Business owners running Facebook and Instagram ads in Pakistan keep noticing the same thing year over year, the cost to reach the same number of people or get the same number of messages keeps climbing, even when nothing about the campaign has changed. Part of that is the rupee, since Meta’s ad auction effectively prices in dollars and a weaker rupee buys less of it. But that’s only one piece. The bigger, less talked about reason is that far more Pakistani businesses are now competing for the same audience than were three or four years ago, especially small retailers and dropshippers who moved online after the pandemic and never left. A campaign that cost a certain amount per lead in 2021 can easily cost two or three times that today for the exact same audience and creative, purely from auction pressure.
Apple’s privacy changes added another layer. Since iOS started limiting how much user activity apps can track, Meta’s algorithm has less data to optimise delivery with, especially for iPhone users, which used to be some of the highest spending audience segments in urban Pakistan. Less data usually means the algorithm needs more spend and a longer learning period to find the right people, which shows up directly as a higher cost per result. Businesses that never adjusted their targeting after these changes are effectively still bidding the old way in a market that changed underneath them.
What’s actually driving costs up
- More local advertisers bidding in the same auction for the same urban audiences
- Reduced tracking accuracy since iOS privacy changes limited ad data
- Rupee devaluation making the same budget buy fewer impressions in real terms
Most businesses respond by either cutting budget, which shrinks reach further, or raising it blindly, which doesn’t fix the underlying inefficiency. Neither works well on its own. What tends to actually move the number is a proper account audit, checking whether campaigns are competing against each other, whether creative has gone stale and is being ignored by the algorithm, and whether the audience targeting is still relevant to how people actually behave now. Ikonix Marketing Agency runs this kind of audit for clients whose cost per result has crept up over months without an obvious cause, usually finding two or three fixable issues rather than one big one.
Ad costs in Pakistan aren’t going back down to where they were a few years ago. Businesses that keep running the exact same campaigns and creative from that era, and just complain about the price, are going to keep losing ground to the ones that adjusted.