If you feel like your CPMs have been rising all year.. you’re right. Costs per thousand impressions are up almost everywhere in 2025. But the why is more nuanced than “Meta got more expensive.”

Some of the rise is simply market forces: more advertisers, more automation, more demand for prime placements. But a surprising amount comes from signals inside your ad ecosystem that affect how easily your campaigns deliver. The good news: many of those can be optimized with the right steps.

1. Market Pressure: The Baseline Is Higher

Industry data shows CPMs up ~10–15% YoY in early 2025. Key drivers:

• Advantage+ adoption. Meta is consolidating spend into fewer auctions, meaning competition is fiercer for high-value impressions.
  

• Placement shifts. Instagram Reels and Stories have seen the steepest price increases as brands fight for attention there.
  

• Auction mechanics. Meta prices each impression based on bid × predicted action rate × ad quality. If your ad is slightly less relevant or lower engagement than peers, you pay a premium.

These factors hit everyone. But there’s a second layer — one that explains why some advertisers’ CPMs climb faster than others, even with strong creative.

2. Delivery Friction: The Quiet CPM Inflator

Some accounts seem to get “stickier” CPMs over time even when CTRs and CVRs stay strong. What causes this?

Patterns we see often during assessments:

• Old policy flags or unresolved Page Quality issues that still sit in the background
  

• Recycled or messy assets Such as pages, domains, ad accounts, profiles that have changed hands repeatedly
  

• Frequent edits or duplication habits that keep campaigns under constant review
  

• Low event data quality (poor EMQ, pixel drift, unverified domains) that reduce predicted action rates

Individually, these aren’t catastrophic. But together, they create subtle drag that slows approvals, caps daily delivery, and keeps CPMs elevated.

You won’t see a red banner warning you about this, you just notice scaling feels harder, and every impression costs a little more.

If you suspect this might be happening on your account, you can use Scoreify to receive a structured assessment can surface the old flags, event data issues, and asset habits creating the drag.

3. Practical Adjustments to Make Right Now

Here’s a 2025-ready checklist to bring CPMs back down:

Clean Up Old Friction

• Resolve or archive flagged assets, old Pages, or rejected ad history that no longer need to be live
  

• Standardize your Business Manager: clear naming, verified domains, minimal redundancy
  

• Stabilize campaign launches — avoid constant rebuilds that reset learning phases

Strengthen Your Conversion Signals

• Audit your Events Manager: fix mismatched events, raise Event Match Quality, verify deduplication
  

• Keep AEM configurations stable, frequent changes degrade learning
  

• Connect server-side Conversions API for cleaner data

Focus on Creative Quality

• Build ads designed for native engagement. Examples are short-form video, UGC-style creative, and hooks that get watched/clicked
  

• Rotate/test creatives to prevent fatigue penalties without blowing up campaigns too often
  

• Match creative format to placement (vertical video for Reels/Stories, 1:1 for Feeds)

Scale Gradually with Advantage+

• Let Advantage+ campaigns stabilize before major budget jumps
  

• Avoid over-segmentation, fewer, stronger campaigns reduce self-competition
  

• Watch placement-level CPMs and shift spend where auctions are cooler
  

4. What Happens After a Good Clean-Up

Advertisers who do this well see:

• Lower CPMs. Sometimes 15–30% cheaper than before
  

• Faster approvals and steadier scaling
  

• Creative performance that “unlocks” without constant reinvention
  

• Better spend allocation inside Advantage+ (less wasted on bad placements)
  

Want a Deeper Diagnostic?

If you’ve cleaned up creative and targeting but CPMs are still sticky, it may be time for a structured assessment. Our team at Scoreify runs a Meta Health Assessment that maps the hidden drags in your ad ecosystem, gives you a prioritized action plan, and shows how to keep delivery smooth as you scale.