The State of PPC 2026 · 1,306 practitioners surveyed

Only 3% say PPC has become much easier.

53% of experienced practitioners say managing paid search is harder than two years ago. The work has not shrunk. It has moved. You keep the strategy. Rubin runs the platforms.

Has PPC become easier or harder? What 624 experienced practitioners said.

Harder
two years ago · 49%
53%
About the same
Easier
16%
Much easier · 3% of all respondents

And within the 16% who say easier, only 3% say much easier. Two years ago, 49% said harder. The line is moving one way.

Source: The State of PPC Global Report 2026, ppcsurvey.com. Question asked of practitioners with two or more years of hands-on experience.

The finding

The work moved. The headcount didn't.

More campaign types, more surfaces, more signals to read, the same team. AI campaign types absorbed the hands-on-keyboard work and replaced it with harder work: reading demand, holding targets through learning phases, judging whether performance is incremental or just attributed. Respondents put campaign efficiency and profitability at the top of the 2026 priority list. And the time AI tools give back is about five hours a week, not a transformation.

The reason

The number one complaint is the black box.

Ask the practitioners who say the job got harder why, and the top answer is black-box ad platforms, ahead of measurement accuracy and rising costs. Platforms report attributed return, not causal lift. The pattern across the report is consistent. Practitioners adopt tools that add control and insight. They resist tools that take it away.

Delegation is not the objection. Losing sight of the decisions is.

The response

Constraint wins, and strategy is coming home.

The report's bidding chapter is unambiguous: target-based strategies, tROAS and tCPA, are both the most used and the most satisfying. Automation performs best inside clearly defined targets. And the in-house shift is accelerating: 73% of in-house teams now keep PPC fully internal, up from 44% two years ago. Teams are not looking for someone to take paid media off their hands. They are looking for a way to delegate the execution and keep the direction.

Rubin Deploy by Upp.ai

Managed by your team. Executed by Rubin.

The market’s answer is to manage the platforms harder. Ours is to read purchase intent before it reaches them. You set the targets and guardrails, and delegate the rest. Rubin, our AI model, executes against them across Google, Meta and Microsoft, reading demand as it emerges and moving budget to where the next pound works hardest. It surfaces the calls that need your judgement and takes the rest, so your team can focus on what only strategists can do: channel mix, brand and the decisions that grow the business.

And it answers the black-box complaint the way practitioners want it answered: growth that is incremental, not just attributed, measured on your own data.

Purpose-built for paid media.
Google PMax
Google Demand Gen
Google AI Max for Search
Meta Advantage+
Microsoft PMax
Microsoft Search
Rubin · Live intent radarLive
Rubin
LLM data collectionCustomer dataSocialBusiness dataMarket dataEconomic factorsWeatherPaid mediaConsumer intent
Monitoring 9 sources · LLM collection liveView radar
0%+
programme-level incremental growth, measured on your own data
£0m+
in ad spend trusted to Rubin Deploy
0k+
paid media decisions made every day
0m+
demand signals read every week

Trusted by retailers including B&Q, Charles Tyrwhitt, Secret Sales and Roman.

See it on your own account.

Book a walkthrough. Bring one channel. We will show you what Rubin reads in your market, what it would do inside your targets, and where the incremental growth is.

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Report data: The State of PPC Global Report 2026, ppcsurvey.com (TrueClicks).