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New brand. Empty ad account. Full deployment by the end of the day.
Most agencies' onboarding takes 2-3 weeks.
Ours takes one day.
This is what it looks like when every step - research, feeds, ads, landing pages, creative - runs through AI agents built specifically for the job.
By the team that embraces the speed of an AI agentic system.
The video walks through every screenshot I sent the client as the day unfolded.
Research.
Deep brand analysis. Keyword research across every product angle.
Competitors pulled on both Google and Meta - their ads, their landing pages, their keyword coverage, their gaps.
The system runs 21 research queries per market and maps them into 380-620 angle variations. Every angle scored for volume, competition, and conversion potential.
Feed strategy.
The product catalog is segmented into 13 separate feed strategies.
Not 1 generic feed. 13 - each built around a different purchase intent.
Every feed is rewritten from scratch:
- Titles (140-150 chars, front-loaded with keywords)
- Descriptions (800-1,100 chars, unique per variant)
- Product highlights
- 30+ other GMC attributes
Each feed is validated against 152 quality checkpoints before it touches Merchant Center. Anything below threshold gets auto-fixed and re-validated.
All 13 deployed to GMC through API. This used to take us a full week. The systems brought it down to hours.
Pre-sell and offer pages.
For top products, AI agents build full landing pages from scratch - unique to each angle and audience intent, not templates.
- Angle discovery through keyword research and SERP analysis
- 2,000-3,500 words of conversion-optimized copy per page
- Full HTML/CSS/JS build with scroll animations
- Lighthouse speed scores above 90
- Deployed to Shopify or Cloudflare through API with SSL, CDN, and cross-domain tracking
Offer pages follow the same pipeline - bundle strategy, pricing psychology, tier selection, and direct Shopify cart integration.
Campaign architecture - everything that went live on day one:
- Brand campaigns - product URLs matched to ads matched to keyword clusters
- Cold acquisition search campaigns for top products - 3 to 6 ad groups each
- Counter-competitor campaigns built from competitor research
- Direct response campaigns for pre-sell landing pages
- 13 Shopping campaigns with separate segments for keyword data mining
- 13 PMax feed-only campaigns for performance and scaling
- Demand Gen image campaigns - AI-generated creative across 4 aspect ratios
- Demand Gen video campaigns - brand videos uploaded to YouTube, deployed as in-stream and Shorts
The Shopping campaigns are where it compounds. Search term data feeds back into title improvements and uncovers new angles for more feeds.
The system gets smarter the longer it runs.
Account-level infrastructure - sitelinks, callouts, price extensions, structured snippets, negative keyword lists, placement exclusions - all generated and deployed through API.
What makes this possible:
47 AI agent commands.
- The feed agent rewrites and validates.
- The search agent builds ads from competitor intel.
- The presell agent writes copy, builds pages, and deploys.
- The demand gen agent generates images across 5 AI models and uploads campaigns.
Each agent runs 1,500-2,000 lines of instructions plus Python scripts deploying through API.
While they handle the build, I'm on tracking fixes and page tagging.
(The agents build faster than I can configure GTM. I've made my peace with that)
Hundreds of ads live from day one. Pre-sell pages deployed. Demand gen running. Sequential testing across every angle - same philosophy as massive creative testing on Meta, applied to search, shopping, display, and video.
Full walkthrough is in the video. Every step. Every campaign. Nothing edited out.
Most onboardings take 2-3 weeks.
Ours takes one day. Due to the systems we spent years building.
Imagine how a month of working on an ad account looks like at this speed.
If you sell on Google, Universal Cart can resurface your product weeks after a shopper saved it. Check what it shows.
Google launched Universal Cart in the U.S. on Oct 15, in Search and the Gemini app. It saves products from different stores in one place, tracks price drops and restocks, and shows promo codes from the cart.
Google says the cart is built on the Shopping Graph, which it puts at 60+ billion product listings. Checkout can happen with Google Pay in the cart, or on your own site, and the merchant stays the seller of record.
