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Industry dispatches, playbooks, and account teardowns from the team running paid-media at scale — what shipped, what broke, what we're testing next.
Google clicks cost about four times more than Meta clicks and convert about four times better. That is not a coincidence; it is the same customer at two different moments. The real question is not which platform wins. It is which job each one does in your funnel, and in what order to buy them.
OpenThe standard answer is a percentage of revenue: 10% to 20% for ecommerce, more if you are pushing growth. It is a decent sanity check and a terrible way to set a budget, because the right spend comes from your margins and payback, not from what other companies do. Here is the backwards method.
OpenAverage CPC is up to $1.72, CPMs jumped 20% to about $14, and the median ecommerce ROAS sits near 1.86. Useful numbers. Also the fastest way to make a bad decision, because a benchmark is not a target. Here are the 2026 figures and how to read them against your own math.
OpenGoogle's AI Max and broad match infer intent, which means they quietly wander into your brand-name auctions and bid against your own brand campaign. You pay more for clicks you would have won cheaply, and your reported ROAS inflates. Here is how to catch it and claw the margin back.
OpenMore buyers now ask ChatGPT or Perplexity for the best product before they ever open Google. If the model does not name you in the answer, you lost the sale before the click. Here is how a DTC brand earns those recommendations.
OpenPlatform ROAS answers a question you did not ask. It tells you how many sales the platform took credit for. The question that decides whether to keep spending is different: how many of those sales would have happened anyway, with no ad at all?
OpenEvery ad platform claims the same sale. Meta counts it, Google counts it, TikTok counts it, and your three dashboards add up to more revenue than your bank received. There is one number nothing can double-count, because it starts from the money that landed.
OpenMarketing mix modeling used to be a thing only big brands could afford. Two things changed in 2026: privacy broke last-click for everyone, and the platforms open-sourced their own modelling tools.
OpenMeta switched on Threads ads worldwide in January 2026, and right now the placement is cheap because few advertisers have shown up. Early CPMs run well below Instagram. This is the short first-mover window, and here is how to use it without wasting budget.
OpenYou used to win by finding the right audience. Lookalikes, interest stacks, detailed targeting, that was the job. Then Advantage+ and broad match swallowed most of it. The machine picks the audience now, and it is better at it than you are.
OpenHere is a number that will mislead you faster than almost any other in a service business: cost per lead. A clinic runs a campaign, the form fills come in at $6 each, and everyone celebrates. Three weeks later the calendar is half empty and nobody can explain why a flood of cheap leads turned into a trickle of booked patients.
OpenMost brands now know their reported ROAS is inflated. We wrote the diagnosis in why your ROAS is lying to you, and you have probably felt it: the dashboard says 4x, the bank account disagrees.
OpenGoogle says AI Max delivers 14% more conversions at similar cost. Independent analysis of 250+ real campaigns shows ROAS outcomes ranging from +42% to -35% — same feature, wildly different results. The honest version of what AI Max does, where it works, where it fails, and how to test it without burning budget.
OpenMost businesses don't have an ads problem. They have a system problem. Somewhere between the click and the customer, 30-50% of every ad dollar disappears into operational gaps nobody flagged because nobody was looking. The seven most common leaks we find in real ad accounts — and exactly how to fix each one.
OpenYour dashboard says 4x ROAS. Your finance team says revenue is flat. Both numbers are technically correct — and that gap is where most growth strategies quietly fail. The full breakdown of why platform-reported ROAS inflates by 30-50%, and the math that actually tells you whether your ads make money.
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