Most 2027 marketing budgets are being drafted right now, and most of them start the same way: take this year's paid media line and add a percentage. That habit assumes a dollar next year buys roughly what it bought this year. The numbers published this week say it will not.
On October 21, 2026, Meta, which sells the ads on Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, reported third quarter results showing advertising revenue of $63.06 billion, up 26% from a year earlier. Ad impressions grew 10%. The average price per ad grew 14%. In the US and Canada, as PPC Land's breakdown of the earnings presentation shows, impressions grew 8% while the average price per ad rose 23%. That regional price increase has climbed three quarters in a row, from 14% to 20% to 23%.
Average price per ad is a blended figure. It moves with auction competition, ad formats, and where ads appear, so it will not match any single advertiser's costs. But the direction is clear, and the company guided its fourth quarter revenue to $73 billion to $76 billion without offering any measure of what advertisers got back.
Reach is getting more expensive, not scarcer
The platform is not running out of people. Its daily users grew 3%. What changed is that more advertisers are competing for a supply of ad slots that is growing more slowly, and the auction sets the price. The busiest season of the year has not started yet.
For a company with a flat budget, the arithmetic is simple and uncomfortable. If the price of each impression rises by a fifth and the budget does not, the plan buys about a sixth fewer impressions. If the plan was built on reach, frequency, or cost per thousand, the same spend now delivers less of all three, and the team will hear about it as "performance softened" in the second quarter.
Four moves for the 2027 plan
- Set the ceiling from the back of the funnel. Work out what a qualified lead or a new customer is worth from margin and close rate, then set the most you will pay for one. Fund paid social up to that ceiling, not up to last year's number plus inflation.
- Treat creative as the cheapest lever left. In an auction, an ad people respond to tends to win more often at a lower cost than one they ignore. Budget for more concepts and faster replacement of tired ones, because a better ad is often cheaper than a bigger bid.
- Grow the audience you do not have to rent. Your email list, your customer base, your website visitors, and your partners do not reprice every quarter. Every buyer you can reach through those channels is one you do not have to win at auction again.
- Test the alternative before you need it. Hold back a slice of the budget for one other channel with a clean comparison, so that if prices keep rising you are choosing from evidence rather than from a sales pitch.
Three questions for the leadership team
- What is the most we can pay for a qualified lead or a new customer and still make money?
- Does next year's media plan assume this year's prices?
- How much of our pipeline comes from an audience we own rather than one we rent?
The price of attention is set by everyone else bidding for it. The value of a customer is set by you. Build next year's plan on the number you control.