That makes a wrong price or availability value more visible than it was in a one-time search.
What I'd check this week:
• Save your ten best sellers to a cart from AI Mode and note the price, stock status and image it shows.
• Compare each against the product page. A mismatch is what a price-drop alert will expose.
• Decide which promo codes you're comfortable having surfaced next to a product before Black Friday.
• Check Merchant Center's UCP checkout page. Google says that checkout is limited to select merchants for now.
Google's own help page now says budget and target changes don't trigger a learning period.
Google rewrote its learning doc on Oct 21 and renamed it "About Smart Bidding learning." The visible Learning status now lasts 7 days at most.
What triggers it, per the new page:
• A new or reactivated bid strategy.
• Campaigns, ad groups or keywords added to or removed from the strategy.
• A significant change to the conversion goals you optimize for.
What doesn't: budgets, targets, creatives, and targeting settings like location, audience or language. Google says those never remove historical data or trigger Learning.
The best practices are the useful part. Keep one consistent primary conversion goal, keep budgets sufficient, consolidate where you can, and avoid several target changes inside one conversion cycle.
Check your account notes for "don't touch it, it's learning." Some of those were written for changes this page now says are safe.
Safe to change isn't the same as smart to change daily. Seven days of "Learning" is also the seven days of someone refreshing the dashboard.
That’s something new. We should definitely try it @andreilunev considering how fast the game can be built with AI agents
Gamified funnel for Halloween 🎃
RYZE is launching a bunch of AI-made games as full funnels for Halloween.
- shop.ryzesuperfoods.com/brid…
And low key this is EXACTLY where you should land your warm traffic.
- Email subscribers
- Retargeting
These people already know the product.
They just need a fun reason to come back and a better deal.
This is where DTC is heading imo.
At some point you just gotta get more creative.
What would I do?
Push these HARD through email not Ads
Tbh this could become one of your best performing campaigns lmaoo
Because you’re not only doing hard work with emails.
You’re improving what happens AFTER the click.
Better destination = more revenue.
Steal it for your brand.
A year ago Grok wasn’t even on radars to be close to what Anthropic and OpenAI do. Now we have this.
Don’t bet against Elon.
Grok @Bot can now call someone or a business for you, make a request on your behalf, take notes on the response and send you a note summarizing the conversation!
Google's Ads API is moving to two releases a month, starting with v26.
Google's reason: "automated agents and workflows" get "near-instant access" to new features. So the customer here isn't you, it's the bot running your account.
The housekeeping is calm: still four breaking versions a year, unchanged sunset dates, and mostly additive releases.
The interesting part came right before it. On Aug 31, Google's developer policy banned programmatic proxies, which PPC Land reads as covering hosted MCP servers and wrappers that re-expose Google Ads to third parties.
On Sept 10, API access moved into Google Cloud projects, with brand verification for new applications. Fast features, then, but only for tools plugged in directly, on Google's terms.
Somewhere, an "AI media buyer" startup is finding out it's a programmatic proxy.
If a third-party AI tool can change your account, "it works" isn't a complete answer anymore.
What I'd check today:
• Every tool, script and agent with write access to the account, and whose Cloud project it connects through.
• Whether any of them is a hosted wrapper around the API, since that's the setup the August policy is aimed at.
• Who on the team reads the API release notes, because Google is cutting its release recaps to twice a quarter.
Six in ten marketers use AI every day. About one in fifteen can show what it returned.
That's from Basis's fourth annual survey, published Oct 19. About six in ten use generative or agentic AI daily, up from a third last year.
Only about one in fifteen organizations measure AI ROI against defined benchmarks.
The detail I'd read twice:
• About two in three either don't measure it at all or aren't sure anyone does.
• More than half of organizations now deploy AI agents, and about seven in ten of those use agents for reporting and analytics.
So the agent writes the report on whether the agent worked. I would like to see that audit.
Basis sells software for connecting this data, and the survey has 184 respondents. Read it as a signal, not a census.
