Google Ads Devotee | 10M+ in ad spend | Stop losing profit on P-Max | Founder & PPC expert @ Prominence

Michael De Boeck

Supplier: Your invoice is due in 30 days.
E-com founder: I would like to pay my invoice with ROAS please.

Supplier: Excuse me?

Founder: Look at my Meta dashboard. 6x ROAS. We are "crushing it."

Supplier: That’s funny, but we need you to pay your invoice in actual dollars...

This sounds like a joke, but I see it in account audits every single week.

Founders are obsessed with "Efficiency" (ROAS) while their actual bank account is bleeding out.

The hard truth: You cannot spend your ratio.

ROAS is a platform metric, not a business health metric. If you’re managing your brand strictly by the ROAS column in Ads Manager, you’re likely making one of these three fatal errors:

1️⃣ overspending on existing customers 
A 5.0x ROAS sounds elite, but also screams "existing customers". Customer acquisition is the lifeblood of every e-commerce brand.

2️⃣ Not evaluating Contribution Margin at different efficiency levels
I’ve seen brands refuse to scale because their ROAS would "drop" from a 6.0x to a 4.0x, but would you rather have a 6x ROAS on $10k spend or a 4x ROAS on $100k spend ($200k profit)?

3️⃣ Optimizing for Revenue, not Contribution Margin 
Standard ROAS treats every dollar of revenue the same. But a $100 sale of a high-margin accessory is worth infinitely more to your business than a $100 sale of a low-margin hero product.

What you should be looking at instead:

👉 Contribution Margin (CM): What is left after COGS, Ad Spend, Shipping, and Transaction fees? This is the money that actually pays your staff and your rent.

The Bottom Line: 

If your media buyer is bragging about ROAS but hasn't asked to understand your P&L or shipping costs, they aren't a growth partner. They’re a vendor looking for a pat on the back.

Stop optimizing for the dashboard. Start optimizing for the bank account.

#ecommerce #performancemarketing #roas #profitability #dtc #growthmarketing #facebookads #googleads #shopify

Voted 3x Top 100 Most Influential PPC Expert | 20M+ In Yearly Ad Spend | Founder & Head Of Growth Strategy @ Prominence

✔️ List & pixel exclusions. ✔️ 64 purchases. ❌ 41 new customers.
Meta exclusions are fundamentally broken.

If you are relying on Meta's exclusions to keep your acquisition campaigns free of existing customers, you are being misled.

But even worse, you have no idea whether that new creative you are testing is showing a positive CPA because the creative is good, or because it accidentally hit a pocket of existing customers who converted.

Here's what you can do right now to improve your accuracy in Meta:

1️⃣ Use a NewCustomerPurchase event

This is the cleanest solution. Don't just fire a standard 'Purchase' event for everyone. Configure your tracking to fire a specific NewCustomerPurchase event only when the order count is 0. Optimizing your prospecting ad sets for this specific event forces the algorithm to hunt for new blood, not just easy wins.

2️⃣ Prioritize 7-day click
If your "prospecting" success relies heavily on 1-day view, you're likely just tagging people who were already going to buy. 7-day click is significantly more incremental. 1-day view often captures existing customers who just received an email or SMS and happened to see your ad in their feed. If the performance doesn't hold up on a click-only basis, it’s not acquisition.

3️⃣ Leverage CAPI with customer tags
Browser-side cookies are too fragile for reliable exclusions. By passing an external_id and a customer_status parameter via the Conversions API, you give Meta a much higher match rate against your database. If Meta knows for a fact that User A is a past purchaser, the exclusion actually stands a chance.

Efficiency isn't a lower CPA in the dashboard. It’s making sure your spend is actually driving incremental growth.

#facebookads #meta #shopify #ecommerce #performancemarketing #metaads #googleads

Return Customer Rate (%) is one of the most pointless numbers in e-commerce.

I see it in almost every e-commerce reporting deck;

 Brands brag when it’s high and panic when it’s low.

The problem? As a standalone metric, RCR tells you absolutely nothing about the health of your growth engine.

Here is why RCR is a "trap" metric:

1️⃣ It punishes growth.
If you have a massive month of new customer acquisition (top-of-funnel success), your RCR will naturally drop. Does that mean your retention got worse? No. It means your denominator grew. You’re being "penalized" for scaling.

