What’s actually changing in Google and Meta ads.
Short, plain-English notes on the platform changes we keep running into during audits. No hype, no press-release language. Just what is shifting, and what it means for the money in your account.
Advantage+ is now the default, not the option.
Over the past year Meta has quietly made its Advantage+ automation the starting point for most new campaigns, rather than something you deliberately switch on. It can work well. It also hides a lot of the levers advertisers used to control. In audit after audit we are finding accounts where automation is deciding budget and placement with nobody checking whether the results actually hold up. Automation is fine. Automation with no one reading the output is not.
Performance Max still hides its search terms. Your account data does not.
Performance Max remains the least transparent campaign type Google offers. You cannot see most of what it spends on inside the interface. What you can see, if you know where to look, is the channel split and the change history. Most of the PMax accounts we audit turn out to be sending a large slice of budget to brand searches the business would have won for free anyway.
Creative volume has quietly become the strategy.
Meta’s delivery now rewards a steady stream of fresh creative more than any single clever ad. The accounts that stall are almost always the ones running the same three ads for months on end. The public ad library makes this trivial to check from the outside, which is exactly what our free snapshot does before you spend a cent.
Broad match plus Smart Bidding: powerful, and easy to get wrong.
Google keeps pushing broad match paired with Smart Bidding as the modern setup, and in the right account with clean conversion data it performs. In an account with broken tracking or a thin negative-keyword list, it burns money fast. The setup is not the problem. Switching it on without the guardrails is.
Consent Mode v2 is now doing real damage to messy accounts.
For anyone advertising into the EEA and UK, Consent Mode v2 is no longer optional plumbing. Accounts that never set it up properly are feeding Google and Meta far less data than they think, and that quietly weakens every automated bid the platforms make on their behalf. We check whether the plumbing is genuinely connected, not just whether a cookie banner appears.
The Conversions API is not a nice-to-have anymore.
As browser signal keeps eroding, Meta’s server-side Conversions API is doing more and more of the work of telling the system what actually happened. Plenty of the accounts we open have it half-connected, sending duplicate or missing events. It looks fine on the surface and slowly starves the algorithm underneath.
Account-level negative keywords arrived. Most accounts still ignore them.
Google rolled out negative keywords that apply across the whole account, including Performance Max. It is one of the simplest ways to stop paying for junk searches. Very few of the accounts we audit have actually used it. The tool is there. The discipline is not.
AI Max for Search: more reach, less control.
Google’s AI Max bundle expands where your search ads can appear and how loosely they are matched. It can find genuine new demand, and it can just as easily drift into queries that have nothing to do with your business. The only way to tell which is happening in your account is to read the search terms, not the summary screen.
Rising CPMs are usually a creative problem, not a market problem.
When costs climb, the first instinct is to blame the auction. In most of the accounts we look at, the real story is tired creative and narrow audiences pushing frequency up. The auction is competitive, but it consistently rewards the accounts that keep feeding it fresh, relevant ads.
First-party data is the whole game now.
Every platform change over the past year points the same way. The advertisers who own and feed clean first-party data win, and the ones leaning on third-party signal keep paying more for less. If your tracking is patchy, no amount of clever targeting fixes it. That is why every audit we run starts with measurement, before anyone looks at a single ad.
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