I was back on Jeff Sauer's Measure U podcast to tackle something most Meta advertisers get wrong without realizing it: they think they are running new customer acquisition campaigns, and they are not.
Here is what actually happens. You set up a campaign to find new customers, but Meta's algorithm optimizes for the fastest, easiest conversions it can find. Those almost always come from people who already know you, your repeat buyers and warm audiences. So the campaign you built to grow your customer base quietly turns into one that re-converts the customers you already had. It looks fine in the dashboard, because the platform is happy to take credit, but your actual new-customer growth stalls.
That is the trap this episode is about, and Jeff and I break down how to get out of it. The first step is being able to separate new customers from repeat ones for real, not guessing, but measuring it against your actual orders. Until you can see that split, you genuinely cannot tell whether your ad budget is buying growth or just recycling demand. This is also why ROAS on its own is so misleading, because it happily counts both and makes recycled revenue look like a win.
From there we get into the feedback loop that fixes it: offer the product most likely to lead to a valuable customer, send Meta the right signal so it optimizes for genuinely new buyers, and then measure the result correctly so you can validate what is actually working. When those three pieces line up, you stop fighting the algorithm and start training it to go find the customers you actually want, which is how you build a compounding engine of profitable new-customer acquisition instead of a treadmill.
If your Meta results look fine on paper but your business is not really growing, this episode is worth your time. Watch the full conversation below.