Google has dominated the digital advertising landscape for a long time now, and despite increasing legal scrutiny, it remains the ad platform of choice amongst marketers, with studies showing that advertisers spend more on Google Ads than both Meta and Amazon Ads combined.
...But do they still deserve the majority of your ad spend in 2026 and beyond?
To find out, we spoke to Matt Shenton (Biddable Director at Croud and host of the Paid Search NYC podcast) to find out whether you should divert more of your paid media spend towards other platforms - and how to do it in a way that's both effective and low-risk.
Timestamps:
0:00 - Coming up
0:15 - Intro
2:09 - Matt’s insights from Paid Search NYC
3:31 - US vs. UK: Marketing mindsets
4:22 - Key advice for platform diversification
10:52 - Budget reallocation mistakes
13:44 - Ad platforms with the most potential
19:17 - Matt’s thoughts on Perplexity / AI ads
21:17 - Testing channels/platforms fairly & cheaply
25:15 - Marketing efficiency ratio & MMMs
26:10 - Maintaining marketing spend efficiency
29:06 - Testing brand campaign value effectively
31:12 - Matt’s attribution strategy
36:35 - Will Google still dominate PPC in 2 years?
39:29 - Final thoughts