Every Mediovsky piece tagged PPC.
Claude Code already pulls last week's numbers, drafts the negatives, and stages a budget change across Google Ads and Meta, wired in through the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and the platforms' own APIs. Here is how the plumbing works, why Google's own connector refuses to spend a cent, and where the guardrails still have to come from you.
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.
AI agents already run bidding, budget shifts, and creative rotation end to end. But 2026 is the year of assisted autonomy: humans on the guardrails, not off the loop. The gap between those two things is where accounts get wrecked or saved.
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.
Google Ads scripts still earn their keep in 2026 doing deterministic, boring work: budget alerts, zero-conversion flagging, out-of-stock pausing. AI can now draft them from a sentence. The judgment about the rules is still yours, and that's the whole point.
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.