2️⃣ It hides the "Churn Gap."
A 30% RCR looks great, until you realize those are the same 30% buying every month, while 70% of your new customers never come back for a second order. You have a "leaky bucket" masked by a loyal core.

3️⃣ It ignores Timing.
RCR is a snapshot. It doesn’t account for latency between orders. If your product has a 60-day consumption cycle, looking at a monthly RCR is a waste of time.

What we track at Prominence instead:

Instead of a flat percentage, we look at Cohort-Based Retention & n-Day LTV.

The Second Order Gap: What % of customers acquired in Month X bought again by Month X+1? If this isn't increasing, your creative-to-product alignment is off.

LTV/CAC Ratio by Cohort: We don't just want "returners." We want to know if the customers we bought in January are more profitable by June than the ones we bought in December.

Time-to-Second-Purchase: Are we shrinking the gap between Order 1 and Order 2? This is the only way to actually improve cash flow.

---

Stop looking at a blended RCR. It’s a vanity metric that fluctuates based on how many new customers you acquire.

If you want to measure the strength of your brand, look at your Retention Curves. If the curve flattens out, you have a business. If it goes to zero, you just have a temporary arbitrage play.

#ecommerce #shopify #facebookads #performancemarketing #dtc #growthmarketing #ltv

What is your one Google Ads take that most people will disagree with? I'll go first 👇

- 

👉 Historical search term performance is a bad reason to exclude a search term from a campaign that runs on smart bidding.


Let me know what yours is in the comments.

#googleads #ppc #adwords #ecommerce #shopify #facebookads #tiktokads

How often do you get searched for vs. your competitors? 
Get free access to our Share Of Search tool 👇

In performance marketing, we spend so much time obsessing over our CPA and ROAS that we often forget to look up and see the bigger picture: Market Share.

If your ROAS is stable but your search volume is declining relative to your competitors, your efficiency might be leading to the consumer forgetting about you.

At Prominence, we wanted an easier way to track this. So, Kishalaya Mukhopadhyay built a Share of Search tool that moves beyond generic "industry trends" and gets specific.

How it works:
You input your brand name and your 3–5 closest competitors. The tool then maps out the search interest landscape over the last 12 months.

Why Share of Search (SoS) matters more than you think:
👉 It’s a leading indicator of Market Share: Historically, a sustained increase in SoS predicts a rise in actual market share.
👉 It measures "Mental Availability": It shows how often your brand is the "top of mind" solution when a problem arises.
👉 It identifies "Competitor Conquesting" opportunities: If a competitor’s search volume spikes while their sentiment drops, it’s the perfect time to aggressive-bid on their keywords.

Are you actually winning market share, or just winning your own small pocket of retargeting?

We’re opening up access to the tool for free.

 If you want to see exactly how you stack up against your competitors over the last year, drop a comment with "SEARCH" below, and I’ll reach out.

#googleads #ppc #shareofsearch #facebookads #ecommerce #shopify

E-com brands, how many new creatives do you need to launch next month to hit your goals? 👇 Let's find out;

TL;DR
Comment "Creative" & let's calculate how many creatives you need to hit your goals next month.*

Most brands treat creative volume like a guessing game. 

"We need 40 videos a month" sounds like a solid plan, but it’s rarely based on the actual math of the account.

At Prominence, we’ve moved past the guesswork. 

We developed a predictive model that calculates your required creative output by looking at your backend performance data, not just your gut feeling.

Here are the 5 levers our model uses to solve the creative math:

1️⃣ Ad Spend & ROAS Goal
The baseline. If we don't know how much you are trying to spend next month, we can't calculate how many new creatives you'll need.

2️⃣ Hit Rate (Historical)
What percentage of your launches actually become "winners"? Our model pulls this automatically. If only 1 in 10 ads successfully scales, your production pipeline needs to reflect that 90% "failure" rate.

3️⃣ Winner Average Spend Rate
Not every winner is equal. Some ads can handle $5k/day; others cap out at $500 before the CPA spikes. We calculate how much "load" your typical winners can actually carry.

4️⃣ Winner Average Lifespan
Creative fatigue is the silent killer of scale. If your average winner dies after 14 days, your production needs to be twice as fast as a brand whose winners last 30.

5️⃣ Revenue Forecasting
We map these variables against your growth targets for the next 30, 60, and 90 days to find the exact "Creative Gap" you need to fill.

The Reality Check:
Scaling isn't just about increasing your budget; it’s about out-producing your creative decay. 

