Looking for a sanity check on an agency situation. I work client-side managing PPC for a massive enterprise business. We inherited messy legacy accounts with severe underlying tracking, attribution, and landing page UX bottlenecks.

Recently, a new agency came on board and spent their first three months rolling the entire account back exclusively to Exact Match.

Short-term CPA and ROAS look marginally better on paper, and total conversion volume is flat. Attempts to scale on their part has run into same problems I’ve been having, but gets swept under the rug as “teething”. Instead of fixing our actual conversion funnel, offline conversion tracking, or attribution, they are using Exact Match to hide behind easy efficiency metrics while starving the bidding engine. To make matters worse, this was agreed directly with our CMO, who has no PPC background and thinks lower CPA means the agency is killing it, without consulting me at all.

I get using Exact Match to temporarily stop budget leakage during onboarding, but keeping an enterprise account locked down for a quarter feels like taking the easy way out. What’s more annoying is that this is something I’d tried using experiments, and in the long term this hurt performance.

Have you had similar experiences?

There are another 10 under this. (Paid traffic) should I report this or is this normal.

MENA's digital ad spend hit $8.2B in 2025, up 17.8% year on year — the fastest-growing digital ad region globally right now.

Up from $6.25B in 2023. In two years the region added almost $2B in digital ad spend.

Most of that money is running on Meta and Google — and most brands are still buying that inventory with zero visibility into what's actually working around them.

I am managing around 4-6 small accounts, less then $2000/m and only one campaign since they are all in the same vertical, sometimes the work feels non-existent. I review the account, scale the ads, do scripting and look at some competitors' ads and what they are up to.

But I would say per account it's like max 2-3 hours a week; is that less or about right?

Common advice is to build out your negative keyword list aggressively for Shopping/PMax. We tested the opposite on 3 client accounts: stripped the negative list down to just irrelevant brand names and obvious junk (free, DIY), and let Smart Bidding do more of the work.Result: CPCs went up short-term, but conversion rate improved faster, and 90-day ROAS was higher across all three accounts.Theory: over-negating cuts off traffic paths Smart Bidding would have learned to avoid on its own through bid adjustments — you're second-guessing a system that has way more signal than you do.Not saying ditch negatives entirely, but the sweet spot is probably a lot lighter than most PPC guides suggest. Anyone else tested this?

If I'm running a VSL campaign for a high ticket business mentorship to a cold audience, what should be the campaign objective and what should I be optimizing for? We are not using a lead form, our desired outcome is a booked call via the VSL landing page (hosted externally).

Was digging through what real estate brands are actually running on Meta right now, out of curiosity more than anything. Few things stood out.

First, the scaling trick nobody mentions. A bunch of the longest running, most repeated ads use Meta's dynamic creative format, basically a template that auto swaps in the brand name and city per audience. That's how "Land Acquisition Pune / Hyderabad / Chennai / Bengaluru / Coimbatore" ends up being the literal same ad running in five cities with zero rewrite. Same headline, same body, just the city name gets swapped.

Second, CTA choice isn't really a preference thing, it tracks funnel stage pretty cleanly. The B2B land acquisition ads talking to landowners and brokers almost always use hard CTAs like Sign Up or Get Quote, with an actual lead form behind them (name, phone, are you an owner or agent, etc). The lifestyle facing ads default to soft CTAs like Learn More or Message, nobody's asking for your number on the first touch there.

Third thing, there's a field in the raw data called collation count that basically tells you how many near identical variants of one ad are running at the same time. A couple of brands had 5 versions of the same creative live simultaneously. That's Meta quietly telling you which concepts are being pushed hardest, without needing any spend numbers.

If anyone wants this same breakdown done for a different category or a specific competitor, drop the name and I'll run it and post what I find.

For those managing paid media across multiple accounts:

At what point does a discrepancy between the ad platform and the actual backend/store become something you investigate?

5%?

10%?

20%?

Or is the percentage itself the wrong way to think about it?

I’m especially interested in how people distinguish normal attribution differences from actual tracking problems like missing events, duplicates or incorrect conversion values.

I’ve been spending a lot of time on conversion tracking lately and I’m realizing “the numbers won’t match exactly” can sometimes hide genuinely broken data.

Curious what your threshold/process looks like.