Performance Max, Advantage+, paid social. For people who run the campaigns.
Two migration dates are circulating with the wrong campaign types attached. Google’s 7% and the independent 16% come from different verticals, baselines, and years, and the question worth testing is whether the added volume was ever new.
The 31 markets that went live on August 24 are exactly the EEA plus Switzerland, the territory OpenAI carved out of personalization. Polish buyers get a contextual product with a 65 PLN daily floor and a CPC figure that is a suggested bid, not a market rate.
Thirty conversions a month. Fifty events a week. Every consolidation argument in the industry rests on those numbers, and neither platform states them as structural requirements. Google says something quieter and more useful, and once you read what it actually says, the real cost of splitting a campaign turns out to be arithmetic you can do yourself.
Two things break creative testing at once: the platform decides who sees what, and almost nobody runs the numbers on how much data a real answer needs. The arithmetic is not close. Detecting a 20% difference takes roughly 400 conversions per variant, and most tests are called at a tenth of that.
Google and Meta will optimize toward whatever a conversion is worth, and they take your word for it. Most accounts send the order total, which is not profit, then set a target on top of a number the business never earned. Here is what to send instead, and the refund pipeline that keeps it honest.
Search themes, campaign-level negatives, brand exclusions, and channel reporting quietly turned Google’s most opaque campaign type into a controllable broad-match machine. The controls exist. Most accounts still don’t use them.
Meta made Advantage+ the default and lowered the bar to use it. The performance lift is real. But the number it reports is blended, and the control you give up is not. Here’s how to run it without fooling yourself.
Independent audits keep finding the same thing: only about half of a programmatic display dollar reaches the site that ran the ad. The rest is the ad tech tax, and in 2026 the way to claw it back is structural, not another blocklist.
Published 2026 benchmarks put LinkedIn cost per click (CPC) anywhere from $5.58 to $10.11, and as high as $15.72 in peak quarters, with cost per lead (CPL) from $15 to $350. The spread isn’t noise. It’s the whole game. Plan to the range that matches your audience, not the headline that matches nobody’s.
Third-party cookies stopped carrying your retargeting a while ago. The value moved to first-party audiences, server-side signals, and the automation layers inside Meta and Google. Here’s what to keep funding and what to quietly cut.
