Agency insights
Thoughts and lessons on client selection, burnout, pricing, and modernising legacy accounts, from someone who's run a Google Ads for years.
Published April 2021. Last updated July 2026.
I've just run a quick calculation and can confidently say that a Facebook like is worth $0.007.
I attended a conference at the beginning of the year where the organiser boasted of having 55 000 likes for the event. He took us through a painful powerpoint presentation on exactly how he got those likes, which times of the day were best, whether pictures with text got more likes and shares than pictures without text.
He analysed the social media campaign he and his minions had spent months working on in every possible way and concluded it a success.
When asked how many tickets he'd sold from this Herculean effort he mumbled 'two'.
2 tickets at $200 each from the social media campaign. So 400 / 55000 = $0.007.
What happens when an engineer applies failure investigation thinking to Google Ads and tries to eliminate the black boxes?
Every tool or system that interacts with that lead creates a copy of some or all of the lead's personal data. But you're accountable for it
Discussions about the future of Google Ads usually start with what’s announced: new features, calling everything Max-this or AI-that. But often this is PR hype. I prefer to look at where Google continues to invest engineering effort over many years. It gives a clue to what the system will depend on in the future.
When I started with Google Ads in 2007, it was cheap. You could get away with a sloppy setup. That's not true today. Ads are expensive. You can't expect to be profitable if you haven't done everything in your power to get the setup right.
After building a lead-handling system that turned $8k in ad spend into $200k, I thought I knew what small businesses needed. I was wrong. This is the story of a good idea, a bad assumption, and what I learned about the real challenges of getting people to change.
One thing still amazes me: people pay for my advice - then ignore it completely. Sometimes they'll dismiss my suggestions without a second thought. Here's how I fix it.
Thoughts and lessons on client selection, burnout, pricing, and modernising legacy accounts, from someone who's run a Google Ads for years.
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