Ajay Chavda
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 Chavda (70 articles)
Google caps Smart Bidding Learning status at 7 days
Google's rewritten Smart Bidding help page says Learning status never lasts more than 7 days and budget or target edits never trigger it. Performance typically takes...
Meta Ads reported 260,849 "leads" for an account that had 2,003. The column name says leads
Meta's offsite_content_view_add_meta_leads column reported 260,849 for an account with 2,003 leads, a 130x overstatement. 19 of 23 accounts carry it.
Google Ads video: $1.2M, 2,124 conversions, $567 CPL. Connected TV: $70/click, 0 conv
$1.2M on video over nine years produced leads at $567, 4.4× the account average. Connected TV added $70 clicks on screens with no keyboard. At some point 'brand...
Google Ads A/B tests: a +25% CVR lift needs 66 days at 420 clicks/day (power calc)
At a typical conversion rate and click volume, proving a 25% improvement takes 66 days. Most tests can't detect what they claim to test, and the honest response is to...
Meta Ads counted 17,402 welcome message views as onsite conversions across 7 accounts
Across 23 Australian Meta Ads accounts, 17,402 automated greeting renders were filed as onsite conversions. In one account they outnumbered leads 134 to 1.
$783,518 of Meta Ads: What 23 Accounts Actually Bought
Twenty-seven posts from a cross-account audit of 23 Australian Meta Ads accounts: $783,518 of spend, 1,134 campaigns, every figure pulled from the Marketing API. What...
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...