The fix is cheaper than the software. Pick one task AI now does for you.
Write down the hours and the error rate from before. Check the same two numbers in 30 days.
If the numbers aren't written down yet, there's nothing to compare against, and that's the whole problem.
Google's AI Mode had no ads at launch. Now Google is testing them for users who connect their apps.
Google says the ads can reflect the user's query, the AI answer's context and their interests, and that connected-app information can now help personalize them. It also updated its privacy policy to say so.
The guardrails Google listed:
• Opt-in only, and users can disconnect at any time.
• No ads based directly on Gmail or Google Photos content.
• No advertiser access to anyone's connected apps.
• Sensitive information is not used for personalization.
What Google hasn't announced is a new targeting option, a new control or a wider rollout. So the placement can be tested without anything on your side changing, which is the part I'd watch.
If you run Search, Shopping, PMax or AI Max, add one habit this week. Check your search term and landing page reports for traffic that looks like a longer, more personal question than anyone types into a search box.
Google called the old experience ad-free. That lasted until someone found the revenue line.
Goated
There is literally so much to learn about marketing from sluts on the internet
A top 0.1% OnlyFans girl making $300,000 a month gives away 95% of her photos for free to 100,000 broke horny guys... just so the algorithm pushes her onto the screen of 15 lonely millionaires
She knows the broke guys pay her in reach & the 15 whales pay her $20,000 each in private DMs
Meanwhile look at how normal businesses try to sell stuff online:
They hide everything behind a paywall or a "book a call" link, make dry content aimed only at rich CEOs, get 200 views, and wonder why they're making $0...
You cannot reach rich buyers on the internet without using the general public as your free megaphone!!!
Why? Because algorithms don't know who has $50,000 sitting in their bank account
They only know what makes human beings stop scrolling, argue in the comments & hit save
When you look behind the curtain of a $300k/mo OF page, it's the cleanest 4-step marketing funnel on earth (and it works even better when you apply it to a normal business):
Step 1: Bait the masses for free reach
You open your content with a broad, controversial human truth that gets 100,000 everyday people fighting in the replies. You don't make a dime from those 100,000 people... their only job is forcing the algorithm to shove your name onto the phone of the 150 quiet millionaires lurking in that crowd
Step 2: Put the "Whale Filter" in the second half
Halfway through, you switch from the broad story into a breakdown so specific that broke tourists scroll past it... while the guy with real $$$ goes "wait, this mf actually knows what he's doing" & clicks your profile
Step 3: Make the front door free
Amateur OF girls put a $25 paywall on their bio & starve. Smart ones make entry free just to get the guy off the public feed and into a private room. In normal marketing, you do the exact same thing with a free 5-minute written VSL, webinar, or diagnostic tool that pulls the serious buyers off the feed
Step 4: Separate the tourists from the whales in 3 DMs
A trained chatter asks 2 casual questions in the DMs to spot the 1% with real budget, then moves only those whales onto a custom call where they close at 10x the price
This is the exact same shit we do on X for high-ticket businesses... we use this whale funnel to get our clients $0.25 webinar opt-ins, $5 to $50 booked calls & a 60% close rate
Feel free to check out yegor. com if you have a $5k+ offer & want us to build and run the whole machine for you
If your budget-limited tROAS campaign used to beat its target, check it today.
Google changed how budget-limited Target CPA and Target ROAS campaigns bid, and the rollout finished Aug 27. smec just published its before-and-after from its own accounts.
Google promised a gradual adjustment. Three weeks is gradual the way a trapdoor is a staircase.
What smec reported:
• Before the change, 55% of budget-limited campaigns beat their ROAS target, by a median of about 20%.
• The overshoot fell to roughly half by the week of Aug 17, shrank again a week later, and was about zero by Aug 31.
• One UK homeware retailer went from roughly 17p to 27p CPC in a week, then raised its target to about 13 and actual ROAS tracked it.
smec's read of a Google slide: capped campaigns used to throttle bids to stay inside budget, and that throttling was the surplus.
