A $4 to $11 jump in one month is way too big to just be a tracking problem. If tracking was the only issue, you'd see fewer reported leads but the actual sales would still be there, and the bakery would feel fine about it. The fact that cost per lead stayed high even after you moved to email retargeting tells me the creative and the offer are what's not landing anymore. People's feeds changed, Apple made it harder to follow folks around, so the old lookalike stack doesn't stretch as far, but a bakery in Austin should still pull cheap leads with local stuff. Try broad targeting in a 10 mile radius, skip the fancy audiences, and lead with a photo of actual bread coming out of the oven instead of a discount code.

The line "spent 5 hours chasing a load chart error" hits way too close to home lol. It's always the tiny stuff that eats your whole day, never the big obvious problems. Same thing happens with my truck at home, I'll tear apart the whole engine looking for a weird noise and it turns out to be a loose heat shield or something dumb in the glove box. I swear life works like that on purpose, the small things sneak past you while you're busy overthinking the big ones. We trust the fancy readouts so much that we forget to check the simple stuff first. Lesson learned the hard way I guess, always check the dumb stuff before you go deep.