Insights — Paid Search, Plainly

Paid search, plainly.

Notes on Google Ads from eighteen years on the dials — profit over vanity metrics, plain talk, no jargon. The stuff I'd tell you over a coffee.

Most PPC content online is written to rank, not to help — recycled checklists, "10 tips" round-ups, and screenshots of dashboards that never mention what happened to the bank balance. This is the opposite. Every post here comes from a real account, a real client, and a real decision that had to be made with imperfect data. Sometimes that means turning ad spend off rather than on. Sometimes it means arguing with Google's own automation. The through-line is always the same question: did this make the client more money, or did it just make the report look better? If you manage your own Google Ads account, or you're trying to work out whether your agency is doing the same, these are written for you.

00325 August 20264 min read

Two identical orders. Two totally different customers

A £50 order from a first-time buyer and a £50 order from your best repeat customer look the same in a conversion feed. They shouldn't be treated the same.

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00225 August 20264 min read

Google's letting you argue with Performance Max

An alpha test gives advertisers a dial to push back on which channels PMax favours. Welcome control, and a new way to shoot yourself in the foot.

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00124 June 20264 min read

Your Google Ads report looks great. So where's the money?

On vanity metrics, the one number that actually matters, and why a tidy dashboard can quietly hide a leaking account.

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