- Jun 24, 2026
- 5
- 75
Hai all,
I've been reviewing my paid advertising campaigns over the past year, and one thing has become very clear: the strategies that worked even a year or two ago don't always produce the same results today. Every major advertising platform has evolved, with more automation, stronger AI, and different user behavior changing the way campaigns perform.There's no shortage of YouTube videos, blog posts, and social media threads claiming to have the perfect formula for profitable advertising. However, once you start spending your own budget, you quickly realize that real-world performance rarely matches those simplified success stories. Every account behaves differently, every audience reacts differently, and what works for one business may completely fail for another.
That's why I wanted to start a discussion with people who are actively running paid campaigns in 2026.
For those using Google Ads, how much are you relying on Google's automation compared to manually controlling campaigns? Has broad match combined with Smart Bidding become your preferred approach, or do you still find tighter keyword control produces better results? I'm also curious whether Performance Max campaigns are consistently delivering results for ecommerce businesses or if traditional Search campaigns continue to outperform them.
Meta Ads also seem very different compared to previous years. Facebook and Instagram appear to reward broader targeting while allowing the algorithm to do most of the audience selection. At the same time, I've noticed that authentic-looking ads often seem to outperform polished commercial creatives. Have you found that simple videos, founder content, or user-generated style ads consistently generate better results than professionally designed advertisements? Has your approach to testing creatives changed during the past year?
TikTok Ads seem to follow an entirely different set of rules. It often feels like creative quality has a much bigger impact than audience targeting. I've heard many advertisers mention that refreshing creatives regularly is essential because performance drops much faster than on other platforms. If you're advertising on TikTok, what has been your experience this year? Are Spark Ads still producing strong results, or have you found better performance using other campaign types?
Another area I'm interested in is landing pages. No matter how good an ad campaign is, the landing page often determines whether visitors actually convert. Have you seen better results from shorter, simpler pages, or do detailed sales pages still perform well? Have small changes to your landing page ever produced bigger improvements than changes made inside the advertising platform itself?
I'm also curious about budget allocation. If you were managing a monthly advertising budget between $3,000 and $10,000 today, would you focus primarily on one platform until it became consistently profitable, or would you spread the budget across Google Ads, Meta Ads, and TikTok Ads from the beginning? How do you decide when a campaign deserves additional budget versus when it's time to stop spending and test something new?
It also feels like AI is playing a much bigger role in paid advertising than ever before. Between automated bidding, campaign optimization, audience expansion, and creative recommendations, advertisers seem to have less manual control than they used to. Has that actually improved your campaign performance, or do you feel automation sometimes makes optimization more difficult?
I'm not looking for shortcuts or "secret" methods that promise overnight success. I'm much more interested in hearing real experiences from people who are actively managing campaigns and spending their own advertising budgets.
What strategies are genuinely working for you in 2026, what has stopped working, and if you could give one piece of advice to someone trying to improve their paid traffic results this year, what would it be?