The Digital Markets Act (DMA): why your Meta and Google ads target less precisely in Europe, and what it means for your landing page

In April 2025, the European Commission fined Meta €200 million for its "pay or consent" model, ruled to breach the Digital Markets Act (DMA). Meta had been offering European users a binary choice: consent to combining their data across services for personalised advertising, or pay a monthly subscription for an ad-free version. The Commission decided this wasn't a real choice, since there was no genuinely equivalent alternative that didn't involve large-scale data processing. Since January 2026, Meta has therefore offered its European users a third option: less personalised advertising, without a paid subscription or full consent. For an advertiser building a landing page around Meta Ads or Google Ads campaigns, this shift isn't just a distant legal headline — it mechanically shrinks the share of traffic the algorithm can target precisely, and pushes part of the qualification work back onto the page itself.

The DMA in brief: what's changed since 2024

The Digital Markets Act designates certain very large platforms as "gatekeepers" — Meta received this status in September 2023, alongside Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and ByteDance. Article 5(2) of the regulation bars them, absent explicit and specific consent, from combining personal data collected on one service (Instagram, say) with data from another service in the same group (Facebook, WhatsApp) or from partner third-party sites, for targeted advertising purposes. It's precisely this cross-service data combination that powered Meta Ads' behavioural targeting precision. Google is subject to a separate DMA proceeding, with a Commission compliance decision expected by the end of July 2026 — the exact outcome for Google Ads was still unsettled at the time of writing.

Why targeting is genuinely getting less precise

A share of European users are now choosing the less personalised option rather than consenting to full data combination. Mechanically, the bidding algorithm has less behavioural signal for that audience segment: automated optimisation systems (Advantage+ on Meta's side, Performance Max campaigns on Google's) need longer learning phases and converge on less finely qualified audiences in Europe than in other markets. This isn't a new phenomenon: a study by Avi Goldfarb and Catherine Tucker published in 2011 in Management Science, "Privacy Regulation and Online Advertising", already measured a 65% drop in display advertising effectiveness in Europe after the 2002 e-Privacy Directive took effect, precisely in the contexts where advertisers lost access to fine-grained behavioural data. The DMA is replaying the same mechanism fifteen years later, with broader reach since it directly touches the largest ad networks on the market.

What this actually changes for an ad landing page

Less pre-qualified traffic from the algorithm

When targeting was very precise, the page could rely on the visitor already looking, on paper, like an existing customer. With a weaker signal for part of the European audience, a larger share of clicks now comes from less-qualified profiles — closer to cold traffic than warm traffic, even on a campaign built from a lookalike audience. The page has to pick up part of the sorting work the algorithm used to do, by making earlier and clearer who it's for — and who it isn't.

The message has to do the work the algorithm no longer does

Blurrier targeting increases the variance of visitors landing on the page: message match between the ad and the landing page becomes more decisive, since it can no longer lean on the certainty that the algorithm already filtered the audience. A headline that hooks and qualifies from the first line avoids paying for a click the page will lose within seconds for lack of a clear match with the visitor's intent.

Server-side tracking becomes more valuable, not less

The DMA targets data combination between platforms, not a site's own conversion measurement: server-side tracking through the Conversions API and a server-side tag manager remain entirely legitimate, and matter more as platforms' native targeting runs on less data. Reliable conversion measurement, fed from your own GA4 tracking, becomes the best data available to retrain bidding algorithms on what actually matters: real conversions, not the indirect behavioural signals the DMA restricts.

Consent still gates everything, regardless

The DMA sits on top of GDPR, it doesn't replace it: your cookie banner, your Consent Mode v2 implementation and your GDPR-compliant form still gate access to conversion data, independently of what Meta or Google do on their end with the DMA. Nothing to change here if these foundations are already in place — but nothing to neglect either.

Testing becomes a necessity, not an option

With a less homogeneous audience, a page variant that performed well a year ago can underperform today simply because the traffic reaching it has changed in nature. Running a fresh A/B test on the pages carrying most of your European ad budget, letting each variant run long enough for a reliable result, checks whether the message that used to convert under precise targeting still converts under blurrier targeting.

Building a page that compensates for blurrier targeting

• An explicit value proposition on the very first screen: don't count on the ad having already done 80% of the qualification work.
• One conversion goal per page, so even a less-qualified visitor immediately understands the expected action.
• Owned audience capture — an email list, a lead magnet — rather than full dependence on ad retargeting, whose precision is dropping for the same reasons as initial targeting.
• A fast page, in the spirit of our Core Web Vitals guides: every click potentially costs more to qualify than before, so an abandonment caused by slowness now costs more than it used to.
• A monitored quality score on Google Ads, since the quality score remains one of the few levers that partially offset less precise targeting by lowering cost per click.

What the DMA doesn't change

The DMA doesn't make advertising ineffective, it makes automatic targeting a bit less precise for part of the European audience — the fundamentals stay the same. A clear offer, credible proof and well-built retargeting on visitors who already consented keep working exactly as before. What's changed is the margin for error: a page that relied on near-perfect targeting to make up for a fuzzy message has less of a safety net than it did two years ago.

Our take

The DMA isn't a technical box to tick once and forget: it's a reminder that ad targeting precision, which many campaigns have leaned on for the past decade, is no longer durably guaranteed in Europe. The right response isn't to spend more to artificially recover the same precision, but to shift some of the effort onto what stays entirely within your control: the message, the speed and the clarity of the page itself. A template built for conversion from the ground up, like the LanderKit templates, keeps an edge precisely because it doesn't depend on any third-party platform to work well.