What I'd check this morning:
• Which target-based campaigns show "limited by budget," and whether their tROAS was set assuming a cushion that no longer exists.
• Whether you raised targets on campaigns that were never budget-limited. smec saw advertisers do that and called it unnecessary.
• Whether Maximize Conversion Value on a bigger budget beats a tight target on the capped ones.
This is smec's data, mostly European retail, with the sample size undisclosed. Google isn't part of the episode, so treat it as one vendor's read until your own account says the same.
Gents. Be safe
This is the most serious 48 hours in cybersecurity history.
"Black October" they're calling it
It seems every *hour* there's a new incident, that in a typical year, would be one of the biggest incidents of the *entire year*
SUMMARY OF THE LAST 48 HOURS:
YEAR-LEVEL INCIDENTS (In a typical year, these would be among the biggest incidents of the year):
1. PHP2Shell: a hole in the software behind ~70% of websites. Governments took sites offline.
2. eMudhra: the master keys that prove websites are real were cracked. One was the number 4.
3. California: data on every public school student since 2023 stolen, including disability status
4. Railway: hackers stole customers' secret keys from a hosting platform used by millions of developers
5. Zeabur: 321,810 accounts breached. The company is shutting down.
6. LiteLLM: an AI tool downloaded 3.4 million times a day was poisoned with a password stealer
7. GitLab: a 10-out-of-10 severity hole in every version since 2014
8. Cairn: criminals used an AI hacking tool to break into 100+ companies
9. Ahold Delhaize: hackers knocked the owner of Food Lion and Stop & Shop offline
10. Onamae: malware planted on up to 26,739 customer servers in Japan
MONTH-LEVEL INCIDENTS (In a typical month, these would be among the biggest incidents):
11. Signal: a bug could leave your mic and camera on after you hang up
12. NGINX: 3 critical holes in software running ~1/3 of websites
13. HTTP/3: a single connection can crash 7 of the 10 web server types tested
14. Plex: hackers breaking into home media servers
15. SafePay ransomware: FBI warns it has hit 600+ critical infrastructure organizations
16. Palo Alto: ransomware gangs breaking in through company firewalls
17. Bullhorn: platform used by 10,000+ companies knocked offline
18. Medi-Cal: 970,000 patients' data stolen
19. WordPress: hackers stole a plugin maker's keys and used them to plant backdoors on websites
20. AOMEI: backup software's update server handed out a backdoor
21. Meta Muse: Meta's AI agent exposed users' personal and business secrets
22. Tor: 333 relays hijacked to steal logins
23. TiDB Cloud: database company's cloud breached
Also serious:
24. State Bank of India: India's biggest bank confirms a data breach
25. OVHcloud: hackers slipped a password stealer into a cloud company's official tool
26. Siemens: a software hole being used to spread malware
27. North Korea: state hackers launch a new attack campaign on South Korea
An IT company ran ChatGPT Ads and never once found its own ad.
The dashboard said thousands of impressions.
From r/PPC this week:
• u/mark_tyler: "I opened ChatGPT in incognito mode... My ad is not there... In dashboard it shows thousands of impressions."
• u/bayouski: "the ad is separate from the answer and shows as a sponsored placement below it."
• u/Either_Guess2405: "There is no prompt-level report... it is only the hints you typed."
The bigger point sits in OpenAI's own help center. Ads "may appear for users on the Free and Go plans."
And: "Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise, and Edu accounts will not have ads."
So the people paying for ChatGPT at work never see you.
That makes it a consumer channel with a very particular audience, sitting under an answer you don't control.
And hunting for your own ad by asking ChatGPT yourself is about as reliable as googling your own keyword ten times.
TL;DR before you fund ChatGPT Ads:
• Your audience is Free and Go users, so it fits consumer products better than B2B.
• Your ad sits below the answer, so the answer above it still decides whether you look credible.
