Sustainable ad-spend optimizer: unit economics & retention for brands

I have a theory about Facebook ads that sounds like a conspiracy but might actually be true. One of my buddies built a tool that gave advertisers perfect event matching. Like 100% match rates. Every conversion tracked flawlessly. Every brand that turned it on saw an immediate lift. But 2-3 months later, that lift disappeared. Every single time. Performance came back down to exactly where it was before. So they experimented. Turn it on for a month, off for two months, back on again. Same pattern every time. Temporary bump, then reversion to baseline. His theory: Meta knows your margin profile and will squeeze you right up to the edge of what you can afford to keep spending. Think about it. Meta has 10+ years of data on who actually buys from ads and who never will. I'm on Facebook every day and I've probably never bought anything from a Facebook ad. They know that about me. But they still need to monetize those users. So they show them ads anyway, diluting your high-intent audience with enough low-intent users to keep you hooked, but not quite profitable enough to scale infinitely. Any efficiency gain you get just gives Meta room to push you into slightly worse audiences until you're back at your margin ceiling. It doesn't matter what you do. Meta will always bring you back to whatever performance you started with. I don't know if this is actually true. Maybe it's seasonality or survivor bias or a hundred other explanations. But everytime I hear a pitch for the next great data enrichment tool this is the first thing I think about. Part I'm not sure of is whether brands actually have any control here, or if we're all just playing a game where the house always adjusts the odds. If Meta's always going to revert performance to equilibrium, the only real leverage we have is outside the ad platform. Better product-market fit. Healthier margins. Higher retention. Operational excellence. The stuff that actually lets you afford to spend more than the next guy. The bad news is those things are really hard. The good news is they're a much more defensible moat than how you structure your ad account.