Ajay C
I am a trained Robotics engineer, a professional hacker, a stand up comedian and an entrepreneur. I’ve hacked Salesforce, Slack, Servicenow, Dropbox, Google and have been recognized for it. I’ve run an agency for 15 years and founded it just when the global financial crisis was unleashing on the financial markets. As an engineer, I’ve been trained to solve problems using experimentation. As a hacker, I often write tools that help others solve problems. As an entrepreneur, I have survived two global recessions and have put up steady growth in our business every year.
Written by Ajay C (64 articles)
Google Ads Target CPA needs ~30 conv/month per campaign. SKAGs give it 2–8
Single-keyword ad groups fragment conversions. Smart bidding needs them pooled. You cannot have both, and most accounts are quietly trying to.
Google Ads Performance Max: $114 CPL vs Search $126 over $32M lifetime, on 8% of budget
Across nine years and $32M, Performance Max produced leads at $114, cheaper than Search. The objection to it is opacity, and opacity is a separate question from...
Google Ads phrase match: close variants took 71% of spend at a 45% CPL premium
Close-variant matching cost 45% more per lead than queries that actually contained the keyword. Exact match was 2.4× cheaper at the same CPC. Here is how to measure...
5 of 7 Google Ads experiments stuck in INITIATED; errors only visible in the API
Google Ads experiments can sit in a failed state for weeks with no notification. The only place the error appears is an API call almost nobody makes. What we found,...
Google Ads close variants put 67% of a competitor campaign's conversions on brand terms
A Target CPA campaign named Competitor (Exact) got 67% of its conversions from the advertiser's own brand name. Here is how it happens, what it costs, and how to find...
Google Ads Manual CPC vs Target CPA, 60/40 experiment: $416 vs $152 per lead (p=0.009)
A restructure moved sixteen campaigns off automated bidding in a single afternoon. Spend rose $13,000 and leads fell 43%. Then a controlled experiment settled the...
$32M in Google Ads Spend: Lessons Learned
Sixteen posts from a full audit of one Google Ads account: nine years, $32.3M of spend, 507 campaigns, 251,780 conversions. Every number pulled from the API. What the...
A/B testing landing pages in Google Ads: setup, traps and a checklist
How we set up a landing page A/B test in Google Ads for a solar installer, the three traps that skewed the first readout, and the seven-step checklist we now run...
