Why Over-Optimization Is Hurting Your Media Performance

Brands are obsessed with micro-optimizations.

We get questions all the time from performance marketers asking things like:

“Which ad is most incremental?”
“Can we optimize incrementality at the campaign level? The ad level? The keyword level?”
“How do we make daily or weekly optimizations?”

It’s understandable. For years, the industry has trained marketers to chase the next click, the next split test, the next tweak. But after running countless tests and media audits, we’ve found that these daily performance-style workflows are often counterproductive and don’t meaningfully improve incrementality.

Here’s why, and what you should prioritize instead.

When brands ask how to “apply incrementality down to the ad or keyword level,” they’re asking the wrong question.

Notice that none of these have much to do with which individual ad or keyword is “most incremental.” In fact, we regularly see

25–50% lifts in iROAS just from reallocating budgets without changing creative, bids, or structure.

We’re talking about simply increasing budget 25% in one channel, cutting it 50% in another, and instantly seeing measurable improvement.

Brands often feel pressure to keep tweaking campaigns endlessly, changing creative, adjusting bids, running daily reports. But unless you’re a massive, mature brand with a robust incrementality measurement system, these optimizations don’t add much.

Sure, you might squeeze another 5–10% improvement. But the real impact comes from fixing foundational issues like:

We see this dynamic play out across dozens of clients:

And yet, many of these tactics cannot be optimized effectively in a traditional performance-marketing workflow.

This isn’t to say you should never optimize. But it is to say you need to prioritize the priorities.

Rather than getting stuck in a counterproductive cycle of over-engineering your campaigns, focus your team’s time and energy where it counts:

Those are the levers that actually drive meaningful, incremental growth, not the thousandth keyword bid adjustment.

We’ve seen this play out firsthand with a popular Wi-Fi brand, where shifting media allocation toward higher-impact areas improved their marketing iROAS by 26% and fueled a 28% year-over-year increase in topline revenue.

The industry has conditioned marketers to chase micro-wins, but the truth is: big, structural decisions drive the biggest gains in media performance.

If you’re ready to rethink your media strategy and focus on what really matters, connect with us. We’ll help you cut through the noise, prioritize the right levers, and unlock more incremental growth.