• You get hints-level reporting, so judge it on leads and orders over a month.
Google now quietly discounts some new Demand Gen campaigns for up to 60 days. Judge yours on day 61.
The beta is called performance-based cost adjustment. If a new tCPA or tROAS campaign converts worse than Google predicted, Google lowers what you pay, after the fact.
It used to last up to three weeks. Google's updated documentation now says up to 60 days (Search Engine Land spotted it on Oct 16).
Nice of them. Here's the part that bugs me.
There's no credit, no line item and no notification. The discount just sits inside your reported cost.
So a campaign launched this week can look on target straight through Cyber Monday, then get pricier in December with nothing changed but the calendar.
Someone in that meeting will say the algorithm got worse.
It isn't guaranteed either. Google weighs account age, tracking quality, bidding habits and budget, and may apply it only on some days.
What I'd write into the launch plan:
• The launch date, so everyone knows when the 60-day window can close.
• Conversion volume and conversion rate next to CPA, because those two aren't discounted.
• No scale-up call before day 60. Then compare the CPA after the window with the first 60 days.
You tested five headlines this month. Every one of them sent people to the same page.
An r/PPC thread this week nailed the problem:
• u/EnvironmentalClue405: "we're testing different angles audiences and headlines, but once someone clicks they're getting pretty much the same message."
• u/MagicalProbation4: "at some point you're not even testing the full message anymore."
• u/Busy_Leader4145: "It's like changing the front door five times but the inside of the house is still the same."
The usual fix makes it worse.
Twenty landing pages sounds great until, as u/Significant_List5074 put it, "the offer changes and someone has to go through every single one."
The best answer in the thread was boring, which is usually a good sign.
u/QuantumWolf99 runs "3-5 page templates by intent, then swap the headline and hero line from a URL parameter set in each ad's final URL. One page, twenty matching headlines, and edits happen in one place."
So the ad test only works once the page knows which ad sent the click.
TL;DR for your next ad test:
• Group ads by intent and give each intent one template.
• Pass the ad's angle in the final URL and print it in the hero.
• Judge the test on conversion rate after the click, since that's where the angle finally gets tested.
If tracking breaks on Black Friday, the fix in Google Ads has a short shelf life.
The tool is data exclusions. It tells the bidder to ignore conversion data from a period when your tags or imports were broken, so it doesn't learn from a fake slump.
Two limits from Google's help page:
• It's meant for issues you catch within about a week.
• It's not recommended for problems older than 14 days on Search, or 60 days on Shopping.
So the clock starts when you notice, and nobody notices anything on a holiday weekend.
Before Nov 27 I'd set up three things:
1. A daily check that conversions are still arriving, per campaign type.
2. One named person who can add an exclusion, with the steps written down.
3. A note of every theme or checkout app update scheduled for sale week, since that's where tags usually go missing.
Google's holiday help page says to set your budget at 3x what you expect to spend.
Not a typo. It's in the Smart Bidding guidance for Shopping and Performance Max, under Black Friday and Cyber Week.
The reasoning is headroom. If budget caps the campaign on the best day of the year, target ROAS never gets the chance to do its job.
And Google notes campaigns can spend up to 2x the average daily budget when demand jumps anyway.
What I'd actually do with that:
• Raise budgets only on campaigns where target ROAS is doing the limiting, and leave the cap as a safety rail.
• Check "Limited by budget" on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, not on Friday at noon.
• Write down the ceiling you can truly afford for Nov 27-30, because "3x" assumes your margin agrees.
Google's page is very confident about your budget. Your CFO may have notes.
Yay awesome chat gents
🌶️ Some kind of magic happens when you have these guys on the call
@d_grimripper
@iamgalba
@KrsteKovaceski
@andreilunev
Every DTC playbook you've read was written by someone selling refills.
If your customer buys once (a mattress, a bike, a sofa), half that advice assumes an order that never comes.
The refill brand can lose money on order one, because order four pays for the ad.
You don't have an order four.
