Insights
Notes from inside the accounts.
Short, practical writing on paid media and SEO. What I actually see when I open an account, and what to do about it. Each post is a mini consulting session.
Start here
The writing is organised into series. Each one opens with the article that lays out the whole argument, then works through it a piece at a time.
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Cost per lead
30What a lead should cost, why yours climbs when you scale, and how to work out the number for your own account.
Start with What a good cost per lead actually looks like All 30 articles -
Conversion tracking
18Why your platform numbers disagree with reality, and how to get measurement you can actually make decisions on.
Start with What your conversion numbers are actually counting All 18 articles
Everything, newest first
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Two tools, one week, three reasons they will never match
A GA4 vs Google Ads discrepancy is expected behaviour, not a fault. Three structural differences explain nearly all of it, and none of them are fixable.
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Most people say yes, and the best data comes from an interested party
Consent rates in Europe run from 71% to 89% depending on region. The figures are the best available and come from a consent vendor's own customers.
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Estimates arriving in the same column as measurements
Modelled conversions are estimates Google adds where it cannot observe. They sit unlabelled beside real ones and take five days to settle.
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The threshold that quietly excludes most small advertisers
Google Consent Mode needs 700 ad clicks in seven days per country before modelling starts. Below that you lose the data and get nothing to replace it.
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Worth it on some accounts, overkill on most
Server side tracking recovers events browsers lose. There is no credible adoption figure anywhere, and on most accounts it is not the thing to fix first.
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Uploading a customer list is not the same as closing the loop
Offline conversion import tells the platform which enquiries became customers. Most accounts that think they do this are running Customer Match instead.
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Recovering the enquiries your click identifier never matched
Enhanced conversions for leads match enquiries Google could not otherwise connect to a click. Here is what they recover and what the numbers really say.
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The uplift figure lives in the marketing, not in the documentation
Google enhanced conversions recover conversions the click ID alone would miss. The published uplift figure is weaker evidence than most people assume.
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Three ways one action becomes two conversions
Conversion event deduplication stops one action being counted twice. Here are the three causes I find most, and how each one inflates your reporting.
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A score out of ten that nobody will tell you how to pass
Event match quality is scored out of ten and Meta publishes no threshold for a good score. Every number you have been given for it was invented.
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The server side connection, and the reason most accounts do not have one
The Meta Conversions API recovers events the browser loses. Whether you can run it is usually a question of client access, not of technical merit.
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The gap is smaller than the internet says, and it should be stable
CRM vs ad platform conversions usually differ by about 10% in my accounts, not the multiples this genre claims. Here is how to size and use yours.
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