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 Guides. Topic hubs above are the curated reading lists.
Recent essays.
How to scale an ecommerce business.
Most scaling advice is a list of tactics with no diagnosis attached, which is why it so often fails: the tactic was fine, the constraint was somewhere else. This guide works the other way round: five constraints that cap ecommerce growth, how to tell which one is binding on your business right now, and what actually moves each.
The Facebook Ads audit checklist for high-spend accounts.
Meta has fewer knobs to misconfigure and more ways to starve the delivery system of what it needs. This is the audit with numbers attached: the conversion arithmetic that sets a hard ceiling on how many ad sets you can support, the reason a reconciliation that balances can be two opposite errors canceling out, the thresholds that make creative fatigue a finding rather than a bad week, and why fixing signal raises the return on every dollar rather than redirecting a slice of them.
PPC management pricing models, compared.
A percentage-of-spend fee does not just "create an incentive to spend more" — at 12% on a $10,000 budget increase, it pays the agency $1,200 to make a recommendation that can cost you $2,800. That ratio is calculable for every model, and once you have it, the choice stops being philosophical. The four models with their conflicts sized in dollars, plus the specific contract term that neutralizes each.
How much should you spend on ads?
There is a minimum spend below which paid media cannot learn, and a maximum beyond which marginal returns go negative. How to find both numbers for your business, and the cadence for moving between them.
How much does a Facebook Ads agency cost in 2026?
The creative line in a Meta quote is not a percentage of anything. It is a fixed monthly cost set by how many net-new concepts the account has to produce to keep a winner in rotation, and that number can be derived rather than guessed. Once you can derive it, the whole shape of Meta agency pricing becomes obvious: why sub-$15k budgets rarely support a full engagement, why the same fee is 20% of spend at one budget and 3% at another, and what improvement any fee has to buy.
How much does a Google Ads agency cost in 2026?
A fee quoted as 12% of spend can consume 20% of the profit your paid channel produces, or 60%, depending entirely on your contribution margin — and the same fee may only need a 7.5% performance improvement to pay for itself. Both numbers come from three lines of arithmetic almost nobody runs, and they answer different questions: whether the agency can plausibly earn its fee, and whether it is worth paying even if they do. The market fee models are here too, but the arithmetic is the part that decides.
The Google Ads audit checklist for high-spend accounts.
Most audits fail not because the checks are wrong but because nothing tells you when an observation becomes a finding — so the output is a list of things that could be improved, which is every account ever built. This version attaches a threshold to every check, states the significance floor underneath it (including the Poisson arithmetic that explains why a term spending one target CPA with no conversions is a coin flip rather than a problem), and ends with how to rank what you found by dollars you can actually recover.
Dynamic keyword insertion without embarrassing yourself.
Dynamic keyword insertion is either a relevance tool or a nonsense generator, depending entirely on the discipline around it. The mechanics, the failure modes, and where it still earns a place.
Demand Gen campaigns: when to use them (and when not to).
Demand Gen bundles YouTube, Shorts, Discover, and Gmail into one visually-led campaign. Where it fits between Search capture and PMax, and the setups where it earns its budget.
PMax asset groups: how to structure them properly.
Asset groups are where PMax strategy actually lives. How to theme them, how many to run, when to split campaigns instead, and the creative quality bar that decides your reach.
PMax brand exclusions: setup, step by step.
Unexcluded brand traffic is the most common source of inflated PMax performance. The exact setup — brand lists, negatives, verification — and what to expect when the crutch is removed.
Google Shopping ads: the complete operator's guide.
One target ROAS across a mixed-margin catalog is not a simplification, it is two errors running at once: the high-margin products are throttled well above their breakeven while the low-margin products lose money on every sale the algorithm is being rewarded for buying. This guide works the channel in the order that matters — eligible inventory, then feed as targeting, then margin-band targets with the arithmetic laid out, with the thresholds that separate a real leak from ordinary noise.
What is Performance Max? A plain-English guide.
Performance Max is the most misunderstood campaign type in Google Ads. This is the explanation we give clients: what it is, where ads show, what you control, and when to run it.
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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