Black-box campaigns
Definition
Automated campaign types in which the platform chooses the audience, the placements, the bidding and the combination of your creatives, then reports the outcome in aggregate. Meta and Google each sell one, under names that change.
How it works
You hand the platform your creatives and a budget, and name the conversion you want; its model spends wherever that conversion looks cheapest. The cheapest conversions sit with people already on their way to you: searches containing your own name, and customers coming back to buy again. The system finds them first because it is built to, and the aggregate report books them as campaign results. So the campaign can look excellent while part of what it claims would have arrived on its own, and the report offers no line that separates the two.
What to watch for
Ask for whatever query report the platform exposes and read whether your own brand name appears in it; if it does, demand that already knew you is being booked as demand the campaign created. Put the campaign’s ROAS next to the account’s total revenue over the same months: a standout campaign inside a flat total is reshuffled credit. Before a budget grows, I tend to look for two things in the account itself: brand terms and existing-customer lists excluded wherever the platform permits it, and whatever breakdown it offers of new against returning buyers.
The question you ask
“How much of this campaign’s reported revenue came from searches with our name in them, or from existing customers?”