Meta Ads Have Changed – What Actually Works in 2026

If Meta ads feel like a wild goose chase lately, you’re not alone—and you’re not imagining things.

With thanks to this episode's sponsor SumUp (https://sumup.com) Use the code 'GamePlan10' to get 10% off hardware from their online shop!

Hi, I'm Catherine Erdly, and this week on The Resilient Retail Game Plan, I’m rolling up my sleeves with Meta Ad strategist CJ Sinclair to dig into why product business advice for retailers is evolving fast.

Algorithms have turned upside down.

Forget the old playbook; smaller brands now have the nimble edge over the big guns. From creative diversity to new ways to track ROAS and cash flow for retailers, we break down what actually moves the needle in 2026. I’m bringing my 25 years in the trade—plus CJ Sinclair’s day-to-day on the ground—for an episode that’s equal parts practical know-how and myth-busting.

Why listen?

1. Squeeze more margin from your Meta ad spend, even with a modest budget
2. Nail creative that cuts through—no high-gloss needed
3. Get independent retailer tips to speed up pivoting, not just scaling a product business
4. Avoid common ROAS mistakes and measure what matters for profit
5. Connect your email, website and socials for rich marketing strategies that don’t break the bank
6. Learn how to improve cash flow in a small product business while boosting conversion rates

Links:

Website: https://resilientretailclub.com

Retail Sales Game Plan: https://www.resilientretailclub.com/retailsales/

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If Meta ads felt harder in 2025, then you're

not imagining it. Targeting that used to work no longer

works nearly as well. Costs feel higher, results feel slower, and

the platform has changed the rules without clearly explaining why.

In this episode, I wanted to cut through the noise and examine what's actually changed

at Meta, what that means for small product businesses heading into

2026 and where your effort is best spent if ads feel

expensive or inconsistent. Welcome to

the Resilient Retail Game Plan. I'm Catherine Edley and in the next few minutes

you're about to get powerful real world retail strategies from

insights shared both from my guests and myself, backed up by

my 25 years in the retail industry. Keep listening to learn

how to grow a thriving, profitable product business. Let's jump

in with this latest episode. I'm joined by

CJ Sinclair, a Meta Ad strategist and founder of Vibing Social

Ads Consultants and Ads Answers for Ecom, a membership for

UK product businesses wanting to run paid ads. She works

hands on with product brands running Meta ads every day.

And what I really value about her perspective is that she looks beyond Ads

Manager at the whole ecosystem around your ads, your content

and your customer behavior. This is the bit I really want you to

hear, because if you're still trying to fix ads purely inside Ads Manager,

it can feel like you're constantly missing something. Meta is now

looking at signals from everywhere, and while that sounds overwhelming,

there's actually a real opportunity here for smaller brands.

The biggest, biggest change is that the whole algorithm has shifted and

changed, essentially. So pre2025

we were really focused on our targeting and we were being

super niche with our interests. So if you had a, I don't know,

kids food brand, you would be targeting parents of

toddlers or women between these ages and being very, very

specific. Yeah, this year that does not work. Absolutely does

not work. We're looking at really big, broad audiences, so no

interests. We're just targeting on age, gender and location.

And we're using our creative to do the targeting. So

we're really calling out our audience segments within our

creative, whether that's in the copy, the visuals, the headline, the

whole thing. We're using our ads to call those people out. And

Meta now is not only just looking at what's happening inside the

platform, inside your ads manager, it's looking at the whole

ecosystem around it. How is your organic content performing?

How are people engaging with your website and product pages? Are you emailing?

Are people engaging with your business in that way? And are you using really

diverse creative. Are you speaking to your different audience segments of your

brand? So. So it's kind of mushroomed outside of Ads

Manager, it's, it's not just the buttons that you press inside of Ads Manager,

everything else around it, which I know sounds really overwhelming,

but that was my first thought. I was like, wow. I know, I know. It's

actually. And this is really going to come into play in

2026. What is so exciting is that for the

first time ever, I genuinely believe that smaller brands

are going to have the upper hand compared to the big guns because they can

pivot, they are agile, they can move much quicker to what the

platform is requesting. And that is creative diversity. That is

updated landing pages. If you've got an ad for a very

specific audience avatar. So I don't know a young mum who's

interested in running marathon, right, Then you would create a landing

page specifically for that audience rather than just going through your

general website. Whereas bigger brands can't do that. They can't pivot that quickly.

