More leads is not the goal
I doubled a client's leads once and made their business worse. Cost per lead is a vanity metric until you know what a qualified lead costs.
Field Notes
Observations from running paid media accounts. Things I learned, things I caught, things I rebuilt.
Your client's AI is reading your report
Clients now paste agency reports into AI before replying. Fluff gets caught in seconds. Here is what machine review does to agency work, and who survives it.
Nobody tells the ads guy about the migration
Site replatforms happen in a vacuum. Then the tags die, the feed breaks, the URLs change, and the ad account finds out at 2am. A war story and a checklist.
The booking platform is eating your conversion data
Tours, clinics, restaurants. The booking happens inside someone else's widget, and the tracking dies there. The campaigns look dead while the business is full.
Your CRM knows which leads were good. Google still doesn't.
Most lead gen accounts train Google to find form fills, not customers. Offline conversion imports fix that. Here is how the machine changes when you feed it.
Why I stopped offering free audits
Free audits attract the wrong clients, eat the wrong hours, and signal the wrong thing about your work. I stopped doing them. Here is what changed.
What surveillance catches that the client misses
Most agencies still log into Google Ads on a Monday and react to whatever happened over the weekend. By then the damage is done. There is a better way.
The real cost of "we'll handle tracking later"
Tracking gets pushed to the end of every project I see. By the time anyone fixes it, the campaigns have been optimising toward fiction for months.
PMax cannibalisation, and how to actually measure it
Performance Max takes credit for conversions it did not earn. Most agencies do not measure this. Here is how to find out what your PMax is really doing.
Why the percentage retainer scales down with spend
Smaller accounts need the same brain as bigger ones. The pricing should reflect that. Here is why my retainer percentage drops as spend grows.
The 30 minute discovery call is dead
Discovery calls used to be a sales tactic. Now they are friction. The right clients want to skip the call and start the work.
What 800 Upwork jobs teach you about briefs
I have read thousands of project briefs. The good ones are short. The bad ones are long. Here is what to put in a brief that gets work started fast.