“I tried to run the ads myself with Claude… and performance tanked.”
I hear some version of that on almost every discovery call now.
The AI whiplash is here. People are figuring out they don’t know what they don’t know. The superpowers they thought they picked up from Claude keep running into kryptonite. Welcome to the Find Out stage. The honeymoon is over.
A call today with an HVAC company drove it home.
The owner is a sharp guy. He fired his agency at the start of the year, rebuilt his whole lead funnel himself, and for about six months he was buying leads for $60 to $70 apiece and touching 10x return on ad spend. (For the record, most businesses never see 10x. Ever.)
Then in September he pulled budget out of Meta to test search ads. Results cratered. He moved the money back, and it never recovered. So he did what a lot of smart operators do now. He dumped his account data into Claude and asked what went wrong.
Claude told him his creative had been going stale before he made the switch. Maybe. Claude knows October is historically the most expensive, lowest-performing stretch of the year on Meta, and that election ads crowd the auction. It knows a local business in one metro has a ceiling on how many people are shopping for a new AC unit. Nobody told it any of that applied here. It got an ad account export and a question.
Context is king with AI. The more you tell it about the situation and what good looks like, the better the answer you’ll get back. But if you don’t know what good looks like yourself, you won’t know how to read its analysis or when to push back. A journalism student can’t walk into a quantum physics lecture and call BS on a professor botching string theory. (Speaking as a former journalism student.)
The day before we talked, he started a brand new pixel. That throws out everything Meta had learned about his customers, and the system starts relearning from zero. I told him what I tell everyone: an ad account is a cruise ship, not a speedboat. The more you yank the wheel, the worse it gets.
A Pilates studio chain told me the same story on a call last week. They’d tried running things through Claude too. The catch was that their tracking was broken for a long time. The pixel was firing page views, random lead events on checkout pages, and not much else, so Meta had no real idea who was buying a membership. No amount of clever prompting fixes missing data. Without conversion signals, there’s nothing for any AI to learn from, Meta’s or Claude’s.
I use AI in my own work every day. I’ve built a tool on top of it that tags every ad in an account by angle and persona. It’s useful because I’ve spent ten years learning what to feed it and when it’s wrong.
Need help with your ads? Let’s chat.