The paid media environment has shifted
The paid media landscape looks meaningfully different in 2024 than it did three years ago. The combination of iOS privacy changes, ongoing since 2021, extended by iOS 17's link tracking protection, and the long-threatened deprecation of third-party cookies has steadily eroded the data quality that performance marketing has always depended on. At the same time, rising cost-per-click across most major platforms has compressed margins on campaigns that were profitable at lower costs. And AI-driven bidding, which the platforms have been pushing aggressively, has moved control over targeting and optimisation further from the advertiser and further toward the platform's own black box.
None of this means paid media does not work. It means the environment requires more sophistication and more honest performance assessment than the more forgiving market of a few years ago. Teams that are still running paid media the way they did in 2021, and measuring it by the same attribution models, are probably making worse decisions than they realise.
The attribution problem
The fundamental issue with paid media measurement right now is that the measurement is broken in ways that are easy to underestimate. Last-click attribution, still the default in many teams, attributes full conversion credit to the last touchpoint before a purchase, which systematically undervalues brand-building channels and overvalues bottom-of-funnel ones. Platform-reported attribution, where Meta or Google tells you how many conversions their ads drove, notoriously overcounts, because each platform claims credit independently and the totals almost always exceed actual conversions.
The result is that many teams believe their paid media is performing better than it is, because the dashboards are optimistic by design. The practical consequence is misallocated budget, too much on channels that look productive but are partly claiming credit for conversions that would have happened anyway, and too little on the brand-building activities whose contribution is invisible in last-click models.
Platform-reported conversions always look better than reality. The question is how much better, and whether your budget decisions are based on the platform's optimistic number or the truth.
Where the budget is holding up
Despite the headwinds, several categories of paid media are still delivering strong results for the right businesses in the right contexts.
Branded search: Bidding on your own brand terms continues to be one of the highest-ROI paid media activities, particularly if you have competitors bidding on your brand. The intent is the highest in all of paid media, someone typing your brand name has already been through the awareness and consideration process, and costs are typically lower than non-branded terms.
LinkedIn for B2B: Despite higher CPCs than other platforms, LinkedIn's targeting precision for professional audiences remains unmatched. For B2B businesses where the target audience is defined by job title, company size, or industry, and where the deal value justifies the acquisition cost, LinkedIn paid campaigns are consistently one of the most defensible paid channels.
Intent-based search: High-commercial-intent search terms, people searching for solutions to specific problems, comparing options, or evaluating providers, continue to convert reliably. The cost is higher than it was three years ago, but the intent quality remains strong.
Retargeting with a first-party data foundation: As third-party audience targeting degrades, retargeting based on your own first-party data, email lists, CRM segments, website visitors, holds up better because it is less dependent on platform-collected data that privacy changes have eroded.
Where teams are wasting budget in 2024
Broad interest-based social targeting on Meta or other platforms, without a first-party seed audience to work from, is increasingly inefficient for most B2B businesses. The days of finding untapped, cheap, highly targeted audiences through platform interest graphs are largely over. The inventory is expensive, the audience quality is variable, and the attribution overcounting is at its worst here.
Display prospecting, reaching new audiences through banner ads and display networks, has similarly seen declining performance at most levels of the funnel. Brand awareness objectives are better served by channels with editorial context (digital publications, podcasts, newsletter sponsorships) than by display units that most audiences have learned to ignore.
Building measurement you can trust
The practical response to broken attribution is not to stop measuring; it is to use a broader, more honest measurement framework. Combine platform data with revenue and pipeline data from your CRM. Run incrementality tests, spend in some markets or time periods and not others, to understand the actual marginal lift of paid activity rather than relying on platform attribution. Use branded search volume as a proxy for overall brand health. And treat any single channel's self-reported conversion numbers with healthy scepticism.
Teams that build this broader view are making better budget decisions than teams that rely on platform dashboards. The investment in measurement infrastructure pays off in better allocation, lower wasted spend, and a clearer picture of which paid channels are actually earning their keep.