The Death of ‘Best Practice’ in Paid Media

Best practice exists to reduce risk. It’s designed to give you a solid baseline, a safe place to start, something that should work across a wide range of advertisers.

But safety rarely scales.

If you’re a small or mid-sized brand trying to compete in crowded auctions, blending in isn’t a strategy that is going to work for you.  It is a ceiling. You end up running the same structures, targeting the same audiences, and using the same optimisation tactics as everyone else.

And when everyone follows best practice, performance starts to flatten. Where is the differentiator? The difference maker? Where is the uniqueness that built your business in the first place? 

Not because paid media stops working, but because no one is doing anything different enough to win in a meaningful way. 

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: platform “best practice” is usually aligned with platform incentives.

More automation means more spend flows through fewer levers. Broader targeting means larger addressable audiences. Fewer campaigns mean simpler delivery systems. All of which benefit the platforms, making them more efficient and profitable. 

It doesn’t necessarily make you more profitable though, which is of course the goal.

That doesn’t mean you should ignore platform guidance completely, that is far from what I am saying,  but it does mean you should question it. Especially when performance stalls and the only recommendations are to “trust the learning phase”, “increase daily budget” or “your audience is too narrow, expand”. 

The best paid media strategies I’ve seen don’t come from following a checklist. They come from understanding context and the needs and specificities of the client.

What actually makes someone buy this product or service?
Where does demand really come from?
What’s the role of each channel in the journey?

Those answers rarely sit neatly within best practice frameworks.

Sometimes remoulding best practice structure unlocks performance. Sometimes narrowing targeting beats going broad. Sometimes duplicating campaigns, without recommendations being applied, gives you the control you actually need.

There isn’t a fool-proof, universal rulebook.  Just patterns, tests, and decisions.

Fewer people can look at an account, understand what’s actually holding it back, and make the call to do something different.

That’s the difference between running ads and delivering performance.

It’s knowing when to lean into automation and best practices and when to ignore it and go rogue.
When to simplify, and when to add complexity. .
When to follow the ‘rules’,  and when to ignore them completely.

Because in reality, the accounts that perform best aren’t always the ones that follow best practice most closely.

They’re the ones that apply it selectively, and most importantly, with context.

Use best practice as a starting point, not a strategy.

Test beyond it. Question it. Push against it when your gut (and ideally, the data) tells you something isn’t working.

And most importantly, stop assuming there’s a “correct” way to run paid media.

There isn’t.

There’s just what works and what doesn’t.

And figuring that out is where the real value lies.

Sound like a lot of work? Good results don’t come easy, but that’s where we come in, so if you’d like a no- strings-attached chat, feel free to get in touch!