So I think it's going to be a really interesting and exciting year. And in

terms of the thing to focus on a smaller brand, it would be

that creative, that creative diversity. So coming up with B rolls

or talk to cameras or static images or review

graphics, but having a really diverse set of creative assets, but

also really focusing on your website and your landing pages as well,

which we should always be doing anyway.

One of the biggest fears I hear is but big brands have

bigger budgets. What CJ's really saying here is that speed,

clarity and relevance matter more than scale. But of

course, ads still cost money. So let's talk about budget.

My advice around this is, you know, I want you to be a

little bit uncomfortable with your spending because nothing exciting happens within our

comfort zones. But if you are struggling to pay your

rent or your mortgage or your food shop, then do not spend more

on your meta ads. You know you can't do that. But

if you want consistent sales, I would recommend 10 to

15% of your revenue as an ad budget. If you want

to grow and really push it, then we're looking at more of 15

to 20% that could be a bit more realistic. But the most

important mindset is your budget should match

your goals and your margins. So if your margins are

super tight, your budget needs to be conservative. If your margins are

a bit better, you can afford to scale faster. Every business

is different. But the question I would be asking is, okay,

how much revenue do I need to generate over the 90 days and how

can ads fit into that equation? They're not everything,

they're that part of the equation. That's what I would be, I'd be thinking about.

It's really good benchmarks. Thank you for that. One of the things that I've heard

people say previously about ads, love to hear your thoughts on it, is they say,

especially in that first three month phase, only spend on ads what you can

afford to lose. Which is I guess what you were saying about like don't put

your mortgage on the line. If you. Yeah, I mean how does that does

that. Do you think that still rings true? Yeah, I definitely do and I

feel I almost put clients off, I would say when they, you know, when they

come to work with me on a retainer basis. Because I say, look, you have

to go into this thinking potentially for the first three months whilst we're learning

and we're testing potentially, you won't make that money back.

It's never happened and I've always been really successful straight out the gate,

which is amazing, but it doesn't really back my point. But I do think you

should go in knowing that there is the possibility that

you won't make that money back. But what you are going to make is lots

of learnings and if you have the right expert on board, those

learnings can then be put in to your future growth and then

you'll start making your money back. Once you understand what people are

resonating with, what structure works for you, what creative works for you,

your messaging angles, all of that sort of stuff, you can't

possibly know that straight out the gate.

What I like about this approach is that ads aren't being treated as a magic

fix. They're part of a bigger picture and your margins matter.

Which brings us to creative because this is where I see a lot of product

founders getting stuck. Creative is such

a big part of Mecca ads at the moment, the one that is crushing it

and has this year and absolutely will do going into 2026

is that real, unpolished, unfiltered creative.

It's the stuff we see at the moment on Instagram and on reels. No

people with no makeup on or, you know, the bloopers. And we find it

really interesting and engaging and that is what people want from the ad.

They don't want the perfect polished product

shots and flat lays. They want to see how that product can

transform their life in action and they want to imagine themselves in

there. So user generated content is really big at the moment. So

people using your products, founder Clips. So behind the scenes,

I don't know whether you, you might have seen it, but warehouse clips, if you've

got a warehouse or a fulfillment center, they're huge at the moment. Yeah.

Employee generated content. So you know what people are up to behind the scenes

in the office. But also things like iPhone photos, you know, like quick

shots on your iPhone or you packing up all orders or a

thing that I'm seeing really big at the moment with some of my clients is

that they will do an Instagram live packing orders and they will talk

through what they're doing. And even that sort of content on ads can

work really well. My kind of golden rule of thumb is if it

has performed well organically, there is a very high chance that it

will perform well as an ad. So you don't need to keep reinventing

the wheel. If you've got a reel that has done well organically, you

can then turn that into an ad and it will mostly perform really

well. That kind of unfiltered, unpolished lo fi. And I think

it's really hard for founders, especially founders that are very

protective of their brand and want it to look polished and lovely

to shift that mindset. But I've seen it so many times

when I finally crack these clients and they try

the ads and they succeed and they're like, I wish I did this.

You know, they don't have to be absolutely disgusting. With none of your branding,

it's almost like you're sending a WhatsApp photo to your friend.

That is the sort of thing that can work for you. Yeah, that's so interesting.

