Guides and notes
Guides and notes from inside the work: Google Ads, measurement, hiring the people who run it, and building with AI. Written for whoever has to make the decision, with the numbers left in and my own rates published rather than quoted on request.
Guide
Smart bidding is Google Ads setting your bids automatically toward whatever your conversion actions count. It is genuinely good on clean data, and it fails in three predictable ways: fed fake conversions, starved of data, or judged too soon after a fix.
Google Ads · Measurement · 2 min
Guide
White-label PPC means an outside senior runs the paid media while your agency keeps the client and the brand. Here is what it costs in 2026 and how to vet a partner before handing over an account.
Hiring and agencies · 4 min
Guide
A plain definition of a GTM container, the public URL that lets you read any site's container without a login, and why checking inside one settles arguments that dashboards start.
Measurement · 2 min
Guide
Plain definitions of remarketing and audience decay, and the reason a broken tracking tag is an urgent problem rather than a cosmetic one: every untagged day shrinks an audience you can never rebuild.
Google Ads · Measurement · 2 min
Guide
Nobody in this market publishes prices, which is exactly why this page exists. My actual rates, the three pricing models and their trade-offs, the minimum media budget where paying for management makes sense, and when you should not hire anyone at all.
Hiring and agencies · Google Ads · 3 min
Guide
A conversion action is the event you tell Google Ads to count as a success, and every report and bidding decision hangs off it. Here is how it works, how the counting setting should be set, and how to check yours in ten minutes.
Google Ads · Measurement · 2 min
Guide
Leads that drop straight after a website relaunch usually mean the tracking tags and old URLs did not survive the rebuild. Here is what breaks, the ten-minute self-check, and the order to repair it in.
Measurement · 3 min
Guide
I sent fifteen cold emails that carried evidence and got two replies, after thirty well-written ones that carried claims got zero. This is the framework that came out of that split, and why the most important step is deleting the findings that fail verification.
Measurement · 6 min
Guide
Five checks a non-marketer can run in about an hour to see whether an ads agency is earning its fee, using the account's own reports and your own records.
Hiring and agencies · 4 min
Guide
A fixed-order checklist for inheriting a Google Ads account: secure ownership, snapshot everything, audit measurement before campaigns, then change slowly. Includes the checks I run on every takeover.
Google Ads · Hiring and agencies · 3 min
Guide
A precise walkthrough of Google's Ads Transparency Center plus two public page checks that show whether any company is running ads and whether those ads are actually measured, with no login needed anywhere.
Google Ads · 4 min
Guide
Most briefs list channels and ask for creativity, which selects for confident talkers. Put measurement in the brief, ask one tracking question in the interview, and the field sorts itself.
Hiring and agencies · 3 min
Guide
Work your budget out from the leads you want, then check it against two floors. The arithmetic takes five minutes and tells you when the right spend is zero.
Google Ads · 3 min
Guide
When Google Ads reports conversions your inbox never saw, the conversion action is usually firing on a page load instead of a real enquiry. Here is the ten-minute check, and what a healthy setup looks like.
Google Ads · Measurement · 4 min
Guide
Five causes explain almost every sudden cost per click increase, in a rough order of likelihood, and each has a self-check you can run inside your own account in minutes.
Google Ads · 3 min
Guide
Google Ads management is priced the same three ways in every market, and the numbers only make sense against one piece of arithmetic. Here are my published August 2026 rates as concrete reference points, and the one-customer test that tells you whether any fee is worth paying.
Hiring and agencies · Google Ads · 4 min