Paid Media & Measurement

This page used to be called “digital marketing,” which is a phrase that can mean anything and therefore means nothing. What I actually practice is narrower and more useful: Google Ads and Meta Ads, and the tracking and reporting layer that makes them accountable.

The order of that sentence is deliberate. Running ads is the visible half of the skill. The half that decides whether the money was worth spending is measurement — and it’s the half most setups get wrong.

Where this comes from

I’ve run paid campaigns from both chairs. As the hired marketer, building and managing campaigns inside someone else’s budget — including in my current full-time in-house role, where paid media and its reporting are part of the weekly work. As the owner, spending my own money on my own stores, which is the fastest education in ad accountability that exists. When the budget is yours, “the campaign got good engagement” stops being an acceptable sentence. Either the spend returned margin or it didn’t.

That owner’s lens is the through-line. I treat every ad account the way I treat my own: ruthless about what counts as a conversion, suspicious of platform-reported success, and unwilling to let attribution flattery stand in for bank-account truth.

How I think about it

• Measurement before spend. If conversion tracking isn’t trustworthy, pausing the campaign is cheaper than running it blind. Tracking is infrastructure, not an afterthought — pixels, conversion events, and analytics wired and verified before the first dollar moves.
• Platforms grade their own homework. Google and Meta both report success in the most generous available light. Reporting worth having reconciles platform numbers against what the business actually banked, and says plainly what can and can’t be known.
• Reports are for decisions. A report that doesn’t change what you do next month is decoration. Mine end with the only questions that matter: what’s working, what isn’t, and what we change.
• Paid and organic are one system. Ads reveal in days what SEO reveals in months — which offers convert, which language lands. I run them as complementary instruments, not competing budgets.

The proof

The measurement discipline on display here is the same one documented across my knowledge base — problem deduction applied to ad accounts: name what the spend actually produced before debating why. This is one of the five skills I employ full-time in my current in-house role, alongside the SEO, platform, and product work it feeds.