If your (Hit Rate) x (Winner Lifespan) doesn't outpace your spend growth, you will hit a performance plateau every single time.

Stop guessing your production schedule. Start engineering your creative pipeline.

👉 Curious what your required creative volume is? Comment "creative" or DM me, and let's run the numbers.

---

#performancemarketing #creativestrategy #metaads #ecommerce #growthmarketing #prominenceagency #facebookads

E-com founder: We produce & launch 25 new ads per week on Meta.
Me:
So, the volume is the same throughout the year?

(TL;DR - comment "creative" and let's discover how many creatives you need to produce to hit your goals next month.)

E-com founder: Yes, I wanted to get my team in a consistent rhythm.

Me: I understand that, but... The production rhythm doesn't make sense to me.

E-com founder: What do you mean?

Me: Well, your brand experiences seasonality, right? So I guess your ad spend is about 40% less in the summer months compared to the holidays?

E-com founder: Yes... We've spent €80k in July last year and €155k in December.

Me: So, why would your ad account need the same amount of creatives for a €155k month compared to a €80k month?

E-com founder: Okay, I see what you mean... But how do we plan this properly?

Me: You can use our Creative Production Model. Based on your historical data, it will analyze & predict your needed creative velocity.

E-com founder: Uhm, in plain English, please?

Me: The model will look at the following things:

👉 What are your ad spend & ROAS goals?
👉 How many tests do you need to find a winner?
👉 How much do winners spend on average?
👉 How long do your winners live inside the account?

and based on that data, it will compute how many creatives you need to produce to hit your goals.

---

Do you also want to find out how many creatives you need to produce to hit your goals next month?

Comment "creative" or send me a DM, and let's run the creative production model for your business.

#facebookads #googleads #tiktokads #metaads #shopify #ecommerce #ppc #performancemarketing

Senior Paid Search Manager, Marcus Thomas LLC

Stop renting your Google Ads success. Build an asset you own.

I am The In-House PPC Consultant. My mission is to eliminate agency dependency and transfer full control of your paid search success back to your team within 90 days.

After 17+ years deep inside the agency world, I saw the truth: the traditional retainer model incentivizes dependency and activity, not lasting client profit or internal competence. It is fundamentally broken.

My Role: Temporary Strategic Architect. I don't sell a monthly retainer or ongoing management. I act as a temporary strategic architect for 90 days, building a fully-owned, high-performing Google Ads system tailored to your specific business logic.

The process (The 90-Day In-House Method):

The Build (Weeks 1-4): Strip down the account, implement my High-Intent Systems, and rebuild campaign structure to match your sales territories and/or business logic (not the generic agency playbook).

The Proof (Weeks 5-8): Turn the machine on, validate that the system captures High-Intent buyers, and gather data to prove the system is stable and profitable.

The Transfer (Weeks 9-12): Train your internal team on the "15-Minute Weekly Check" protocol, hand over SOPs, custom dashboards, and fire myself—leaving you with a self-sufficient, durable in-house advantage.

The Outcome: You transition your current agency budget into an investment that builds lasting internal competence, achieving independence and measurable profit.

Sarah Stemen, MBA

We all know that search terms are gold…

So I’m gonna leave this one right here. 🤦‍♀️

💰 Google Ads ‘In-Housing’ Consultant (without the retainer)

It is only March 2026 and here I am once again seeing red over an agency that is holding an account hostage. But then, as the client is about to leave, they took another HIGHLY predatory action.

I cannot explain how mad this makes me on behalf of all advertisers, I do not believe that you have to cheat somebody out of their money to win in the world. I don’t.

This is wrong on so many different levels. 

This type of behavior is why clients have trust issues with agencies. This is why clients have PTSD.

Your client’s data belongs to the client…period. 

If your business model relies on exploiting a client’s lack of technical knowledge, you've already lost.

I added pictures of the kind PPC influencers, agency owners, and thought leaders in the world who won’t do this ever. We exist.

No alternative text description for this image

I’ve grown more as a business owner than I ever did as an employee. Running a business forces you to confront your beliefs, your habits, and the way you treat yourself. It holds up a mirror you can’t really look away from.

Now that it’s 2026, I can look at myself and genuinely feel proud of where I am. Every phase taught me something I couldn’t have learned any other way.

Some core memories and turning points:

1. The first summer of freedom. I’ll never forget being in Tennessee with my daughter for 10 days, swimming, exploring, giving her my full and focused attention. After agency life, that season of balance felt like oxygen. I still treasure it.

