibelo of pwn.ai named it Click2Shell. A theme slug in a URL gets read twice. The WordPress.org themes API sanitises it on the server, while the admin JavaScript drops the same raw value straight into a jQuery selector without sanitising anything. A crafted slug makes the page behave as though an administrator clicked install on a different theme, and chaining that into a catalogue theme with a careless AJAX handler hands the attacker a shell. It takes an administrator loading the link while logged in, so this is phishing rather than a drive-by. Anyone still on 7.1.0 should update today.
Why this matters for your business: Your administrator account is now the thing worth attacking, because one click from it is enough. Give editors the editor role, turn on two factor authentication for every admin login, and treat any WordPress link arriving by email as suspicious even when it looks like your host sent it.
Automotive
The price on the dealer website left out the fee
New York Attorney General Letitia James settled on Monday with two DARCARS dealerships in Mount Kisco over what her office called deceptive fees. The stores charged a 2 percent fee labelled a sales commission. It was optional, it never reached the salesperson and it bought the customer nothing. DARCARS Lexus collected about 5.8 million dollars from it. Refunds now exceed 1 million dollars alongside 700,000 dollars in penalties.
The detail that should worry every dealer group is simpler than the fee itself. Prices shown on the website excluded the charge, which made the stores look cheaper than the rivals down the road. The fee applied to nearly every sale and lease.
Why this matters for your dealership: South Africa is not New York, but the Consumer Protection Act takes the same dim view of a displayed price nobody can actually pay. Add up everything a buyer pays on top of the figure on your own stock pages. If that number surprises you, it will surprise them at signing. Put on the road pricing on the vehicle detail page.
What to do this week
- Put twelve months of Meta spend and cost per lead in one sheet before approving any increase
- Check X Under the Hood if your reach dropped, before blaming the algorithm
- Update any site still on WordPress 7.1.0, then move editors off the administrator role
- Walk your own checkout on a phone and time it from product page to payment
- Add every fee to the price shown on your vehicle or product pages
If you would rather someone else watched all this and told you only what needs doing, talk to us.
Sources
- Metricool 2026 Social Ads Report, Social Media Today
- X shares more insight into penalties impacting post reach, Social Media Today
- Threads advertisers will no longer need an Instagram account, Social Media Today
- Google Search drops free product listings from the EEA, Search Engine Roundtable
- VML Future Shopper 2026, South African findings, Bizcommunity
- Click2Shell, the RCE WordPress 7.1.1 just patched, Patchstack
- NY AG orders two DARCARS dealerships to refund over deceptive fees, CBT News