Sophie Mills
Performance marketing strategist
Sophie Mills is a performance marketing strategist at ADSRUNNER. She works hands-on in client accounts across Google Ads and Meta, with a focus on ecommerce and lead generation.
Her day-to-day is the craft layer of paid media: campaign and account structure, search term and negative keyword hygiene, shopping feed quality, creative testing cadence, and the reporting that tells you whether a change worked or the week was just noisy.
She writes the practical guides — how a thing is actually set up, what the settings do, and which defaults quietly cost money.
ADSRUNNER is a performance marketing agency for established Shopify and DTC ecommerce brands and consumer subscription software, where senior operators run paid media on a platform built in-house that judges every channel against what the business actually banked.
Customer research for ad creative: turning what customers say into hooks.
Five research sources, a six-code scheme that turns messy quotes into countable themes, a worked example from source to hook, and the arithmetic for how many hooks to brief each month.
Meta creative diversity: why similar ads compete instead of adding up.
Ten variants of one idea are not ten chances. What Meta documents about auction overlap, ad volume, and fatigue, the six axes that make ads genuinely different, and an audit you can run this month.
What the Google and YouTube app for Shopify does, and where it stops.
The Google & YouTube app is the fastest way to get a Shopify catalog into Merchant Center, and for most stores it is the right start. The trouble begins when the account grows. Here is what the app does, what it does not, when a supplemental data source beats a feed tool, and how to stop counting purchases twice.
Shopify and Meta’s Conversions API: match quality and dedup, in order.
Most Shopify stores turned on Meta’s Conversions API with one setting in the Facebook and Instagram app and never looked again. Here is the Shopify-specific path: the data sharing level, the stray pixels to remove, how Meta pairs browser and server events, and what actually raises Event Match Quality.
The BFCM 2026 paid media playbook for ecommerce.
A working plan for Black Friday Cyber Monday 2026, from eight weeks out to the January review. What to lock down, what to prepare, how to pace budget and bidding through the peak, and how to judge the weekend on what the store kept rather than what the platforms claimed.
Free trial or paid: what your ads should optimize toward.
A no-card trial produces cheap trial starts. A card-required trial produces expensive ones that pay. The ad account cannot tell the difference unless you tell it, and the way you tell it is the event and value you send.
Subscription payback: what you can afford per subscriber.
Payback is the month a subscriber has earned back what they cost. Working it out takes a cost per paying subscriber, a monthly contribution, and a retention curve, and it turns every budget conversation into a question the business can actually answer.
First-party data for paid media: what to collect and where to send it.
First-party data is not a strategy deck. For paid media it is a short list of things to capture on your own domain and a short list of places to send them. This guide gives both, in the order to do them, with the consent rules that decide what you may send.
Shopping profit by product: the losers campaign ROAS hides.
A Shopping campaign at 3.7x can contain products earning well and products losing money on every sale, and the average hides which is which. Breakeven ROAS differs by product because margin does. This is how to find the losers and restructure around margin.
TikTok ads for ecommerce: when the demographic actually fits.
TikTok can mint demand that search never saw. It can also burn a catalog that sells to a buyer who is not in that audience. This is the fit test, the measurement honesty, and the cases where you should not run it at all.
Google Ads keyword economics for SaaS.
SaaS teams still rank keywords by cost per click and cost per lead. Those are input prices, not the cost of a customer. This is the arithmetic that prices a query by pipeline: close rate, ACV, payback, and the volume you should refuse.
LinkedIn ads: the honest defense of $18 CPCs.
LinkedIn will charge you more per click than any other major paid channel. Sometimes that is the correct price for reaching the buyer who can sign. Sometimes it is a vanity audience with no pipeline behind it. Here is how to tell, without pretending the CPC is cheap.
Meta account structure in 2026: consolidation, Advantage+, and control.
For years, sophisticated Meta accounts meant elaborate segmentation: an ad set per audience, per placement, per stage. That playbook now actively hurts. The modern skill is consolidation: fewer campaigns, more signal, and a clear framework for when to trust automation.
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.
Creative testing: you cannot afford significance.
Every creative testing guide tells you to let tests run until the results are significant. Do the arithmetic and you discover that significance costs roughly four hundred conversions per variant, more than many accounts produce in a month across everything. So the honest system is not a better experiment. It is ranking, floors and retirement rules that make good decisions while individual verdicts stay noisy.
Creative volume is the new targeting.
For ten years, performance marketing was won on targeting. iOS 14 weakened that game, and Meta has since rebuilt ad delivery so the system picks the audience from the creative. The edge now is a steady supply of genuinely different concepts, and you can calculate how many your spend needs.
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.
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 a black box. It is a budget router across six surfaces that reports a single average, and the job is not to control the algorithm, it is to make that average decompose.
From Sam— Growth checkWhat's actually holding your growth back?
About 4 minutes, no account access. For Ecommerce stores, SaaS, and digital products. A score across five areas and the one constraint to fix first.
Want this applied to your account?
Run a free AI audit of your Google or Meta account, or talk to the team about what scaling profitably would take.