2. The performative era. Part of this was the culture of LinkedIn at the time, but I loved posting memes, being playful, and somehow getting clients from it. It was fun, even if it wasn’t sustainable.  I scheduled a bunch of posts like that for this month because I miss the social aspect but IDK...it isn't my priority at the moment.

3. The “WTF, this isn’t working” phase. My revenue dipped, and I questioned everything. Looking back, that season forced me to get obsessed with my client, my values, and why I was doing this in the first place. It was painful, but it sharpened me.  I would call my mom every day and tell her I wanted to quit.  Not fun.

4. The overworking, self‑critical boss inside me. This one still shows up so much for me. It's a problem.  I can sit at my desk for hours, obsess over accounts, skip lunch, skip workouts. Confronting my own tendencies has been one of the hardest and most important parts of growing up as a business owner.

5. The expansion of my circle. This year, I started talking to PPC managers outside my usual inner circle. Brilliant people who aren’t in the “influencer” space. It reminded me that quiet businesses can thrive. You don’t have to be plugged into social media 24/7 to grow, most of the successful owners I know aren't building followers and industry creds they are building around their customers.

6. The plagiarism moment. Last year, someone stole a post I poured myself into...it wasn't anything that was rocket science but I wrote the post with so much intent. It was irritating. It really made my trust go down and made me rethink what I share and where I share it. I’m okay now, but it still annoys me mostly because it was such a odd moment.

Owning a business has stretched me, humbled me, and made me more myself. I wouldn’t trade any of these phases, even the messy ones.

Hope you enjoyed my Sunday reflection...

Also I am at an all day dress rehearsal for my daughters comp season - wish me luck if you got this far...

AI Max can now be told which words, tones, and concepts to avoid,  meaning advertisers finally have a way to stop AI from sounding off‑brand, misleading, or downright wrong.  This is good.

I broke down what this means for brand safety, performance, and whether AI Max is finally safe enough to test:

🔗

Open article: Google Expands Text Guidelines in AI Max: What This Means for Predictive Advertising in 2026 — Sarah Stemen | Paid Ads Consultant by thesarahstemen.com

Google Expands Text Guidelines in AI Max: What This Means for Predictive Advertising in 2026 — Sarah Stemen | Paid Ads Consultant

My point of view is that no bid strategy is inherently better or worse, each one is simply a tool with a specific purpose, set of tradeoffs, and predictable behavioral patterns. 

Effective paid search isn’t about chasing the “best” bid strategy; it’s about understanding why a strategy behaves the way it does, what signals it needs, and what you gain or lose when you choose it. 

I teach clients how these strategies actually work so they can choose intentionally, interpret performance correctly, and avoid the panic-driven switching that harms long‑term results.

In some markets, especially niche B2B or specialized local services, daily eligible search volume might only support a few hundred impressions per day even with a large budget and excellent Ad Rank. 

You simply can’t manufacture searches that don’t exist.

CTR (Click-Through Rate) is a favorite "vanity drug." among many marketers.

It feels good to see the numbers go up, but it’s often a mask used to hide a failing strategy.

As a PPC expert, I don’t care how many people knocked on the door; I care how many were actually invited guests and how many just got lost looking for the bathroom.

As someone who has spent this many years doing paid search one thing that feels good but always surprises me is when lead comes and tells me “they are a big fan”…

My work has never been about being liked.

It’s been about being useful, being protective, being diagnostic or being the one who says the thing no one else is willing to say. 

So when someone says they’re a fan, it’s almost disorienting. 

It’s like:

“Wait… you’ve been watching?
You’ve been learning from me?
You’ve been paying attention to the way I think?”

This isn't a post that has a point so if you want one then stop reading...

I am a sucker for ad copy and one liners. Punchy things...

Here are a few lines, I like that I would love to use in my own business but haven't found a reason to use...

I sell the cure, not the hospital bed.

But your phone isn't ringing. (just as a headline...I might use this actually LOL)

You aren't crazy. The reports do look fake.

Your Google Ads account is a race car. You’re treating it like a slow cooker.

Need a framework to think about AI Ads?  I break it down in my latest article on Search Engine Land

Special thanks to Julie Friedman Bacchini and Ameet Khabra for their industry quotes and some others on Threads :)

Open article: Are your PPC ads still authentic in the age of AI creative? by searchengineland.com

Are your PPC ads still authentic in the age of AI creative?

