Posts
Google Ads Reported 444 Conversions. None of Them Were Signups.
A software client's Google Ads program closed at $470.83, 2,726 clicks and 444 conversions. Every conversion was a YouTube channel subscription. Here's how the conversion column decides what a campaign chases, and how to report a real result that isn't the result you needed.
Ten Creator Slots Produced One Post
Matching with creators is the easy part. We audited a live campaign and found the failures are all downstream: shipping, approval, payment, disclosure, and a status label that means something other than what it says.
The Dashboard Said One Lead. There Was No Lead.
A counter read one. The record surface read zero. The download produced no file, three times, on three different days. Here is what we have learned about marketing numbers that restate themselves, and the six rules we now report by.
Our Warmest Audience Was Our Most Expensive One
We ran the same LinkedIn ad against a 59,000-person customer list and against cold attribute targeting. The warm list cost six and a half times more per click and produced nothing. Here are both sets of numbers.
Your Sitemap Might Be Publishing Pages You Have Never Seen
One photography studio's own sitemap listed 2,124 online casino pages, all returning 200 inside their template, all set to index. Here is how to read the two files that tell search engines what your site is, and what we keep finding in them.
We Published 16 Blog Posts and Got Two Clicks
Our own journal earned two clicks in three months. It was not a content problem or a speed problem. Google had never fetched most of the posts. Here is the diagnosis, in full, with our own numbers.
The Contact Button That Dials Nothing
We have crawled a few hundred small business websites this year. The most common revenue-costing defect is not SEO or design. It is that the phone link, the email link, or the form quietly does not work.
Financial Advisor Marketing That Does Not Trip the Marketing Rule
Half of investors with $5M or more found their advisor with no referral involved. Here is how to be findable, and what the SEC Marketing Rule actually requires when you are.
Your Restaurant's Reviews Expire
Three quarters of diners now weight reviews from the last three months. A wall of five stars from 2023 is not an asset, it is a countdown.
Why Cold Email That Gets Opened Still Gets Ignored
Our open rate was healthy and our reply rate was zero. Here is what we found when we audited our own outreach, including the personalization trick that quietly insults people.
The DNS Work Nobody Does Before a Big Email Send
Three DNS records decide whether your campaign reaches the inbox or disappears silently. Plus why your open rate and click rate are probably lying to you.
Your Meta Ads Have a Cheap CPC and No Customers. Here Is Why.
Ninety percent of one client's launch budget went to a placement nobody chose. The clicks were cheap, and three quarters of them never reached the website.
