What we have actually learned running accounts

26 October 20269 min read

You do not have a lead problem. You have a qualification problem

Sales says the leads are rubbish. Marketing says sales is not working them. Both are describing the same broken feedback loop, and neither can fix it alone.

23 October 20269 min read

Your Shopping campaigns are not an ads problem. They are a spreadsheet problem

An owner asked me which keywords to add to his Shopping campaign. There are none. The feed is the targeting, and his was the one his platform generated on install.

Tracking

Half your conversions are missing, and the fix is not another pixel

The pixel is not broken. It is doing exactly what it was designed to do, in a browser that no longer lets it. That gap is what server-side tracking exists to close.

23 October 20269 min read

B2B

LinkedIn costs four times what Meta does. Sometimes that is the cheap option

A founder showed me two numbers: $19 a lead on Meta, $81 on LinkedIn, and asked why we were still running LinkedIn. The answer was in a column neither report contained.

23 October 20268 min read

SEO

Your buyers are asking ChatGPT before they ever reach your website

A prospect told me he had already narrowed it to three agencies before our call. He had not searched Google once. He had asked an assistant, twice, and read what came back.

22 October 20269 min read

22 October 20269 min read

You do not have a targeting problem. You have run out of things to say

Every stalled account I audit has the same request attached: find us a better audience. The audience is almost never the problem. The account has simply said the same thing four hundred times.

22 October 20268 min read

Agency, freelancer or in-house: the honest version of that decision

We are an agency, so take this with the appropriate pinch of salt. I will try to earn it by being specific about when we are the wrong answer.

21 October 20269 min read

Five weeks to Black Friday: what to fix now, and what to leave alone

Most stores lose Black Friday in the final fortnight, by restructuring the account in the middle of the most expensive auction of the year. Everything that decides the result happens in the five weeks before it.

Email Marketing

Your email flows are empty, so you are paying to acquire the same customer twice

Almost every store I audit has a single abandoned cart email and nothing else. The ads are not the expensive part of that setup. Buying the same person a second time is.

21 October 20268 min read

CRO

Sending paid traffic to your homepage is quietly costing you a third of your conversions

The ad promised one specific thing. The homepage offers eleven. That mismatch is the most expensive half-second on most websites, and almost nobody measures it.

21 October 20268 min read

Web Development

Webflow, WordPress or custom: choosing a marketing site you will not regret in eighteen months

A Boston B2B firm asked me which platform to rebuild on. The honest answer had almost nothing to do with the platforms and everything to do with who would be changing the homepage in March.

20 October 20269 min read

WordPress

Your WordPress site was fast when it launched. Here is what made it slow

A professional services firm in Leeds had a site that loaded in under two seconds at launch. Two years later it took nine on a phone. Nobody had done anything wrong. They had just each done one small thing.

20 October 20269 min read

Branding

Your brand looks expensive and your copy sounds cheap. That gap is your price ceiling

A Toronto consultancy had a genuinely beautiful website and could not get past a certain day rate. The design was not the problem. Every sentence on the site could have been written by any of their competitors.

20 October 20268 min read

Shopify

Seven in ten checkouts are abandoned. Most of them die on the same screen

A Birmingham apparel brand started 2,100 checkouts in a month and completed 540. The owner wanted better ads. The ads were fine. The problem was a number that appeared for the first time on step two.

17 October 20268 min read

17 October 20269 min read

Broad match is not what is wasting your budget. Your missing negative list is

A Sacramento commercial HVAC firm was spending about $14,000 a month. Their third highest spending search term was a salary query. Nobody had opened the search terms report in seven months.

Social Media

You grew to forty thousand followers and sold almost nothing. Here is the disconnect

A Melbourne skincare brand had 41,000 followers, strong reach, and three or four orders a month from social. The content was working exactly as designed. It was just designed for the wrong outcome.

17 October 20268 min read

16 October 20268 min read

Meta will not spend your budget. Here is what is actually blocking delivery

A Denver home goods brand set an $800 daily budget and Meta kept spending about $340 of it. Nothing was disapproved, nothing was paused. The account was telling them something and nobody was reading it.

16 October 20269 min read

Google says 180 conversions, GA4 says 94, your store says 71. Which one is lying?

A Leeds homeware brand spent the first twenty minutes of every board meeting arguing about whose number was right. Nobody was lying. They were answering three different questions and treating the answers as one.

SEO

Your blog gets traffic and your sales team gets nothing. That is a keyword problem

A Dublin consultancy was getting fourteen thousand organic sessions a month and about three enquiries. The content was good. It was just answering questions that buyers had already finished asking.

16 October 20268 min read

14 October 20267 min read

Your ROAS looks fine. So why is there no money in the account?

A DTC founder in Manchester sent us a screenshot last month: 3.6x ROAS, trending up, and a bank balance going the other way. Nothing was broken in the ad account. The number was.

14 October 20268 min read

Nine questions to ask before you hire an offshore marketing agency

We are an offshore agency. We also inherit accounts from offshore agencies that did real damage. The difference is not geography. It comes down to a handful of things you can check before signing.

14 October 20268 min read

Your Google Ads leads are cheap. They are also useless. Here is why.

A Texas roofing company was paying $31 a lead and proud of it. Their closer was spending his mornings calling people who wanted a gutter cleaned. The account was optimising for exactly what it was told to.

14 October 20267 min read

Performance Max is probably spending your budget on people who already searched for you

A UK fitness equipment brand saw a 6.4x ROAS in Performance Max while total revenue stayed flat. The campaign was not finding new customers. It was intercepting people who were already on their way.

Shopify

Your Shopify store converts on desktop and dies on mobile. Here is what is usually wrong

An Austin skincare brand was paying for mobile traffic that converted at less than a third of the desktop rate. The store looked fine on a phone. The problem was everything the screenshot did not show.

14 October 20268 min read

Branding

Why a forgettable brand is quietly raising your cost per lead

A Toronto kitchen renovation firm had watched its cost per qualified lead rise for a year while the ad account stayed healthy. Every optimisation was fighting a problem that lived somewhere else.

14 October 20267 min read

10 September 20268 min read

How to structure a Meta Ads account that actually scales

Most accounts do not stall because the targeting is wrong. They stall because the structure stops the algorithm from learning. Here is the architecture we use instead.