INSIGHTS FROM EXPERTS
Brenden Delarua shares how a CFO challenged his “record-breaking” ad results when the company was actually losing money. He realized platform metrics like ROAS don’t reflect actual business performance and began focusing on incrementality to measure real impact. The experience shifted his mindset from trusting dashboards to understanding what truly drives revenue.
Anthony Blatner explains how linking LinkedIn Ads with Claude unlocks deeper insights and faster optimizations. It allows actions like bulk edits, identifying ad fatigue, improving targeting, and cutting costs more efficiently. The integration helps go beyond platform limits and makes campaign management much more powerful.
Chris Avery pushes back on the trend of stopping brand PPC campaigns to save money. He explains that it gives competitors an easy opportunity to capture high-intent traffic and reduces control over conversions. Keeping brand ads active protects visibility, revenue, and overall performance.
Charlie de Thibault explains how over-focusing on in-market buyers concentrates spend on a tiny audience, driving up costs without real growth. Attribution models make performance look strong while ignoring whether conversions would have happened anyway. The result is rising CAC and inefficient budgets trapped in a competitive bidding loop.
Jillian Als pushes back on the idea that social media, apps, or AI will replace websites. She highlights that websites remain the core place for trust, validation, and conversion, fully controlled by the brand. They also provide critical signals about the buyer journey that no other channel can fully replace.
Anna Ursin breaks down how first marketing hires in small B2B SaaS companies are often given impossible roles. From being too specialized too early to lacking strategy and absorbing unrelated tasks, the structure sets them up for failure. Clear priorities and focus are needed before hiring to avoid wasted time and poor results.
Liam Moroney argues that marketers overvalue creative because it feels more controllable, while underestimating the importance of distribution and reach. Strong creative means little if not seen by enough people, and both elements need to work together. Effective advertising comes from balancing quality with scale, not choosing one over the other.
Katerina Fotiadi shares data showing that selling SEO and social as separate retainers leads to higher profitability, while bundling or upselling often hurts margins. Bundled offers make it harder to estimate work, price correctly, and control scope. The structure of how services are sold can have a bigger impact on profit than simply raising prices.
Ivars Krutainis 
breaks down how to plan LinkedIn ad budgets using key variables like CPM, audience size, penetration, and frequency. By combining these, marketers can estimate realistic monthly spend needed for campaigns to perform. The approach turns budget planning from guesswork into a more structured and predictable process.
Andrew Faris explains that a recent Meta reporting change redefined what counts as a click-attributed conversion, making performance appear worse. Conversions from non-link clicks are now categorized differently, lowering reported results. The shift means advertisers should expect underreported performance and adjust how they measure and optimize campaigns.
WHAT'S NEW IN THE INDUSTRY
This article explains how most B2B brands blend in, making them forgettable and even mistaken for competitors. Using the Von Restorff effect, it shows that distinctiveness drives memory, while sameness wastes ad spend and benefits bigger players. Brands need to invest in unique assets like sound, characters, and visuals to stand out and stay top of mind.
This piece breaks down how tracking too many micro-conversions confuses ad algorithms and leads to misleading performance metrics. Platforms optimize for the easiest signals, not the most valuable ones, which can inflate ROAS while real revenue suffers. The key is to keep conversion signals focused, prioritize real outcomes, and use micro-conversions carefully and temporarily.
Google Ads now automatically applies winning experiment results, aiming to speed up campaign optimization. While this saves time, it also removes a layer of manual review and only protects the metrics you selected. For more complex or high-impact tests, it’s safer to review results fully before letting changes go live.
Google introduced a new timeline view in Performance Max that shows how channels like Search, YouTube, and Display contribute to results over time. It helps advertisers quickly spot which channels are driving performance and where budget may be underperforming. While not full transparency, it’s a useful step toward better understanding and optimizing PMax campaigns.
Salesforce is expanding Slack’s role by turning Slackbot into an AI assistant that connects conversations, data, and actions across tools. New features include automatic meeting summaries, action tracking, and reusable AI workflows that help teams move faster without switching platforms. The goal is to reduce friction and make AI actually useful in day-to-day work, not just another tool.
New data shows that ChatGPT ads perform best when they are short, precise, and directly relevant to user intent. Instead of storytelling, winning ads focus on clear value, specific numbers, and actionable messaging that fits naturally into conversations. The shift reflects a broader move toward utility-driven advertising, where helping the user matters more than being clever.
Reddit is evolving into a powerful platform for marketers, driven by its highly engaged communities, new ad formats, and improved tools like Reddit Pro and AI-powered optimization. Success on the platform depends on authentic engagement, understanding subreddit culture, and contributing value rather than pushing traditional ads. With growing ad revenue and new features for targeting, shopping, and analytics, Reddit is becoming a more structured and scalable channel for brands.
Strong LinkedIn recruitment campaigns focus on intent, not reach, using targeting, messaging, and funnel structure to attract the right candidates. Pre-qualifying users through ad copy and segmenting campaigns by intent helps reduce wasted spend and improve application quality. The result is a more efficient hiring process, often lowering cost-per-hire significantly.
New data from Adthena shows AI-driven ad environments like Google AI Overviews and ChatGPT are becoming more competitive and expensive. Performance is shaped by short, high-intent queries, specific CTAs like “Compare,” and rising auction pressure across key industries. As AI sits between users and advertisers, understanding these patterns is becoming critical for budget decisions and ad strategy.
That’s the scoop for this week! If you found this valuable and any useful insights caught your eye, feel free to share them with your network.
Until next week!
