AI in your account
AI is already
running your ads.
Google and Meta moved their best-performing campaign types to automation, and your vendors switched them on. That part is fine. Automation genuinely works. What it does not do is stay tuned, and almost nobody is checking whether it still earns its budget six months in.
12%
Meta’s automated campaigns ran 9% ahead of hand-built ones at the halfway point of controlled testing — then finished 12% behind them. 58% of advertisers got a better return from manual. Left alone, automation drifts.
+12pt
That same automation over-reported its own contribution by about twelve points against measured incremental lift. It grades its own homework, and it grades generously.
Haus, The Meta Report: 640 controlled geo-lift experiments over 18 months. Sample is direct-to-consumer advertisers, not dealerships — the mechanism carries, the exact figures will not. We measure yours against your CRM.
AI—01Automation drifts
Automated campaigns learn from whatever you feed them. Feed them stale inventory, a bad conversion signal or an unfiltered radius and they optimize hard toward the wrong buyer, quietly and at speed.
Decay
AI—02It grades its own homework
The platform reports the conversions it wants credit for. We check those against what actually landed in the CRM and what actually sold, because those are different numbers and only one of them pays you.
Attribution
AI—03Guardrails are not automatic
Geographic exclusions, negative keywords, placement blocks, frequency caps, suppression lists so you stop paying to advertise at your own customers and staff. No AI sets these for you. Somebody has to.
Waste
AI—04Your AI vendor has no counterpart
Most dealers now run at least one AI tool — chat, follow-up, merchandising, bidding. Nobody on the dealer side is briefing it, testing it, or holding it to a number. It just runs.
Ownership
We do not rip out your AI vendor. We work with them. We brief the tools, set the guardrails, read the output against your CRM, and keep the platform honest about what it actually delivered. The automation proposes. A person who has run a dealership marketing department decides.
