Welcome to the thoughts of Silvertip Digital.

How Google’s latest Performance Max updates are turning your product feed into one of your biggest competitive advantages.     When most retailers think about improving Google Ads performance, they tend to focus on budgets, bidding strategies or creative….

A founder messaged me in March: “We’ve doubled our Meta spend and revenue has only grown 30%. What’s broken?” Nothing was broken. They were running a 2023 operating model on a 2026 system. Their creative pool was too thin, their structure was too complex, and their testing budget was non-existent. The platform was working exactly as designed. They just weren’t.

Last September I sat with a client whose Meta ROAS had dropped from 4.1x to 2.6x in eight weeks. No changes to creative, budget, structure, or targeting. The platform looked broken. We dug in. Their dev team had pushed a tag-manager update that quietly broke 31% of their pixel events. Andromeda had been making decisions on a third of the signal it used to have. The auction wasn’t broken. We were starving it.

I audited a £140k-a-month Meta account last month that had 47 active ad sets. The agency running it called this “comprehensive coverage.” Three of those ad sets were spending 71% of the budget. The other 44 were eating fees and confusing the algorithm. That account is not unusual. That account is the median.

In 2012 I used to download spreadsheets of every search keyword and manually change bids by plus or minus 10%. That was the job. Six years later most of that work had been swallowed by Smart Bidding. I haven’t manually adjusted a keyword bid since 2019.

A founder asked us last month how many ads his agency should be producing for his Meta account. He was spending £85k a month. The agency was shipping six ads a fortnight. He thought that sounded fine because his previous agency had shipped four. He was wrong by roughly an order of magnitude.

Last quarter Silvertip ran two campaigns for the same client. Same product, same offer, the same creative budget split down the middle. One was Advantage+ with broad targeting and nine creatives. The other was the structure we’d been running for three years: eight ad sets, layered interests, careful exclusions. The broad campaign returned 41% more revenue.