For years, I’d been accustomed to centering my PPC strategy around bidding. The debates seemed endless: should I go with manual or automated, focus on Target CPA or aim for Maximize Conversions? Plus, the ongoing discussions around incrementality, budget pacing, and efficiency thresholds were never far behind.
But as we move into 2026, I’ve realized that this focus might not be serving us as well as it once did. With automation taking over bidding on platforms like Google Ads and Meta Ads, the real bottleneck holding back performance is the creative side of things. If anything, Meta’s recent Andromeda system update makes this shift glaringly obvious.
Smart bidding frameworks now largely mirror each other. On Google, Smart Bidding considers real-time signals such as device, location, behavior, and intent—parameters that would overwhelm any human doing this manually. Meta’s system also optimizes ad delivery by predicting outcomes rather than sticking to static audience definitions.
With such similar optimization engines in play, bidding has become more of a commodity. It’s no longer the edge it once was; rather, it’s the creative inputs we feed into these systems that truly differentiate performance. And it’s about time we acknowledged this.
The new Andromeda update from Meta is a testament to how critical creative has become. It’s not just a performance enhancer anymore; it’s an essential aspect of delivery. Meta even published a technical dive into Andromeda, explaining how it prioritizes and ranks ads based heavily on creative signals, boosting ad quality and increasing efficiency.
What this means for us is simple yet crucial: ads that don’t cut it creatively might not even reach meaningful auction phases, despite how well we target or how much budget we allocate. Poor creative not only costs more but can limit our reach entirely.
Meta’s clear stance positions creative quality as a pivotal factor in ad auctions. Studies have shown that campaigns with more creative variants achieve better cost-efficiency, and Andromeda compounds this by learning faster and being more selective. Many advertisers, including myself, have noticed a plateau in performance, even with consistent bidding and budgets. The reason? Creative inputs aren’t meeting the system’s learning needs.
I’ve also seen that Google Ads is quietly evolving in the same way, emphasizing the importance of creative assets in Performance Max, Demand Gen, and others. These changes demand that we prioritize creative assets as a major part of our strategy.
Many agencies, including those I’m part of, hit performance plateaus where the instinct is to re-evaluate bids. But often, it’s the creative that needs refreshing. Audiences get tired of repetitive visuals and messages, making engagement drop and costs rise.
I’ve realized that our current setup emphasizes optimizing bids faster than generating new creative. Creating engaging ads takes time—it involves strategic planning, design, approvals, and sometimes iterative refinement. However, retaining the same ads over prolonged periods stunts performance growth.
I’ve learned that effective creative testing is an ongoing process, much like a product development cycle. Successful campaigns focus on continually introducing new creative elements—each honing a specific aspect, whether it’s the opening line, visual style, or call to action.
If creative is identified as the bottleneck, agency operations must adapt. Planning for creative content should go hand-in-hand with media planning. It should be seen as fundamental, not supplementary, allowing teams to maintain a fresh and diverse creative library.
By acknowledging that creative drives performance, we can move beyond just optimization skills and into a realm of consistent growth, fueled by innovative and diverse creative inputs.
Inspired by this post on Search Engine Land.
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