Paid Media
Planning and buying across paid social, search, programmatic, video, CTV, and OOH, judged on incremental impact, not reported ROAS.
14 posts in Paid Media
Your campaigns were beating their targets. Google just ended that.
Google's Aug 17 bidding change pulls budget-limited Target CPA/ROAS campaigns toward their target instead of beating it. That outperformance was your margin. Here's what to do.
The model got 99% cheaper. Your CAC didn't.
DeepSeek V4 Flash is 99% cheaper than frontier models. That lowers the cost of producing marketing, not the cost of demand. Why AI's price war won't cut your CAC.
How to run a geo holdout test without fooling yourself
Everyone says 'run a holdout.' Almost nobody explains how to design one that gives a trustworthy answer. Here's the practical method, matched markets, duration, split size, reading the lift, and the ways these tests...
Which channel for which level of intent, and how to sequence them
A channel isn't a strategy, it's an instrument for reaching a buyer at a specific distance from purchase. Here's what each paid channel is actually good and bad at, mapped to the level of...
The cheap-acquisition era is ending: AI search is forcing paid back upstream
AI Overviews, AI Mode, and LLM answers are eroding the clickable placements performance marketing was built on. The capture layer is shrinking and commoditizing, which pushes the durable advantage back upstream, into brand and...
Platform ROAS is grading its own homework
Every ad platform reports the conversions it can see and stays silent on the counterfactual. How to tell how much of your reported return is actually real.
One demand engine, measured one way: stop running paid and SEO as rival teams
Paid and organic aren't two disciplines competing for budget. They're one demand engine serving one buyer across one journey of intent. Here's what changes when you organize and measure them that way.
Attribution, incrementality, MMM: stop asking which one is right
Teams argue about attribution vs incrementality vs media mix modeling as if they have to pick one. They answer different questions and work best layered, tests calibrate the model, the model allocates, attribution steers....
Incremental ROAS: the only return number a CFO will actually trust
Reported ROAS answers what the platform observed. Incremental ROAS answers what the spend actually caused. Here's the difference, why the gap is usually enormous, and how to measure the number that survives a budget...
Is branded search incremental? Run the holdout you're afraid of
Branded search reports some of the best ROAS in the account. It's also the spend most likely to be paying for clicks you'd get for free. The only way to know is a holdout,...
Prospecting vs retargeting: your retargeting ROAS is mostly a mirror
Retargeting reports the best ROAS in the account because it shows ads to people who were already going to buy. Prospecting does the harder job, finding new demand, and gets punished for it on...
Demand generation vs demand capture: the split that decides whether you grow
Demand capture harvests intent that already exists. Demand generation creates intent that didn't. Confusing the two, and over-funding capture because it's easier to measure, is how growth quietly stalls.
What full-funnel marketing actually means (and why most 'full-funnel' plans aren't)
Full-funnel marketing isn't running ads on more platforms. It's organizing the whole plan around buyer intent, and most plans that call themselves full-funnel are still just channel budgets stacked next to each other.
The saturation point: finding where the next dollar stops working
Average ROAS tells you nothing about scaling. The only number that matters is the return on the next dollar, and it's lower than you think.