Long-form thinking,
written by operators.
We write because we have to think, and we publish because we think it might be useful. Essays as record of how we approach the work — not blog posts as content marketing. No 400-word listicles, no SEO filler. Things you might actually want to read.
Recent essays.
Google AI Max for Search: should you turn it on?
Google AI Max for Search promises broader reach by letting AI find new queries and adapt your ads. Sometimes that is real incremental growth. Sometimes it is just a more expensive route to traffic you already had. Here is how we decide, and how we test it without risking the account.
How we scaled a global book retailer 300% without breaking ROAS.
Awesome Books came to us wanting to grow fast without sacrificing profitability, across an inventory of millions of titles and a global customer base. We grew sales 300% in six months while holding their ROAS and CPA targets. Here is how the engagement was built.
A creative testing system that scales without chaos.
Creative volume is the new edge on paid social, but volume without structure is just noise that costs more. This is the testing system we use to run dozens of variants a month while still being able to say, clearly, what is working and why.
Performance dropped: a systematic method for finding out why.
Performance drops trigger a predictable panic: bids get changed, campaigns get restructured, budgets get shuffled — all before anyone has established what actually happened. We work a fixed diagnostic order instead: measurement, market, platform mechanics, then the account. In that order, for a reason.
Server-side tracking and the Conversions API: a practical 2026 setup.
Server-side tracking is no longer optional. The browser pixel misses too much, and the gap is widening every year. This is a practical look at how Conversions API and Enhanced Conversions work, what a trustworthy setup looks like, and where implementations go wrong.
The first 90 days: how we approach a foundation rebuild.
The interesting work in paid media, the bid strategy and creative testing and audience expansion, only compounds once the foundations are right. So our first 90 days on any account are deliberately spent on the unglamorous work first. Here is the sequence.
Incrementality testing without a data team.
Every attribution model, however sophisticated, is still an allocation of credit among ads. None of them can tell you what would have happened without the ad. Only a controlled test can, and you do not need a data science team to run one honestly.
Why most Google Ads audits miss the real issue.
Most accounts we audit have great-looking dashboards and broken foundations. The interesting issues are never bidding strategy or keyword choice. They are upstream of those — in measurement, attribution, and architecture decisions made years ago and never revisited.
Lead gen bidding when not every lead is equal.
Cost per lead is the most seductive metric in lead generation and the most dangerous. Optimize to it and the algorithm learns to find people who fill in forms, not people who buy. The way out is closing the loop between the CRM and the ad platform.
Attribution after iOS 14: what actually works.
Pixel-based attribution is not coming back. Conversions API helps but does not solve everything. After iOS 14, after GTM consent mode, after third-party cookie deprecation — what does a measurement stack that actually works look like in 2026? We have rebuilt this for dozens of clients now. Here is the pattern.
Creative volume is the new targeting.
For ten years, performance marketing was won on targeting. Better audiences, sharper segmentation, smarter lookalikes. iOS 14 broke that game. The new edge is creative — but not the kind of creative most brands produce. Volume of native, testable variants beats single polished hero spots, every time, in 2026.
Profit on ad spend: bidding to margin, not revenue.
A 4x ROAS on a 15% margin product loses money. A 2.5x ROAS on a 70% margin product prints it. Revenue-based bidding cannot tell the difference, which means most accounts are systematically over-buying their worst economics. The fix is to bid to margin.
MER vs ROAS: which number is actually telling you the truth.
Platform-reported ROAS measures each channel in isolation, and every platform over-claims its own contribution. MER measures the whole business at once. Understanding when to trust each is one of the highest-leverage shifts a growing brand can make.
Smart Bidding in practice: tROAS vs tCPA and when each wins.
Target ROAS or target CPA is one of the most common questions in Google Ads, and most answers are dogmatic. The honest answer depends on your business model and, far more importantly, on whether your conversion data is clean enough for Smart Bidding to work at all.
Landing pages: where paid media is actually won or lost.
Every efficiency gain inside the ad account is capped and local. A conversion rate improvement on the landing page compounds across every channel, every campaign, and every future click at once. Most teams still optimize in the wrong order.
Brand vs non-brand: the measurement error most accounts make.
When someone searches your brand name, they were probably going to find you anyway. Counting that as paid acquisition is a measurement error most accounts make routinely, and it quietly corrupts every decision downstream. Here is how to fix it.
What good looks like: our standards for a healthy paid-media account.
Most advice about paid media is tactical and contradictory. Far more useful is a clear standard for what a healthy account looks like structurally, so you can measure any account against it. This is the checklist we hold our own work to.
Google Shopping feeds: the optimization layer most retailers ignore.
In Shopping and Performance Max there are no keywords. The product feed is the targeting. Which auctions you enter, what you pay, and what converts are all decided by data most retailers export once from their store and never look at again.
Performance Max in 2026: how to actually control it.
Performance Max is the default for most Google Ads accounts now, and most advertisers run it on faith because Google frames it as a black box. It is not. There are real levers, and the accounts that use them outperform the accounts that do not.
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