Here's where the borrowed playbook breaks:
• LTV bidding, when your LTV is your AOV
• "Break even now, profit on retention" math
• Remarketing budgets chasing people who already bought the thing
• Replenishment emails for a product nobody replenishes. Nobody restocks a sofa.
What works is less glamorous. The first order has to pay for itself, so contribution margin per first order becomes the target.
This buyer researches hard, so the feed and the landing page do most of the selling. Reviews and referrals are the closest thing you have to retention.
One number decides which playbook you're in: the 12-month repurchase rate. Founders who quote ROAS to two decimals often have never pulled it.
For a buy-once brand, the plan is three lines:
• Pull the 12-month repurchase rate before trusting any LTV in the plan
• Set targets on first-order contribution margin
• Move the "retention" budget into reviews and referrals
“At dinner, someone asked the table, "If a new model drops next month, does your company get better or worse?" HALF the table went quiet! I think that's the best question to ask about any AI startup right now.”
As many people said already - service businesses that use AI, but effectively operate like - are the winners with every new model release.
Meanwhile - building AI wrappers is going to get eaten one way or another.
I spent 48 hours in SF hanging out with billionaires, data labs and AI founders and execs running $1B to $100B companies.
My observations:
1. Sooo MANY stories of data brokers making like $2M a WEEK selling company data to labs. I can't tell if it's the beginning or a bubble, and I kept wondering which niches are left. Digging into it actively.
2. At dinner, someone asked the table, "If a new model drops next month, does your company get better or worse?" HALF the table went quiet! I think that's the best question to ask about any AI startup right now.
3. The bar people talk about now is hitting $1B in revenue in 12 months (I guess that's the new unicorn?). What I didn't hear much about is retention. AI revenue can come in fast and leave fast, and I think we're going to see a lot of stories of AI companies with huge revenue and terrible retention.
4. It's pretty clear we're living through the reinvention of the computer. The model is the CPU, the harness is the operating system, and skills and plugins are the apps. Thinking about it that way makes it easier to see where the whitespace is.
5. We're maybe 12 months from an agent that can watch you work for a week and then do your job without any instructions. The screen recording plus agent memory plus local model combination makes this possible right now.
6. Agent harnesses feel like the new GPT wrappers, in a good way, especially vertical ones. The best teams I talked to treat the model as swappable. One founder walked me through routing different models to different jobs: one for taste and visuals, a cheaper one for the everyday stuff, another for text.
They use prompts they can move across models over fine-tuning, and A/B test the output on what users actually do with it: do they edit it, export it, share it? A vertical harness is basically four things: the connectors for that industry's data, evals written by people who know the work, rules for what the agent can and can't touch, and a clean screen for a human to review. The model is maybe 20% of it.
7. There's a lot of reverse engineering going on/cloning going on more than I've ever seen. People are decompiling software and rebuilding it with agents, and someone showed a suite of like 10 apps that are worth $5B+ each all that he cloned open source. Me and everyone are still thinking through what it means when software gets this easy to copy.
8. My guess is the value moves to data. If the software can be rebuilt quickly, what's worth paying for in a legacy SaaS company is the years of customer data and workflows inside it. Some SaaS companies are secretly data companies.
Gets me thinking about how do you truly value data for this saas companies? Like if we were buying these dying saas companies at 2x ARR before (as example), maybe there is a better metric. Idk, just thinking out loud here.
9. It feels like a good chunk of legacy software won't make it to the agentic era, especially anything built around people clicking through a lot of screens.
10. Every company I talked to wants to pipe its internal data into one place and expose it to agents through MCP. Then they look at the data and realize it's a mess: five versions of the same customer, old Slack channels, PDFs nobody can search. Cleaning that up feels like a big consulting opportunity!
11. A lot of founders are building the basic building blocks for agents: APIs, data layers and tools. Some of the companies I saw barely have a UI because the main user is an agent. I really believe the startups that build primitives to this agentic era will do extremely well. Building blocks is the best way to think about it.
