We have been in the trenches managing over $10M in ad spend for info product businesses, and what is happening on Meta right now is directly impacting your cost per booked call, your webinar registration costs, and your front-end ROAS.
Here are the 7 biggest developments from the past week, what they mean for your business specifically, and exactly what to do about each one.
This is the single biggest complaint in every paid media community right now, and it is hitting info product businesses especially hard.
Here is what is happening: Meta's Advantage+ system is autonomously swapping out your carefully crafted VSL thumbnails, your webinar ad creatives, and your lead magnet images with bizarre AI-generated alternatives. Advertisers are reporting AI-generated models with contorted limbs, random elderly people promoting products that have nothing to do with them, and flying cars appearing in coaching ads.
Why this matters for your coaching or course business: Your ad creative is your first impression. When someone scrolling Instagram sees a weird AI-generated image instead of your face or your client testimonial, they do not click. Your cost per lead goes up, your show rate goes down, and your entire funnel economics break.
The scariest part? Settings like "test new creative features" and "automatic creative adjustments" are reportedly re-enabling themselves without your permission. You turned it off last month. It is back on now. Go check.
If you are still running the same account structure you used in 2024, with separate campaigns for cold traffic, retargeting, lookalikes, and interest stacks, you are fighting the algorithm instead of working with it.
Meta's Andromeda algorithm has now reached full scale. Here is the fundamental shift: your creative IS your targeting now. The algorithm does not start with the audience you selected. It starts with your ad creative, reads it, understands who it is for, and finds those people for you. It has 10,000x more processing capacity than the old system.
What this means for info product businesses: That VSL ad where you are talking directly to burned-out corporate executives who want to start a coaching business? Andromeda reads the visual, the copy, the hook, the body language, and serves it to people matching that profile. Your targeting settings are almost irrelevant now. Your creative is doing the targeting.
As of January 15, 2026, ads relying on legacy targeting options stopped delivering entirely. If you have not migrated to Advantage+, some of your campaigns may have gone dark without you even knowing it.
Campaign 1: Creative Testing (15 to 20% of budget). This is where you test 10 to 15 conceptually different ad creatives per cycle. Not the same image with different headlines. Completely different concepts: a talking-head testimonial, a screen-share walkthrough, a text-overlay story, a before-and-after transformation, a behind-the-scenes clip.
Campaign 2: Scale Winners (80 to 85% of budget). Broad targeting. Campaign-level budget. One to two ad sets maximum. Only your proven winners go here.
That is it. Two campaigns. Not twenty.
The critical mistake almost every course creator is making: They take one winning image and test it with 20 different headlines, thinking they are testing creative. Under Andromeda, Meta's visual recognition treats all 20 as the same ad. They all get assigned the same Entity ID. You only get one ticket into the auction instead of twenty, and worse, Meta sees the repetition as creative fatigue and raises your CPMs.
Meta pushed through 47 policy changes in March alone. This is the most aggressive policy revision since Special Ad Categories launched, and several of these changes directly target the kind of claims coaching and info product businesses make every day.
Multimodal Review is now live. Meta is simultaneously analyzing your ad copy, your image, your video, your audio, and your landing page all at once. If your VSL makes an income claim that your ad copy carefully avoids, Meta will still catch it. They are transcribing your video audio and matching it against policy. Your entire funnel chain is being scanned together.
Semantic pattern matching for misleading claims. Meta's AI now detects patterns like "make $10K in 30 days" even when you try to word it differently. If you run ads for a health coaching program or a business coaching course, your claim structure needs to be reviewed immediately.
Personal attributes crackdown. Ads can no longer imply knowledge of a user's personal characteristics. Phrases like "Struggling with your business?" or "Tired of your 9-to-5?" technically violate this rule now. The enforcement is getting stricter every week.
This is the crisis nobody is talking about loudly enough. Meta ad costs are quietly destroying the economics of coaching funnels across the board.
The numbers: The US average CPM is now $18 to $23, up 12% year over year. Cost per lead across industries is up 20.94% to an average of $27.66. Q4 seasonal spikes are pushing beyond $28 in competitive sectors. And 60% of industries are paying more per lead than they were 12 months ago.
What this means for your funnel economics: If your cost per webinar registration was $8 and it is now $10, your cost per booked call went from $80 to $100, and your cost per close went from $400 to $500. On a $3,000 program, that is the difference between a 7.5x ROAS and a 6x ROAS. On a $997 product, the math gets very tight, very fast.
On March 3, 2026, Facebook went completely dark globally for about 3 hours. Ads Manager was inaccessible. You could not create, edit, or view your campaigns. Instagram Boost was down. Reporting was gone. Then it happened again on March 6th with a second round of medium disruptions. Meta has still not explained what caused it.
Why this matters for your launch: If you are in the middle of a webinar launch or a live cart-open window and Meta goes down for 3 hours, that is real money lost with no recourse.
What to do: Never concentrate 100% of your launch budget into a single day's delivery window. Spread it across 3 to 5 days so one outage cannot kill your launch. Keep a backup tracking dashboard outside of Ads Manager, whether that is Triple Whale, Hyros, or a server-side data setup. And maintain an email and organic content plan that can carry momentum when paid goes dark. Your email list does not go down when Meta does.
Starting July 1, 2026, Meta is adding Location Fees to cover Digital Service Taxes in six European countries. The UK gets a 2% surcharge, France, Italy, and Spain get 3%, and Austria and Turkey get 5%. These fees land on top of your regular ad costs, with VAT calculated on top of that.
If you primarily target US audiences this is minor. But if you run a coaching business targeting English-speaking audiences globally, the UK 2% surcharge adds up quickly. On $50K per month in UK-targeted spend, that is an extra $1,000 per month you cannot optimize away.
Meta's Generative Ad Model (GEM) is the endgame behind all of these changes. The vision is that you hand Meta a URL to your sales page, a budget, and a one-line prompt, and GEM generates the entire campaign: the images, the video, the copy, the headlines, the targeting, and the budget allocation. Everything automated.
The real question for coaching and info product businesses: Can an AI that has never been on a sales call with your ideal client, never heard the specific language your audience uses to describe their pain, and never understood the transformation you deliver, can it write better ads than someone who lives and breathes your market?
Right now, the answer is no. Not for high-ticket offers where the nuance of messaging determines whether someone books a call or keeps scrolling. GEM might work fine for an e-commerce brand selling phone cases. But for a $5,000 coaching program where every word in your VSL hook matters, human creative strategy still wins.
The real concern is this: Meta is building a system where they control the creative, the targeting, and the data. The businesses that will survive this shift are the ones building strong personal brands, deep audience relationships, and diversified acquisition channels now, before the platform makes those choices for them.
Most coaching businesses are running the same Meta playbook they used two years ago and wondering why costs are climbing while results are shrinking. The platform has fundamentally changed. What used to work at $5K/month in ad spend breaks at $30K. And the gap between "running ads" and "running a profitable growth engine" gets wider every quarter.
We have managed over $30M in ad spend and driven more than $125M in revenue specifically for coaching, course, and info product businesses. We are not learning on your account. We know what is converting right now, what the algorithms are rewarding this quarter, and where most businesses at your level are bleeding margin without realizing it.
Book a free strategy call with SXV Digital. We will break down your current setup, show you exactly where money is being left on the table, and map out what a profitable scaling roadmap looks like for your business over the next 90 days.
