If your cost per lead jumped this month and you can't figure out why, I'll save you the three hour rabbit hole.

It's not you. Your ads are fine and your audience still likes you.

You're bidding against a Senate race.

The ad tracker AdImpact is projecting about $11.6 billion in political ad spending for this cycle. That's a record. It's more than the entire 2024 presidential cycle, and it blows past the roughly $8.9 billion spent in the last midterms. A big chunk of it goes to TV and streaming, but AdImpact has digital spending on platforms like Facebook and Google pegged at around $1.6 billion.

And almost all of it gets crammed into the last few weeks before Tuesday.

So when a campaign with a bottomless budget decides it wants to reach every adult in Ohio, Texas or Michigan this week, it's bidding for the same phone screens your HVAC ad is trying to reach. The auction doesn't care that you sell furnace tune-ups. It just knows somebody's willing to pay more for that eyeball than you are.

I manage ads for a lot of service businesses. Every election cycle, I get the same panicked message from owners around this time. "Should I turn everything off?"

Short answer, no. Long answer is the rest of this email.

Meta and Google ads are auctions. Every time someone opens Instagram, a bunch of advertisers compete to show up in that spot. More advertisers chasing the same people means higher prices for everybody.

Campaigns are basically the worst bidder you could draw. They have huge budgets that have to be spent before a hard deadline. They target broadly, often by entire states or districts. And they don't care much about efficiency in the final stretch, because there's no point saving money on November 4.

On top of that, Meta stops accepting new political and social issue ads in the U.S. from October 27 through the end of Election Day. Some people read that and think "great, the auction clears out." It doesn't. Ads that were already approved and running can keep running. The campaigns knew the deadline and loaded up their ads before it hit. And during the freeze, those campaigns can still crank their budgets up on the ads they already have running. So the freeze mostly stops new creative. It doesn't stop the spending.

Then there's the part people forget. Attention. Your customers are distracted right now. They're doomscrolling, arguing in group chats and getting 14 texts a day from candidates they've never heard of. Even when your ad shows up, it's fighting for brain space with a lot of noise.

More money for less attention. Lousy deal, but it's temporary.

Your gut is going to tell you to slam the brakes. Turn it all off, wait it out, come back when it's quiet.

That's usually a mistake, for two reasons.

First, pausing resets your progress. Meta's delivery system learns over time who's likely to become a lead for you. When you shut a campaign off for a couple of weeks and turn it back on, you're often starting that learning over again. You pay for it later, right when you want results the most.

Second, your competitors are going to pause. Every other contractor and dentist in town who doesn't read this newsletter is going to panic and go dark. When the election ends, the ones who stayed on are still showing up, still collecting leads, still top of mind. The ones who paused are rebuilding from scratch.

Don't hit the off switch. Turn the knob down.

Here's what I'm doing with client accounts right now, and what I'd do if it were your money.

Trim, don't kill. If cost per lead is up 30 percent or more, pull daily budgets down 20 to 30 percent on your prospecting campaigns. Keep them running. You're keeping the lights on, not trying to win the week.

Protect your winners. Look at your last 60 days. Which ads produced actual customers, not just clicks? Keep those running and leave them alone. This is not the week to tinker with a winner.

Stop launching new tests. New creative tests need clean data, and this week's data is a mess. If you launch a new ad on Monday and it bombs, you won't know whether the ad was bad or the auction was crazy. Save your new stuff for November 4.

Lean on your warm audiences. People who visited your site, watched your videos, filled out a form and didn't book, or bought from you before. These are cheaper to reach and way more likely to act, even when they're distracted. If you've been ignoring retargeting, this is the week to fix that.

Watch the right number. Your cost per thousand impressions, or CPM, will look scary. Ignore it as a stand-alone metric. Watch cost per lead and cost per booked appointment. If CPM is up 40 percent but your cost per booked job only went up 10 percent, you're fine. Breathe.

Let search do the heavy work. People who type "furnace repair near me" into Google this week still need a furnace repaired. Search intent doesn't care about the news cycle. If you run Google Search ads, this is the place to hold budget steady or even nudge it up, while you trim the feed-based stuff on Meta, YouTube and display where the political money is piling in.

Check where you're running. If you're in a state with a hot Senate or governor's race, you're getting hit harder than someone in a quiet market. That's not your fault. Don't compare your numbers to some guy in a Facebook group who lives in a state nobody's fighting over.

This one bites somebody every single cycle.

Meta classifies ads about "social issues" under the same rules as political ads. That category is broader than most people think. Ads that talk about things like energy policy, taxes, healthcare access, immigration or the economy can get flagged, even if you're just a solar company or a tax preparer trying to sell your service.

During the freeze, new ads that get flagged into that category won't run. Period. And you usually find out after you've already planned your week around them.

So this week, keep your ad copy boring in the best way. Talk about the customer's problem and your solution. Skip anything that sounds like a policy debate. "Save on your electric bill this winter" is fine. "Take back control from the utility monopolies" might get you a rejection and a support ticket that takes nine days to answer.

When rented attention gets expensive, use the attention you already own.

Your email list. Send something useful to your list this week. A seasonal tip, a customer story, a reminder about a service they're due for. Your list doesn't care that it's election week. If you're not emailing your list regularly, Beehiiv is the easiest way I know to get a clean, good-looking email out the door without hiring anybody.

Text your past customers. A short, personal text to people who bought from you before. "Hey, it's Mike from Smith Heating. We've got a few tune-up slots open next week before the cold hits. Want one?" These cut right through the noise because they come from someone the customer already knows. Keep it compliant. Only text people who've given you permission, and make it easy for them to opt out.

Call the list you never called. Every business has a pile of old leads and estimates that went nowhere. This is the week to work it. Phone calls don't have a CPM.

Post organic. Your organic social posts aren't in the auction. Schedule a week of useful posts in Buffer and keep showing up while your competitors disappear.

Now the fun part.

The couple of weeks after the election can be one of the best buying windows of the entire fourth quarter.

Think about what happens on November 4. Billions in political ad money just stops. Not slows down. Stops. The campaigns are done. Their budgets go to zero overnight.

Meanwhile, the big retailers haven't fully ramped up their Black Friday spending yet. That usually starts building through mid-November and peaks around Thanksgiving week.

So there's often a gap. A window of a couple weeks where the political money is gone and the holiday money isn't fully here. In past election years, plenty of advertisers saw costs ease once election week passed. I can't promise you exactly how it'll play out this year, nobody can. But I'd bet on it being a lot friendlier than the last two weeks of October.

Cheaper is only half of it. People come back. The texts stop, the yard signs come down, and everybody goes back to thinking about their own lives. Their furnace. Their teeth. Their kitchen remodel they've been putting off. Their business that needs fixing before the year ends.

That's when you want to be ready.

Spend this week loading the truck.

None of this is a reason to blame politics for everything. Some of you are going to read this and decide every bad number for the rest of the year is "because of the election."

It's not.

If your ads were weak before October, they'll be weak after November. If your landing page is slow, your offer is boring or nobody answers your phone, a quiet auction won't save you. The election makes things harder. It doesn't get you off the hook.

But if your fundamentals are solid and your numbers just went sideways for a few weeks, relax. It happens every cycle. Trim, protect what works, lean on what you own, and get ready to step on the gas while everybody else is still catching their breath.

Talk Soon,

Dan

Dan Kaufman

Founder, Dead Simple Growth and Pinnacle Masters

P.S. Reply with CPM and tell me what platform you're running, what you spend a month and what your cost per lead looked like in September versus this week. I'll tell you whether I'd trim, hold or push, and what I'd have ready for November 4.