Year in Review: What Worked in 2026 for BD and International Brands

Body republishes 7 days after the LinkedIn edition. LinkedIn URL will be pasted above once the issue ships Tuesday 09:30 Dhaka.

The seven plays that worked in 2026

1. Server-side GTM as a default, not an upgrade. Every account I onboarded this year got sGTM in week one. Match quality up, CPA down within two cycles.
2. Broad + Advantage+ on accounts that earned it. The readiness check from issue 07 became the standard qualifier.
3. MER as the founder-facing number. Killed 80% of "why is ROAS down" panic conversations.
4. Creative concept count over creative volume. Two strong concepts a week beat ten variants of one.
5. Google brand defence at a floor of 15% of budget. Recovered revenue that was leaking to competitor bids.
6. LinkedIn for B2B lead gen with a warm-audience-first sequence. Cold traffic never converted; retargeting warm signals did.
7. Weekly three-number dashboard. Founders stopped opening the ads manager at 11pm.

The three that quietly stopped working

1. Interest-stacked audiences. Not because targeting is dead but because the algorithm outperforms it once signal volume is there.
2. Attribution-window optimisation. Chasing 7-day-click vs 1-day changes moved the number, not the business.
3. Long-form landing pages for cold traffic. Founders wrote them, nobody scrolled. Short, one-decision pages won every test.

What I am doubling down on in 2027

• More sGTM, earlier, for smaller accounts than the market says it is worth doing for.
• MER-first reporting across every engagement.
• Killing more dashboards, not building more.

What to do next

• Book a growth audit: end the year with a clean plan for 2027, not a panic Q1.
• Try the free Performance Leak Auditor to see which of the three broken plays you are still running.
• Reply with your #1 win of 2026 and I will send you my full 2027 playbook.

Morshed