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.
Showing Agency craft. Topic hubs above are the curated reading lists.
Recent essays.
The high-spend monthly review, done properly.
A monthly review of a six-figure ad budget should not be a dashboard tour. It should interrogate the blended scoreboard, the marginal dollar, measurement integrity, structural hygiene, and next month’s allocation — in that order. The agenda we actually run.
Freelancer, expert, or agency: who should actually run your ads?
"Google Ads expert" and "Google Ads agency" are usually typed by the same person on the same afternoon, and they lead to very different places. Here is what each option is genuinely good at, the spend range where each stops making sense, and the failure mode specific to each.
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.
Questions to ask before hiring an ads agency.
A good question has a property almost nobody checks for: a weak agency cannot answer it well by being articulate. That single test disqualifies most of the questions in circulation — "what is your process," "can you show me case studies" — and it produces a much shorter list where each question comes with the answer that should reassure you and the answer that should end the meeting.
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.
Managing Google Ads at $100k a month and beyond.
The tactics that grow a $20k account are not what governs a $200k one. At scale the job shifts to marginal-return allocation, incrementality, and structural discipline — and the failure modes get more expensive. What management actually looks like at six figures a month.
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.
In-house vs agency: the honest comparison.
In-house teams win on context and focus; agencies win on cross-account pattern exposure and infrastructure. The honest cost math, where each model breaks, and the hybrid most scaling brands converge on.
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.
The paid-media account standard, v1.0.
Every "healthy account checklist" is a list of things no competent operator would dispute, which is exactly why accounts fail them: agreement is free and thresholds are not. This is the same discipline rebuilt as a real standard: 22 numbered criteria each with a pass condition you can fail, weighted scoring that gates on the layers which corrupt everything downstream, an explicit list of what we left out and why, and a version number so an account scored today stays comparable next year.
How to choose a performance marketing agency.
There is a spend level above which one in-house hire is simply cheaper than an agency, and it is calculable rather than a matter of opinion: fully-loaded senior salary against a percentage-of-spend fee gives a crossover around $100,000 a month — with three specific reasons the naive crossover is too low. That is decision one. This is the full sequence: whether to hire, what shape, how to select, and how to structure the first ninety days so the arrangement can fail cleanly instead of drifting for a year.
Written by operators, not content teams.
One essay when we find something worth your time, from people running real accounts. How we research and correct this writing is set out in our editorial policy.
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