Meta Q2 ad revenue up 27% to $59.4B; Q3 guidance falls short of estimates

August 1, 2026 · Marketing Dive

Advertising revenue at Meta climbed to $59.4 billion in the second quarter, a 27% increase from a year earlier, while total revenue reached $60.8 billion for the three months ended June 30, up 28% year over year. Earnings fell short of Wall Street's targets even though revenue beat expectations, and Meta shares slid after the report. CFO Susan Li said Meta is lapping a period of strong ad impressions growth in the third quarter, a tougher comparison, and flagged possible additional headwinds from policy changes in Europe that allow for less personalized advertising. Meta forecast third-quarter revenue between $61 billion and $64 billion. CEO Mark Zuckerberg told analysts, "On a dollar basis, our ads business is reporting faster year-over-year revenue growth than any other company's reported ad business, so these AI investments are paying off." Meta's Advantage+ ad suite reached a $75 billion annual revenue run rate in the quarter, and the company rolled out its Meta Generative Recommender, which Li called a "paradigm shift" that uses large-language models to weigh ad content and user preferences together for each person.

Budgets funneled through Advantage+ and the Generative Recommender stand to benefit as Meta's system weighs ad content and user intent together for each person, a change from scoring each ad individually that Li said sharpens ad matching and compounds performance gains. Campaigns aimed at European users may see targeting narrow if the EU's limits on personalized ads take hold as Li described, a trend worth tracking for buyers who lean on Meta's audience targeting there. Meta narrowed its full-year capital expenditure range to $130 billion to $145 billion, raising the low end from a prior $125 billion estimate, a sign of continued investment in the infrastructure behind these AI ad tools. Some researchers expect Meta to surpass Google in ad revenue this year, though Forrester's Mike Proulx noted that nearly all the cash Meta generated in the quarter was absorbed by AI infrastructure spending, a gap advertisers can watch as a gauge of whether that investment keeps compounding into performance gains.