The archive
Full editions, not teasers. Real accounts, real numbers, and the parts that did not work.
23 editions
Latest · No. 01
An 8-figure supplement brand handed us their ad account in March. Performance Max had run for eight months. Spend sat at $380,000. Nobody on the account, agency or in-house, had pulled the actual search terms behind that…
Read the editionNo. 02
Monday, 7am. I open one screen and see the health of every account I run. Over 100 of them, anywhere from $300k to $2.5M moving through them in a given month. Three years ago that took a team of six people and a standing…
No. 03
Your account has sat at $650K a month for the better part of a year. You rewrote the ad copy three times. You added five new audiences. Revenue moved maybe 4%, then slid back to where it started. None of that was the pro…
No. 04
3:14pm on a Thursday, a client texts me one line: "Google just shut off our whole feed." No warning, no gradual throttle. A red banner across Merchant Center, every product delisted. That account was doing $240k a month…
No. 05
I opened an account last month spending $410K a month on an 8-figure supplement brand. Clean campaigns, tight ad groups, a Smart Bidding setup someone had spent real time on. Zero negative keywords. Not thin, zero. Googl…
No. 06
One ecommerce account in our book sat on the same four ad creatives for eleven weeks. $540,000 a month in spend, ROAS flat at 2.6x, and nobody upstream was refreshing the assets because refreshing assets meant a designer…
No. 07
A founder I know typed his own company's category into ChatGPT last month. "Best inventory software for mid-size retailers." His product has better retention than anyone else in the space. It didn't show up once in ten p…
No. 08
The Shopify dashboard said $85,000 a month. The Google Ads interface said 4.2x ROAS. The bank statement said 1.9x. The brand had been making budget calls on the first two numbers for over a year, and both were wrong.
No. 09
A founder I work with forwarded me a proposal last month: $7,500 a month, twelve-month minimum, for a "GEO and AEO retainer." That's $90,000 a year for two acronyms he couldn't define when I asked him to. His question to…
No. 10
7:41am. The coffee's still hot, five windows are open on my machine, and $300k to $2.5M a month in ad spend across 100+ accounts has already been checked while I slept. Nobody else is in the office, because there is no o…
No. 11
At 6:12pm on a Tuesday, an ecommerce founder gave me read-only access to a Google Ads account spending $520,000 a month. By 9pm the case file was built: $44,300 a month leaking through four separate holes, none of which…
No. 12
Five DMs, one week, and they're the same five questions I get every week. Different founders, different revenue, same worries. So this edition is a mailbag: real questions from my inbox, senders blurred, answered the way…
No. 13
223 checks each. Two problems surfaced. A spend spike on one, a broken feed on another, and both fixes were written up before I opened my laptop. I read the thread, typed one word, went back to my coffee.
No. 14
An agency owner messaged me last Tuesday at 11:40pm. $88k a month in revenue, nine people on payroll, and he takes home less than the developer he hired back in March.
No. 15
A store sat at 1.9x ROAS for four months while another agency kept rebuilding its Google Ads. New ad groups. Fresh bids. The whole campaign structure torn down and stood back up twice. The number would not move.
No. 16
At 9:14 on a Tuesday a CV landed in my inbox. Two pages, four certifications, a university I recognized. I read one line of it. His name. Then I closed it and asked him to show me one thing he'd built with his own hands.
No. 17
By the time I poured the coffee, the nightly audit had swept 107 Google Ads accounts, 223 checks on each one. The cold email system had booked two calls onto my calendar while I was out. Six client reports sat drafted in…
No. 18
A Monday, 9:14am. 183 products went dark in Merchant Center and nobody had touched a single bid.
No. 19
16 meetings booked last month. From the channel half your feed keeps calling dead.
No. 20
A founder forwarded me a slide at 11pm on a Tuesday. 8.2x ROAS, a green arrow pointing up like a rocket, another agency's logo tucked in the corner. He wanted to know if the number was good.
No. 21
Two things on my calendar this week. A client call on Tuesday and the gym on Thursday.
No. 22
That second number is the one I look at, and it is the one almost nobody says out loud.
No. 23
Two columns on a screen. Same output. One costs $28,000 a month and one costs $1,900.