From the field
Notes on running B2B Google Ads.
What ~$650K/month in industrial spend has actually taught me. No frameworks, no rehashed best-practice posts, no AI-generated SEO bait. Just what works and what doesn't, written for other practitioners.
- 3 min read
Bidding on 10-digit part numbers: the industrial PPC goldmine
Google Keyword Planner says a specific part number gets zero searches per month.
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Why "Performance Marketer" is becoming a useless job title
Changing a bid by 15% on a Tuesday is not a career.
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Building a search term n-gram analyzer in Python
The problem with analyzing search term reports manually: you're looking at individual queries. You can't see the patterns.
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Adobe Analytics vs GA4 for B2B attribution: an honest take
Before I say anything critical of GA4, I'll acknowledge the obvious: GA4 is free. Adobe Analytics costs $30,000-200,000 per year depending on traffic volume and features.
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Optmyzr review after 3 years and $7M in managed spend
I've put more money through Optmyzr than most users will ever manage. My perspective is different from the standard review: I tested it at real enterprise scale on accounts where the stakes were high enough to actually see the failure modes.
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Structuring a B2B account for offline conversion imports
Turning on OCT in a poorly structured account is like giving better fuel to a car with a broken engine. The data quality improves. The underlying structural problems don't go away.
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Scaling MECCO laser marking from zero to 100 leads/month
The brief was clear: get MECCO to 100 qualified leads per month without blowing the CPL limits.
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The script stack that runs my $650K/month portfolio
I spend about $21,000 a day in Google Ads. Mistakes at that scale are expensive.
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Budget pacing in massive MCCs without using auto-apply
Google auto-applied a recommendation in one of our accounts without my approval. The recommendation was to raise daily budgets by 25% across several campaigns "based on performance trends."
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Auditing a $650K/month account: cutting 30% of waste
The question that kicked off this audit: "If we had to cut $200K from the annual budget without losing pipeline, where would you cut it?"
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The multi-touch attribution delusion
I have a file of vendor pitches I've kept over the years. Attribution SaaS companies promising "complete customer journey mapping" and "100% touchpoint visibility."
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Offline conversion tracking defaults are broken
Your offline conversion imports are failing silently and you probably don't know it.
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The B2B match type framework I use across $650K/month
If you mix exact, phrase, and broad match in the same ad group, you've surrendered control of your account.
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Negative keyword strategy for industrial B2B (with library)
Most B2B accounts have around 100 negative keywords. The accounts I take over from agencies usually have a standard "B2B negative list" they found online: "free," "job," "resume," "salary," maybe a few others.
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Quality Score is a vanity metric that actively harms B2B accounts
My most profitable keyword cluster in the MECCO account has a Quality Score of 4.
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The B2B marketing funnel is a fallacy
Every campaign structure I've been handed by a previous agency follows the same template:
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Brand terms are a defensive scam we all play along with
When I show clients their blended ROAS, they're usually proud of it.
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Salesforce's native Google Ads integration is fundamentally broken
One month we lost 40% of our conversion signals. No alert. No warning. The native Salesforce-to-Google Ads sync just quietly stopped working.
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Why every senior PPC manager needs to learn SQL
There was a day I needed to answer a simple question: which keywords are driving closed deals?
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B2B remarketing is mostly a tax on your organic traffic
I cut display remarketing spend by 80% on three accounts over the past two years. Pipeline didn't move.
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Naming conventions that actually scale in BigQuery
I inherited an account once where campaigns were named things like:
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Why GA4 is useless for B2B pipeline tracking
When Google forced the migration from Universal Analytics to GA4, I spent about three weeks trying to make it work for our attribution setup.
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Stop optimizing for MQLs. The sales team hates you.
I refuse to report MQLs in quarterly reviews.
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Why your CPL is lying to you and what to track instead
A $50 lead sounds better than a $500 lead. That's the trap.
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What SEMrush gets wrong about B2B keyword data
An agency pitched a client on a new Google Ads strategy. They brought a full deck with projected CPCs, search volumes, and estimated traffic for the target keywords.
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Device bid adjustments for desktop-heavy B2B
Pull your device performance report. Segment by device. Look at the closed-won column.
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We turned off brand search for 30 days. Here's the data.
The debate in our portfolio: are we paying $15K a month for brand clicks that would have come to us anyway?
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First-click vs last-click is a false binary
I've sat through too many meetings where marketing teams argue about attribution models like they're choosing between two correct answers.
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Why pausing low-volume keywords is burning your pipeline
An agency almost killed a deal by pausing a keyword.
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Performance Max in B2B is professional malpractice
Last year a rep pitched me on Performance Max for the MECCO account. Said it would simplify campaign management and improve reach across Google's full network.
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The search term report that saved $50K in 30 days
I opened the search term report expecting routine cleanup. What I found was a $50K leak.
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Why UTMs are still better than GCLID for pipeline health
I once looked at a closed-won report for a $100K deal and saw "utm_term: (not set)" on the winning touch.
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Ad copy testing doesn't matter as much as offer economics
I ran an A/B test for three months. Headline A: "Industrial Safety Signs — Fast Shipping." Headline B: "Industrial Safety Signs — Expert Compliance Support."
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Stop optimizing for CTR in industrial B2B
My most profitable ad groups have a CTR under 3%.
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Search Partners are a scam you're opted into by default
The most expensive checkbox in Google Ads is on by default.
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Breaking down $3.78M in attributed pipeline revenue
We built the pipeline I described in the last post. Adobe → BigQuery → Salesforce → Google Ads. Then we ran it for a full 90 days.
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Cross-brand cannibalization: a $650K/month MCC case study
I discovered that my own campaigns were bidding against each other and I was losing money to myself.
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How I built a Salesforce → BigQuery → Google Ads attribution pipeline that actually works
Native Salesforce to Google Ads connections don't work for B2B.
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The 70% overstatement hiding in your Google Ads new-customer reports
Here's a number that blew my mind when I finally dug into it.
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Langton Tools: Scratching my own 12-year itch
After 12 years of running B2B Google Ads at scale, I reached a point where every software demo ended the same way.
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The 200-line Chrome extension that replaced my spreadsheet
I used to export search term reports to CSV every Friday.
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How I'm using Claude Code to ship 21 paid media tools in 30 days
I've never been a full-stack engineer.
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Why I built my own budget pacer instead of using Optmyzr
I was paying $2K a month for Optmyzr.
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Smart Bidding is making your reporting worse, not better
Here's what I see happen in accounts that rely on Smart Bidding.
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Why your tCPA is lying to you
Target CPA bidding is broken for B2B. Specifically, it's broken for any account where the time between a click and a close is longer than 90 days.
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Most B2B agencies are running your account on autopilot. Here's how to tell.
I've audited dozens of agency-managed B2B accounts. I can usually spot the problem in about 30 minutes of looking at the change history.
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Why I still build SKAGs in 2026 and you should too
Everyone told me Single Keyword Ad Groups were dead.
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The ghost effect: why 40% of your conversions don't show up for 90 days
Here's something that happens in every B2B account I've ever audited, and almost nobody talks about it.
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Why I'm done with broad match in B2B
Google's account reps pushed broad match hard. They still do. They'll tell you the algorithm is smart enough now to find conversions you'd never think of, that exact match is leaving money on the table, that you have to trust the machine.
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What 443 leads at $297 CPL taught me about industrial B2B
$297 a lead.
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