12. Labs can get plenty of training data, but it's harder to get real examples of agents failing inside companies. Whoever has those logs has something valuable.
13. Someone running a big consumer company told me the next fight is over memory. The model that remembers the most about you wins, and the smartest model matters less than people think.
14. Physical AI came up a lot. Astra I think was the first model that got people into AI can actually do CAD, and I think a lot of people are thinking what does vibe manufacturing really look like. The line I keep thinking about came from a robotics founder: the hardest problems in AI are deployment problems now, not research problems. Their robots work on their own, call a human when they get stuck, and every one of those calls becomes training data.
15. Cybersecurity companies are having a moment and are actually cool companies to build now, especially the ones that clean up after a breach. Every agent with access to your systems is a new door into your company, and a lot of those doors were left open.
16. Some startups are worth more dead than alive now. A shutdown company with 5 years of Slack, email and code can get paid for licensing all of it. I wouldn't be surprised if founders start factoring that into when they shut down.
17. People are starting to talk about monetizing the agent web. It feels really early, but when the most popular user of the internet is an agent, what startups should you be building?
18. I think agent insurance is coming. Once an agent makes an expensive mistake, insurers will want audits before they cover anyone.
19. Several people said the hire they want most is someone with taste who can write evals. The models are getting good at generating ideas, so the hard part is judging which ones are good.
20. New trend I observed: startup raises VC, uses venture dollars to become a creator, startup fails, founder falls back on being a full-time creator and incubates other products bootstrapped.
21. Getting SIGNIFICANT distribution is HARD right now. Founders are sponsoring buses, buying billboards like crazy and throwing parties with famous DJs to get noticed. Kinda feels dotcom era in that sense.
Attention is what's scarce! The growth guy going viral sharing his UGC strategy from Wispr Flow is a good example. It's the sauce everyone wants, and I truly believe there are probably only 50 people on the planet who know how to scale these types of businesses efficiently in this era.
Always good to get that dose of SF. I felt sooo lucky to have such an incredible trip during such an incredible time in building businesses. Surreal in so many ways.
Happy to be home and locked in.
Until next time!
Q4 advice: one Performance Max for the whole catalog.
Then keep raising the budget while the total sits at break-even.
That total is an average. A raise buys more of whatever is inside it.
Here's what I'd open before the next step up, and why each one matters.
The search terms insight comes first. If a big share is your own brand name, part of the raise buys orders you were getting anyway.
Then the product report. Often two SKUs carry nearly every conversion, and the rest of the catalog rides on their numbers.
Merchant Center product status is next, because the raise can't reach a disapproved product or one missing an identifier. The "whole catalog" may be smaller than the campaign name suggests.
And returns. A returned jacket still counts as a conversion in Google Ads until somebody tells it otherwise.
Scaling is still fine once you know which part of the average you're buying.
TL;DR before the next budget step:
• Brand share of the search terms
• Conversions per SKU, top two against the rest
• Disapproved or limited products in Merchant Center
• Revenue after returns
Moving your store before Black Friday? Ask one question first: what happens to the item IDs?
Google's Merchant Center help is blunt about it. Change a product's ID and "it will be treated like a new product." It goes back through approval, which Google says can take up to 3 business days, and its past performance "won't be associated with this new product."
So a migration can leave every product page looking identical and still send the catalog into the auction like it has never sold a thing.
It rarely shows up as an error. It shows up a month later in the P&L, and everyone blames the market.
The usual wounds in a migrated feed:
• New IDs, so the history sits on products that no longer exist
• GTINs lost in the field mapping
• Titles "cleaned up" by a new template, so they stop matching the searches they used to win
• Sale prices out of sync for a day, so disapprovals pile up overnight
TL;DR for a migration this quarter:
• Keep the old IDs, or map old to new before launch
• Diff GTINs and titles before and after the switch
• Read disapprovals daily for the first two weeks
• Push the move past Black Friday if you can













