Zoe Barlow

When performance marketing campaigns start to struggle, the first place many teams look is targeting. Audiences get refined, keywords are adjusted and budgets are moved between campaigns in the hope of improving results. Sometimes these changes make a difference. But quite often they only shift performance around rather than addressing the underlying issue. A lot of the time, the problem isn’t who the ads are reaching. It’s the ad creative those audiences are seeing.

Meta has its own targets. Google has its own targets. When results are reported back to the business, each channel often looks strong in isolation. On paper, everything looks fine. Campaign dashboards show healthy return on ad spend, conversion rates look stable, and platforms regularly recommend further optimisations that promise even better performance. But when you zoom out and look at the bigger picture, the story can be very different.