You are spending on Facebook and Instagram every month. The reports show reach, impressions and a healthy number of clicks. What they do not show is a single conversation your sales team can trace back to an ad. Someone sends a WhatsApp message, someone fills the form, and nobody knows which ad brought them. So the spend continues, because stopping it feels risky, and the decision to increase it never gets made, because nothing proves it would return more.
Why it persists. Meta rewards the account that is fed clean data and fresh creative, and penalises the one that is not, quietly, through delivery. Most SMBs manage neither, because both need someone who owns the account week after week. Tracking was set up once, before consent rules and browser changes broke it. Creative is made when somebody finds time. The person running the ads is usually the person running everything else, so the account is opened when results drop and left alone when they do not.
If it stays unresolved. Costs rise slowly and quietly. The same money reaches fewer of the right people each quarter as the creative ages, and because nothing is measured against a baseline, the drift is only noticed when a month is bad enough to argue about. Eventually the account is paused, and the conclusion drawn is that Facebook does not work for this business.