Notes from inside live Google Ads accounts — what actually breaks, what fixes it, and what the numbers looked like either side. Written for the people who have to make the budget work.
Start here
Being the page an AI cites is a different problem from being the page that ranks. It rewards self-contained passages, claims with sources attached, and facts about you that agree across every property you control — and it punishes vagueness harder than search ever did. Attribution is still poor, so treat it as an investment in being findable and accurately described, not as a channel with a cost per acquisition.
The guides
Five long-form guides, one per area of the practice. Each collects the writing on its subject and puts it in the order the work is actually done.
How should a Google Ads account actually be organised?
Read the guideHow do I know my Google Ads conversion data is real?
Read the guideWhat should a page receiving paid traffic actually do?
Read the guideHow do feed-driven and visual campaigns actually work?
Read the guideHow does paid search differ by industry?
Read the guideEverything else
Someone types six words into Google. You get about two seconds and roughly ninety characters of headline to convince them you are the right answer. That is the whole job of ad copy, and most of it is…
Google Ads presents itself as one product. It is really a set of quite different advertising businesses sharing a login, and the most expensive mistakes in paid media come from using one of them to…
Plenty of accounts generate leads. Far fewer generate leads the sales team is willing to call twice. The difference is rarely the bidding, and it is almost never the budget — it is that the account…
Most people set up their first Google Ads campaign in about twenty minutes, and most of those campaigns waste money for months before anyone works out why. The platform is deliberately easy to start…
These are the questions I am asked most often before an engagement starts, answered the way I would answer them on a call rather than the way a brochure would. If yours is not here, ask it directly —…
Most articles with this title are written by specialists, for the benefit of specialists, and read as one long argument for hiring the author. This one includes the cases where you should not —…
Arguing that a business needs to exist online is no longer an argument anyone needs to win. What is still worth saying is more specific: which parts of an online presence actually earn their keep,…
The question I actually get asked is not which social media trends matter. It is simpler and harder: I have a fixed budget — how much of it should go to social, and how much to search? That decision…
Every January the same article appears under a hundred bylines: ten trends that will define digital marketing this year. AI, video, personalisation, authenticity, some emerging platform. The list is…
I get a steady stream of enquiries from people starting out in digital marketing, and they nearly all ask the same question in slightly different words: how do I become a Google AdWords Certified…
The certification itself takes an afternoon. Being worth hiring takes considerably longer, and it is worth being clear about which one you are pursuing before you start. Here is how the…
In business to business paid search, a large share of the traffic you can buy is worthless — not badly targeted, but structurally incapable of becoming a customer. Job seekers. Students writing…
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