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.
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.
Are Bing ads worth it in 2026? A data-grounded answer.
Microsoft Ads in 2026 is a more serious platform than the one advertisers dismissed years ago — PMax with real transparency, native experiments, Copilot inventory. Whether it earns your budget depends on math, not sentiment.
Audience exclusions and retargeting in a consolidated Meta era.
In a consolidated, automation-first Meta account, targeting is largely the algorithm’s job — but exclusions are the control that decides whether you pay to acquire new customers or to re-reach ones you already had. How to structure exclusions and retargeting that is genuinely incremental.
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.
Performance Max examples: what good actually looks like.
What does a well-run PMax setup actually look like? Three worked examples — high-SKU ecommerce, considered purchase, lead gen with offline import — with the reasoning made explicit.
Meta reporting beyond Ads Manager.
Meta’s in-platform ROAS is generous by design — attribution windows, view-through conversions, and blended prospecting all flatter it. How to build a reporting layer on a blended metric that reconciles against real revenue instead of taking Ads Manager at its word.
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.
The measurement stack for high-spend advertisers.
At scale, measurement is not a dashboard — it is a layered system: clean signal into the platforms, a blended metric anchoring reality, and incrementality tests settling the questions attribution cannot. What the stack contains and why each layer earns its place.
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.
Scaling Meta creative production without burning out.
A high-spend Meta account consumes creative faster than any individual can produce it. The production system that keeps pace: concept pipelines, modular assembly, a disciplined testing cadence, and a method for turning winners into the next round of tests.
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.
Facebook Ads cost benchmarks in 2026 — and why they mislead.
Realistic 2026 ranges for Meta CPM, CPC, and CPA — presented with the caveats that make them usable. The real lesson is methodological: a benchmark is a distribution, not a target, and your own economics decide whether your cost is good.
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.
Meta bidding: cost cap, bid cap, and when to use which.
Meta’s bid strategies are widely misunderstood and frequently misused. What highest volume, cost cap, and bid cap each do to the auction, the volume-versus-efficiency trade-off between them, and the disciplined way to decide which your account needs.
SaaS marketing metrics that matter.
Median B2B SaaS CAC payback now sits around 15-16 months — a different world from the 12-month rule of thumb. The metrics that matter, current benchmark ranges, and how to derive paid media targets from them.
Questions to ask before hiring an ads agency.
Agency selection is usually a pitch-deck beauty contest. Here are the falsifiable questions — about measurement, incentives, ownership, creative, and reporting — that reveal whether you are hiring an operator or a marketing department.
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.
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.
Advantage+ Shopping campaigns: an operator’s guide.
Advantage+ Shopping is Meta’s "hand us the whole machine" campaign. Used well it is genuinely strong; used naively it spends acquisition budget on people who were already coming back. The preconditions, the settings that matter, and how to measure it honestly.
How to scale Meta ads in 2026.
Meta scaling in 2026 has three levers left: consolidated Advantage+ structure done properly, a creative pipeline that refills faster than fatigue drains it, and conversion signal the ranking models can trust.
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.
The Facebook Ads audit checklist for high-spend accounts.
A Meta Ads audit checklist built for real spend. Signal quality, consolidation, creative velocity and fatigue, Advantage+ discipline, and the measurement honesty that separates reported ROAS from actual profit — grouped so you can run it before anyone else does.
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.
PPC management pricing models, compared.
The four ways PPC management is priced, compared on the only axis that matters: what each model pays the agency to do. The incentives, the failure modes, and the spend tiers where each structure earns its keep.
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.
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.
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.
How much does a Facebook Ads agency cost in 2026?
A Facebook Ads agency costs more to run than a search agency at the same spend, because the deliverable is a stream of creative, not a keyword tree. What the market charges, how creative production shows up in the fee, and what to verify before you sign.
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.
How much does a Google Ads agency cost in 2026?
Google Ads management is priced four different ways, and the right one depends almost entirely on your spend tier. A neutral guide to what agencies charge, how each model behaves as you scale, and the pricing structures that predict a bad relationship.
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.
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.
The Google Ads audit checklist for high-spend accounts.
A field-tested Google Ads audit checklist for serious spend. Not the beginner list — the structural, measurement, and bidding checks where six-figure monthly budgets quietly leak, grouped so you can run it yourself before you run it past anyone else.
You are buying pipeline, not leads.
Optimizing lead gen to CPL is how you fill a CRM with people who will never buy anything. The feedback loop, bidding setup, and reporting structure that aim spend at pipeline instead.
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.
How to scale Google Ads without breaking it.
The scaling order that works: exhaust impression-share headroom, loosen targets deliberately, expand match types and inventory in sequence, and never destabilize the bidding model you depend on.
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.
Ecommerce unit economics: CAC, LTV, and MER that add up.
Before any scaling decision, four numbers have to agree: real CAC, contribution-margin LTV, payback window, and MER. How to compute each honestly and turn them into bidding targets.
How to choose a performance marketing agency.
Most agency selection is a pitch-deck beauty contest. The falsifiable questions to ask instead — about measurement, incentives, access, and reporting — and the red flags that predict regret.
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.
Google Shopping vs Performance Max: which, and when.
Standard Shopping gives you control and transparency; PMax gives you reach and automation. When each wins, when to run both, and the migration mistakes that cost real money.
The SaaS paid acquisition playbook.
Long sales cycles, recurring revenue, and a form fill that means nothing by itself: why SaaS paid acquisition needs its own playbook, and the channel sequence that actually compounds.
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.
Google Ads audience segments that do real work.
First-party lists, custom segments built from converting searches, and observation-mode data you actually read: the audience toolkit that changes outcomes, not just settings.
YouTube ads for performance, not branding.
The advertisers winning on YouTube treat it as direct response: conversion-focused formats, intent-built audiences, creative engineered for the skip button, and measurement that respects lag.
How Performance Max actually works under the hood.
PMax is a black box, but not a mystery. How asset combination, surface arbitration, and conversion-value bidding actually interact — and where your inputs steer the machine.
Google Ads metrics that lie to you.
CTR rewards clickbait, conversion rate punishes growth, impression share hides its own denominator, and platform ROAS grades its own homework. What each metric really measures and what to read instead.
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.
Microsoft Ads: the second search engine your competitors ignore.
Most advertisers treat Microsoft Ads as an afterthought, which is exactly why it works. The audience economics, who should bother, and how to run it in two hours a week.
Google Shopping ads: the complete operator's guide.
Shopping ads have no keywords and no ad copy — the feed is both. A working guide to matching, structure, bidding, and the discipline that separates profitable Shopping from expensive Shopping.
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.
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