It starts when you track "calls" that are actually wrong numbers. Or "leads" that are just bots filling out forms.

The AI sees a conversion. It gets excited. It goes out and finds ten more people just like that bot.

You aren't growing. You're just teaching a machine how to waste your money faster. I call this "Black Box Syndrome."

Clean data is revenue. Everything else is just noise.

When your views and methodologies freeze in a past era, your experience stops being an advantage and starts becoming a liability. In 2026, platforms evolve faster than practitioners who cling to what used to work.

If your understanding of platform behavior isn’t current, the number of years you’ve been doing this becomes irrelevant.
Real expertise requires the humility to say, “That isn’t how this works anymore,” and the clarity to admit, “Knowing what I know now, I would never approach that problem the same way.”

Experience only matters when it evolves. The platforms don’t reward tenure — they reward accuracy. They don’t care how long you’ve been here. They care whether you understand how they behave today.

PPC is just math your emotions are hiding.

A lot of PPC really is just math, and little napkin‑math examples help my clients actually get what’s happening. 

I’ve also learned that using examples outside their own business makes the numbers click faster (no pun intended) once you take the emotional attachment out of it, the math is just the math.

Please join the PSA webinar this one is a do not miss! Greg Finn

View company: Paid Search Association (PSA)

PSA is teaming up with Greg Finn to blow up the way you’ve been taught to think about PMax.

No hacks. No hopium. No “just trust the machine.”

He will be breaking down the real incentives, the real levers, and the real patterns that actually move performance.

If PMax has ever felt like chaos, this session will give you a mental model that finally makes the whole thing click.

🎙️ New to streaming or looking to level up? Check out StreamYard and get $10 discount! 😍 https://lnkd.in/eiKgnXGb

PMaxxing: A Different Way to Think About PMax (& Shopping)

Google Ads is deceptively easy to start and mathematically difficult to win.

💡Impressions are not guaranteed just because you are running campaign. 

You need to be eligible for the auction, which requires proper targeting setup, policy compliance, and a bid that clears the minimum threshold. 

You also need sufficient daily budget remaining when that auction happens. If you’ve exhausted your entire budget by noon, you won’t participate in any afternoon auctions.

Did you see a new episode of Ads Decoded just dropped now? Now that it is officially live...

This isn’t just another “here’s what’s new in the UI” update.  We got a behind the scenes conversation here.

AI Mode, Direct Offers, and the new guided ad creation flow aren’t just features and shiny objects.

👉 My analysis on my blog:

https://lnkd.in/ePT5tX27

If you want to watch the episode yourself, it’s now public:

▶️ https://lnkd.in/es_G32x2

Brands who understand why Google is steering advertisers toward these flows will protect their budgets and create better ad campaigns within their budget and goals.

Open video: Search ads: How Google is reimagining experiences that drive value on youtu.be

Search ads: How Google is reimagining experiences that drive value

It's launch day!

The Global State of PPC report 2026 is live. 1,300+ respondents. 60+ charts. 14,000 words. 
And for the first time: a full chapter on AI in PPC, with 10 questions on how practitioners actually use (and don't use) AI in their daily work.

Thank you to every respondent who took the time, and to the PPCsurvey.com partners who made this possible: DataFeedWatch by Cart.com, God Tier Ads, Hero Conf, Optmyzr, Producthero, Smarter Ecommerce (smec), SMX Advanced Europe, Swydo and TrueClicks

No email gate, no form. Just a 1-click PDF download at www.ppcsurvey.com

Stay tuned for more content coming soon:

🎤️ A podcast recording with Frederick Vallaeys, Mike Ryan and myself discussing the results (just recorded at SMX - Search Marketing Expo in Munich)
📊 Download high-res charts and a PPT with the report results next week
🏆 The Top 50 Most Influential PPC Experts of 2026 will be published next week

Follow me if you don't want to miss what comes next!

taplio

The Battle

Michael De Boeck

Sarah Stemen, MBA

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance ScoreMichael De Boeck's LinkedIn Performance

Performance ScoreSarah Stemen, MBA's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

taplio

The Battle

Michael De Boeck

Sarah Stemen, MBA

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Michael De Boeck's LinkedIn Performance

Performance ScoreSarah Stemen, MBA's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

Performance ScoreMichael De Boeck's LinkedIn Performance