Gavin DuffFor a long time, the digital media plan looked roughly the same. Google at the centre. Everything else around the edges.
You set your search budget first, justified it with intent data and conversion numbers, and then figured out what was left. Meta was the reach play – useful for awareness, occasionally good for retargeting, never quite the main event.
That’s changed. But most plans haven’t.
According to eMarketer’s April 2026 forecasts, Meta is on track to pass Google in global net ad revenue this year for the first time. The numbers: $243.5 billion versus $239.5 billion. Meta’s ad revenue is growing at 24.1% annually, Google’s at 11.9%. The gap between those two figures is the part worth paying attention to.
What’s actually driving it
It isn’t users. Meta lost daily active users in Q1 2026 for the first time in its history – down from 3.58 billion to 3.56 billion. The growth is coming from somewhere else: more ads per session, higher prices per ad, and a material improvement in what those ads actually do. Ad impressions grew 19% year-on-year. Average prices rose 12%. The platform is extracting more revenue from roughly the same audience because Advantage+ and Reels have changed what the algorithm can do with a decent brief and a clean creative. It’s not perfect, but it can only get better.
Google is not in trouble, by the way. US search advertising hit $114.2 billion in 2025. But the growth rate has slowed, and AI Overviews have started compressing click-through rates on the informational queries that used to sit at the top of a lot of funnels. The product still works. It’s just not the only thing that works anymore.
What the mix looks like now
There is no universal answer here. Anyone giving you one is selling something.
Google Search still wins on intent. If someone is actively looking for a solicitor, a software platform, a builder… paid search is the most direct route to them. The question isn’t whether to run Search. It’s whether Search should still be getting the majority of the budget by default rather than by evidence.
Meta has moved.
The old mental model – awareness channel, soft metrics, vague brand value – doesn’t describe what a well-run Meta account actually does in 2026. Advantage+ Shopping has turned Meta into a primary acquisition channel for e-commerce clients, not a supporting one. The CPL numbers, at least for clients with strong creative, are competitive with Search in sectors they weren’t anywhere near two years ago.
The catch: creative is not optional. Meta’s algorithm is very good at finding the right person. It cannot make a bad ad work. If the only video content going into an account is repurposed TV ads or static images with a logo dropped on them, the results will be underwhelming regardless of targeting. Reels-native short-form video – made for the platform, not adapted for it – is now a production requirement, not a nice-to-have as part of your social media advertising strategy.
SEO is being restructured rather than dismantled.
AI Overviews have taken clicks on informational queries, the kind where someone types a question and Google now answers it directly. What they haven’t touched are commercial queries, comparison searches, brand searches. If an SEO strategy was built on informational traffic, it has a problem.
If it was built on converting qualified intent, it’s largely intact. There’s also a new objective worth building towards: appearing inside AI-generated answers. Content written by named experts, structured clearly, backed by original data is what gets cited.
That’s a different brief to the one most agencies are working from. But not us.
Email is chronically underrated.
It doesn’t generate the same volume of conversation as paid channels, but across the campaigns in general, it consistently delivers the lowest cost-per-conversion of any channel – because you’re talking to people who already know you. The problem is that most email programmes were set up years ago and haven’t been touched since.
Google and Yahoo have shifted from authentication to positive interaction signals as the primary deliverability factor. Brands with low reply rates and high skim-and-delete rates are seeing inbox placement fall. If your open rates are below 25%, your email programme needs attention before your ad budget does. If your open rates are above 60%, you probably have seventeen subscribers and one of them is your mother.
The part nobody wants to talk about
Here’s what tends to happen. A business invests properly in its media mix, the ads start performing, the leads start coming in, and then – silence. Not because the leads are bad. Because nobody followed up.
A salesperson who takes four days to respond to a web enquiry might as well not bother. Research consistently shows response time within the first hour is the single biggest predictor of whether a lead converts, and most Irish businesses are operating on a “we’ll get to it” basis that would make that hour look ambitious. The ads did their job. The CRM did not.
This is the bit that gets left out of most media planning conversations, because agencies would rather talk about CPL than ask a client whether their HubSpot is held together with good intentions and a spreadsheet someone built in 2019. But it matters more than almost any channel decision. You can have the perfect media mix and a beautifully optimised Meta account and still be watching your budget disappear into a follow-up process that consists of one voicemail and a shrug.
The things worth having in place before scaling spend
A CRM that is actually being used. non-negotiable. Not technically implemented – actually used, by the actual sales team, every day. A HubSpot with 600 contacts and the last activity logged in November is not a CRM. It’s a monument to good intentions.
Lead response times under an hour for anything high-intent…
If someone fills in a contact form having just searched “accountant Dublin fees,” they are at peak readiness. They will also be filling in three other contact forms simultaneously. Whoever calls first usually wins. This is not complicated, but it requires someone’s job to include doing it.
A nurture sequence for leads that aren’t ready yet…
The majority of enquiries at any given time are not ready to buy this week. That doesn’t make them worthless – it makes them a future pipeline that needs to be maintained rather than ignored until they either convert themselves or quietly go to a competitor. Most businesses have no process for this beyond hoping the person remembers them.
A feedback loop from sales back to marketing…
If the leads coming in are consistently the wrong size, wrong sector, or wrong budget, that’s information the media plan needs. Without it, you’re optimising for volume rather than quality, which is a reliable way to generate a lot of activity and not much revenue.
None of this is glamorous. Nobody has ever got excited about a lead routing rule or a CRM pipeline stage. But running serious ad spend into a business without this infrastructure in place is roughly equivalent to turning on all the taps and wondering why the bath isn’t filling up. The pipes aren’t connected.
The actual question
Most media plans in Ireland were built on a logic that made sense around 2018 and haven’t been revisited since. Google takes the majority, Meta gets a supporting budget, SEO gets a retainer, email gets occasional attention when someone remembers it exists, and the CRM gets a login that three people share, and nobody updates.
The data in 2026 doesn’t support that as a default. It might still be the right setup for a specific business with specific objectives and numbers to back it up. But if nothing has changed in three years, the honest question is whether that’s because the evidence points there or because nobody has sat down and looked.
Meta passing Google in ad revenue is a signal. The instruction it’s pointing at is: pull your cost-per-lead data by channel, look at your lead response times, check whether your CRM is a tool or a trophy, and ask whether the current setup reflects what the numbers are saying or just what it’s always looked like.
If the answer is the latter, that’s where to start.
Dave Jackson