The Hidden Cost of Over-Optimization: Why Performance Marketers Are Risking Their Future by Over-Relying on Meta and Google

For years, platforms like Meta and Google have trained performance marketers to chase the most measurable click, the fastest conversion, and the highest short-term ROAS. It’s efficient, scalable, and – on the surface – accountable. But what happens when those same optimizations start to cannibalize your future growth?

At ARM, we’re seeing it play out in real time. Marketers, under pressure to prove performance, are over-indexing on platforms that grade their own homework, and as a result, they’re losing the signal of what’s actually driving long-term brand and business health.

The Closed-Loop Trap: When the Platforms Control the Story

Let’s start with the obvious: Facebook, Instagram, Google Search, and YouTube have built entire ecosystems around attribution that’s convenient, but not necessarily accurate.

Each platform defines its own audiences, its own reach, and its own conversion logic. They A/B test within walled gardens that they have created and control, set their own benchmarks for statistical significance, and then conveniently attribute results to themselves without much external validation.

As Gretchen Dubois, VP of Media at ARM, explains:

“When you’re optimizing inside a closed system, every lever you pull reinforces the illusion that the platform is performing. But what it’s really doing is reallocating attention – not necessarily growing it.”

It’s no surprise, then, that when clients compare cross-channel ROAS, they often see Meta and Google “winning.” Not because other channels aren’t working, but because the platforms that control the attribution are built to claim the credit, with their own methodology that seems to only work within their own ecosystem. Notably, these types of platforms often have the most red tape when it comes to getting third party verification pixels added onto their paid ad campaign platforms, taking months to be approved (or sometimes never at all).

When Short-Term Metrics Undermine Long-Term Growth

We’ve heard clients say that audio campaigns didn’t drive as high of a ROAS as other channels such as Facebook and Google. But let’s unpack that. Meta’s platforms and Google have:

• Click-heavy user interfaces that bias toward immediate, trackable responses.
• Editable creatives that can be optimized in real time, unlike live or recorded ads.
• Opaque audience definitions that make it nearly impossible for brands to verify reach or overlap.

Meanwhile, other upper- and mid-funnel channels such as podcasts, streaming audio, and CTV aren’t consumed in traditional interactive screen formats. They’re heard or seen, not clicked. Their influence happens over days, sometimes weeks. And because they don’t get “last touch” credit, their impact often goes unnoticed in the dashboards that dictate spend.

Because of this, brands are optimizing themselves into a corner and cutting investment in channels that build memory, salience, and incremental growth – all in service of channels that win only on paper.

The Real Story: “Sticky” Channels Still Drive (Indirect) Performance

Here’s what we’ve consistently seen in our own campaigns.

After running a programmatic audio flight for a client a few years ago, we saw a significant lift in both brand and non-brand search activity during and after the campaign. In fact, one in three campaign conversions ultimately came through paid search after the user had already engaged with the programmatic ad – a clear indication of how upper- and mid-funnel channels assist last-touch platforms.

We’ve seen it anecdotally, too: a listener hears an ad on their favorite podcast, laughs, remembers the tagline, then sees the brand again on Instagram – and that’s when they click. Meta gets the conversion credit, but the seed was planted well before the user ever saw an ad.

As Gretchen puts it:

“Audio doesn’t always win the last click. It wins the first memory. And that’s the foundation every performance marketer actually needs.”

This interplay between channels (what we call “assisted performance”) isn’t captured in last-touch attribution models. But it’s often the hidden driver of scalable growth.

The Measurement Gap (and Why It’s Getting Wider)

Tools like Podscribe, Claritas, and other independent attribution partners can bridge this gap by modeling cross-channel effects more accurately. Yet, interestingly, many brands remain skeptical of these third-party solutions while continuing to take Meta’s and Google’s numbers at face value.

It’s an irony that speaks to how deeply ingrained performance culture has become: if it’s not clickable, it’s hardly measurable; and if it’s hardly measurable, it’s not valuable.

But that’s not how consumers behave, and it’s not how brands grow.

The Path Forward: Smarter Measurement, Not Smaller Thinking

Performance marketers don’t need to abandon Meta or Google. These are incredibly powerful ecosystems. But they can’t be the final source of truth.

Marketers should be investing in:

• Direct attribution partners that validate cross-channel performance independently.
• Brand lift and search correlation studies that quantify the “assist” from awareness channels.
• Holistic models that look beyond last-touch conversions to capture lifetime impact.

As Imran Ismail, Managing Director at ARM, says:

“If you’re only measuring what’s easy to measure, you’re optimizing out of your own future. The next era of performance marketing won’t be about who can optimize fastest – it’ll be about who can attribute smartest.”

In conclusion, Meta and Google have made marketing measurable. But they’ve also made media investment decisions short-sighted. The brands that will win the next decade are the ones that can balance short-term efficiency with long-term elasticity. The ones that see audio, podcast, and video not as vanity channels, but as value creators.

Because when you optimize only for what you can click, you risk optimizing yourself out of growth.

The Secret Sauce: Open, Adaptive Measurement

At ARM, our advantage is an open and adaptive measurement architecture, designed to evolve as our clients’ businesses do.

This approach consistently delivers:

• Flexibility to integrate with preferred partners like Podscribe, Claritas, and InMarket.
• Transparency and full visibility into every performance signal.
• Control over data and methodology.
• Interoperability that ensures measurement frameworks can scale and adapt over time.

We’re partner-agnostic by design, because no single platform has a monopoly on truth. Instead, we focus on connecting the right tools to answer the right questions. Our belief and our practice is that the industry’s leading ability to measure incrementality in audio and podcasting is key to quantifying true lift among net-new audiences, nationally and regionally alike.

Bottom line: it’s not about tying measurement to one ecosystem. It’s about ensuring every integration delivers a complete, trusted, and growth-oriented view of performance.

As a future-looking and fully transparent measurement partner, ARM welcomes independent validation and operates openly – never behind a walled garden. If you’re ready to build a measurement framework that’s built for where performance is going, not where it’s been, connect with our experts today.