Every month here at The Media Buyer we publish retrospective reports comparing last month to the same month the prior year.

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Now we look at May 2026 versus May 2025, and what we find is most of the same challenges we’ve seen already this year. Spend increases, performance dips, and increasing inefficiencies for advertisers across the spectrum.

This is all independent Northbeam performance data, covering more than six billion in ad spend over the last 12 months. These numbers were calculated by comparing advertisers who had full sets of May 2026 and May 2025 data in Northbeam, meaning it’s a true comparison of changes for advertisers who were on Northbeam during both periods.

Let us begin the litany of suffering with some high level metrics:

Immediately we see that spend is up 10% but revenue is only up 3%. It’s more expensive to acquire the same customer, and revenue isn’t keeping up.





There isn’t one specific cause for this. Ad platforms need to increase their profits and numbers of advertisers on the platform, and both increase ad costs. Inflation is driving up spend, making your dollars less powerful. Depressed consumer confidence is holding down conversion rates. Nobody knows if the Strait of Hormuz is open or closed, and nobody knows if they should care.

All of these swirl together into a perfect storm of down-trending ad efficiency that we’ve seen for months.

A 10% increase is just the average. Let’s categorize our advertisers into more useful sections, and focus on Meta ads.

We’ve found the best way to categorize ad accounts and compare them is by their monthly spend levels. So here’s revenue changes, median and average, across categories of monthly ad spend on Meta.

Spend is up for everybody except the sub-$50k advertisers, who are mostly yanking spend back and stru

📌 Data: May was a horrorshow for performance marketers (Jun)
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📍 Jun