I guess because the platforms are flooded with this kind of content anyway. So it's

what blends in and doesn't sort of make people go, oh, that's an

ad. It's just like, oh, that looks nice. Yeah, it's like, oh, who's that?

Is that my friend? Are they sharing that? And then, then you've got the dwell

time and then your messaging angles with the clear

product benefits are what supports it. So your visual is going to stop them,

then your messaging is supporting them. And if it really grabs them, and hopefully

it does, that's when they go over to the website and then it's your website's

job to then grab them towards the buy now button. Got

you.

Talked about diversity of creatives. Well, so sort of trying lots of different

things. Yeah. I mean the, the brands I've worked with this year

and that have absolutely won are the ones that are iterating

every week. They're trying new things every week. And it might

not seem like it is totally on brand because they're trying

things that they've never tried before. But there is a cohesion to their

creative. You know, you can tell that it's there, but the ideas are a

bit different. So one of my fashion clients, for example, they've

kind of gone down the videos of them wearing the outfit in the

mirror. So they're walking to in the mirror. So something again, that you would send

to your friend, like, what do you think of this outfit? And it's doing amazingly

well. Like, incredibly well. Another one of my jewelry clients has used

hooks at the moment, where this is the brand my friend wouldn't shut up about.

And everyone's like, oh, what's it? So it's all of this sort of stuff

that is really working. And my background is psychology. And this is the sort of

stuff that you absolutely like. How do we grab curiosity? How do we

pique people's interest? How do we get them over to the website? And we're going

to be seeing a lot of this in 2026. That kind of unpolished,

unfiltered storytelling content is going to be absolutely huge

next year. That's fascinating. I mean, and that leads me on to my next question,

which was, which I feel like you may be have even answered, which was how

can smaller businesses compete without a huge budget? But it sounds like from what you're

saying, that because it's unpolished, you don't need a giant budget.

It can be somebody in the mirror. Yeah, yeah. Something simple.

So simple, so simple. Like smaller brands. And this is why I'm so excited for

2026, because smaller brands can pivot and move so much quicker.

What all of this really comes back to is believability. And once you

start thinking about trust, it naturally leads into how we measure success,

especially when it comes to roas. So

independently, roas doesn't really mean anything together. When you're

looking at your cost per result, how much is it costing you to get a

sale and your roas, those two things make a lot

of sense when they're together. The one thing I would say to brands, and I

see this a lot, that if you are running ads by yourself and you're kind

of dabbling and working out yourself, is to

calculate what we call a break even roas. So

what is the ROAS I need to hit to break even?

So anything over that is okay. I'm profitable. Anything under

that is okay, I need to do some tweaks when you know that number,

understand the data and letting the data guide you makes a lot more

sense than just going in there going, oh, well, I want to Ross a 10,

which literally means nothing because it depends on your margin. So. Yeah, yeah, totally.

And also one of the things that bothers me about Roas is of course it's

like, so let's say you spend £10 and you get £50 of sales back. Okay,

that's great. But it's not your profit on ad spend, it's your return,

it's your sales. Whereas actually, you know, you could be, yeah, you get twice

as much back as you spent, but if your margins under

50%, you've actually lost some money. So, yeah, and it, I mean, you know, for

me, managers and run clients and the roas in their Ads Manager

doesn't factor in my fee, for example. So, you know, there are

so many other costs outside of the platform. Also, the other thing to

mention is that in Ads Manager we're not seeing all of the data.

So especially for products that are of higher value, where the

consideration period from the customer is longer, we don't see

data outside of seven days in Ads Manager just from looking at the dashboard.

So if your buyers are taking 14 days or 28

days to buy and the ad has helped do that, we don't see

that data. So again, it's skewed. And the data

is also delayed in Ad Manager, so we have no idea what's going on some

days because the data is so delayed. I would take ROAS with

a pinch of salt on its own, but just factor it into everything else

and also your overall sales and revenue, not just ad sponger.

So there you have it. Ads in 2026 aren't about hacks or

perfect targeting. They're about clarity, creativity and

trust. And if you're a smaller brand that can move quickly, test

ideas and show up as a real human behind your products, that's not a

disadvantage, it's an opportunity. You'll find CJ's details

in the show notes. And if this episode has highlighted gaps in your

margins, cash flow, or your platform for growth, that's exactly

the work I do with my clients. So why not head to resilient

retailclub.com to find out more about my services. Thanks for

listening and I'll see you next week.