For years, Meta was the default performance engine for India’s direct-to-consumer brands. Cheap inventory, broad reach and enough targeting control made Facebook and Instagram the obvious place to scale. That math is changing fast, and D2C teams are being forced to rethink the playbook.
The two numbers that explain the shift
Gopa Menon, Co-founder and COO at theblurr, points to Meta’s recent earnings disclosure as the story in miniature. Ad prices were up 14% year-on-year, while impressions only grew 6%.
“That gap is the whole story in two numbers,” Menon said. “Advertisers are paying meaningfully more to reach roughly the same volume of eyeballs.”
Menon says average CPMs globally are up about 20% year-on-year, with India seeing 15–20% increases. India is still cheaper than the US or UK in absolute terms, but crowded high-intent categories such as real estate, finance and education are absorbing sharper increases.
Swagat Sarangi, co-founder of Smytten, says the pressure isn’t just about inventory supply. It’s about which shoppers actually convert. While India has huge device and content consumption numbers, the transactional audience is far smaller. “Everybody is still fighting for the attention of roughly the same 50–100 million shoppers who are actually likely to convert,” he said.
That puts advertisers into a classic auction squeeze: more bidders, similar demand, higher prices for the same attention.
Automation and privacy are rewiring control
The second shift is under the hood. Five to seven years ago, performance marketers could manually adjust audiences, interests, media mix and funnel sequencing. Today, Google and Meta are more automated and more opaque. Meta has pushed most advertisers onto Advantage+ campaigns, which simplifies bidding but also puts everyone into the same broad auction.
Privacy changes have made the picture worse. After iOS signal loss, audience data is weaker, targeting is broader, and more advertisers are chasing overlapping groups. Marketers are left with fewer reliable signals while handing more decision-making to algorithms.
Intent is becoming the real differentiator
The Meta-versus-Google comparison is no longer just about cost per click. Sarangi said a click on Meta may cost ₹2–3, while a Google Search click could be ₹8–10. But search conversion can run three to four times higher because the user is already looking for a solution.
Meta often works as an interruption designed to trigger impulse action. That makes creative far more important. Content fatigue is rising, scroll speeds are high, and low-engagement ads get pushed less. Meta’s system effectively charges more to hold reach when creative underperforms.
What D2C teams should do now
The brands absorbing these costs best are not finding a secret targeting hack. They are changing what they bring into Meta:
- Use first-party data aggressively: CRM lists, WhatsApp signals and Conversions API are becoming more valuable than broad audience settings.
- Treat creative as the performance lever: Test more formats, refresh creative faster, and optimise for stopping power mid-scroll.
- Measure incrementally: Shift from cheap clicks to incremental business generated against incremental spend.
- Diversify conversion paths: Marketplaces, QR-led journeys and emerging AI shopping environments can reduce dependence on one auction.
- Respect AOV economics: Higher average order value categories are better placed to absorb rising CPMs; low-AOV brands need sharper unit economics.
“The era of ‘set a budget, let the algorithm handle it’ is ending,” Menon said. For growth teams in India, the next stage is less about mastering Meta’s buttons and more about owning the data, creative and measurement layers around it.
Source: Storyboard18
