Insights
Notes from the operator's side.
Essays on how search, maps, AI answers, measurement, email, and paid media actually work when the incentives are pointed at the client. Opinionated, sourced, and free of gated PDFs. Every industry number is a published figure, never a disguised sales claim.
14 essays
Pricing
9 min read
What an agency actually costs
Retainer, project, percentage of spend and performance, what each model rewards, and the arithmetic showing the three places our own bundles cost more.
Read the essayReporting
8 min read
Is your report telling you anything?
Activity versus outcome, the blank source field, platform conversions against CRM reality, view-through and modelled numbers, and nine questions to send.
Read the essayStrategy
8 min read
In-house or agency
The loaded cost of a hire, what one person can genuinely cover across ten disciplines, and the three conditions under which you should hire instead of us.
Read the essayMeasurement
8 min read
Why your leads have no source
Click ids, UTMs, redirects, form handlers, consent and call tracking. The nine links in the chain, and ten minutes of checks any owner can run alone.
Read the essayAI search
7 min read
How to get cited by ChatGPT
How answer engines retrieve, extract, and corroborate. Crawler access, quotable passages, entity consistency, schema, llms.txt, and how to measure any of it.
Read the essayLocal and maps
7 min read
How the map pack actually ranks
Relevance, distance, and prominence, plus what genuinely moves the three local slots, what is theatre, and why your rank is a heat map rather than a number.
Read the essayMeasurement
8 min read
Build the measurement floor first
GA4 key events, Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, server side tagging, and call tracking, wired in the order that keeps every other channel honest.
Read the essayEmail and SMS
8 min read
Email deliverability, accurately
SPF, DKIM, DMARC and alignment explained properly, plus list hygiene, engagement signals, and the Google and Yahoo bulk sender requirements.
Read the essayStrategy
8 min read
Why one channel caps your growth
The three ceilings inside every channel, the specific mechanisms by which search, maps, social, email, and CRO compound, and the order to build them in.
Read the essayMeasurement
8 min read
The broken tracking epidemic
Consent blocking, ad blockers, silent form handlers, duplicate containers, redirects that strip parameters. Eight failure modes and a three-hour self-test.
Read the essayGoogle LSA
8 min read
The Local Services Ads playbook
Eligibility and screening, what the Guaranteed and Screened badges promise, why the ranking is operational rather than an auction, budgeting, and disputes.
Read the essayCreative
8 min read
Twenty ads per batch, or bust
Why one ad at a time proves nothing, what volume a winner really needs, the multiple-comparison trap, and rules cheap to kill with and expensive to crown with.
Read the essayTransparency
8 min read
Why we publish our pricing
What opacity costs the buyer and the seller, how it changes who books a call, and the arithmetic showing where our own tiers cost more than buying separately.
Read the essayContracts
8 min read
Agency contract red flags
Auto-renew windows, account and pixel ownership, exit fees, IP assignment, exclusivity, minimum spend and termination rights, with the fair version of each.
Read the essayLooking for what we actually run rather than what we think about it? Start with the ten services or the published pricing.
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