PPC guidance in 2025 heavily emphasized AI and flashy new tools. Much of it sounded convincing. Much of it drained advertisers’ budgets. Teams aligned with platform talking points instead of real business constraints. Spend went up. Efficiency did not. As 2026 kicks off, carrying those assumptions forward all but guarantees the same outcomes. This article unpacks three PPC myths that seemed smart on paper, spread rapidly in 2025, and frequently led to bad decisions in practice. The aim is straightforward: reset priorities before repeating costly mistakes.
Myth 1: Skip manual targeting, AI will handle it better
We’ve seen this message everywhere: AI beats humans at targeting, and manual account structures are obsolete. Merge campaigns as much as you can. Hand control to AI. There is some validity here – but only under certain conditions. AI performance is entirely driven by the data it receives. No volume means no learning. No learning means no results. An even riskier version of this issue is weak signal quality. Without a business-level conversion signal, there’s nothing meaningful to optimize toward.
For ecommerce brands that pass purchase data back into Google Ads and reliably hit at least 50 conversions per bid strategy each month, leaning on AI for targeting can be reasonable. In those scenarios, both volume and signal quality are typically adequate. In short, AI thrives on scale and clear, measurable outcomes.
That logic falls apart quickly for low-volume campaigns, especially those using leads as the main conversion event. Without enough high-quality conversions, AI cannot build a useful model. The outcome isn’t superior performance, but automation with no real improvement.…