Suraj Dev

Part 9 of the growth marketing series. Part 1: what actually moves the needle . Part 2: finding your funnel leak . Part 3: landing pages . Part 4: paid media waste . Part 5: AI in paid media . Part 6: retention flows . Part 7: attribution . Part 8: SEO . Eight posts in, and I haven't touched the one lever that changes every number in all of them — the offer itself. A founder once asked me to fix his ad creative because conversion rate had been sliding for four months. Fresh angles, new hooks, better hooks again. Nothing moved it. I asked to see his discount history instead of his ad account. Every single day, without exception, for over a year: 20% off. Sometimes 25% during a "flash sale" that ran the entire month. His customers had learned something his creative team never accounted for. 20% off wasn't a deal anymore. It was the price. Anyone paying attention — which is most of your repeat browsers — knew to wait, or to feel slightly cheated ...

Part 8 of the growth marketing series. Part 1: what actually moves the needle . Part 2: finding your funnel leak . Part 3: landing pages . Part 4: paid media budget waste . Part 5: where AI actually helps in paid media . Part 6: retention flows . Part 7: attribution . This series has been entirely paid channels so far. Time to fix that. Two weeks ago I opened Search Console for this exact blog and found a post sitting there flagged "not indexed — redirect error." It had been live for weeks. I'd written it, published it, moved on, and never once checked whether Google could actually see it. Turned out to be a one-time DNS propagation hiccup right after I published, nothing structural. Fixed it in two minutes with the Request Indexing button once I confirmed the live URL was clean. But the part that actually stuck with me wasn't the fix — it was how easily a technically perfect piece of writing can sit completely invisible to search because of somet...

Part 7 of the growth marketing series. Part 1: what actually moves the needle . Part 2: finding your funnel leak . Part 3: landing pages . Part 4: paid media budget waste . Part 5: where AI actually helps in paid media . Part 6: retention and lifecycle flows . This one's about the number everyone trusts and shouldn't — last-click attribution. Last year I ran a geo holdout test for a brand that swore Meta prospecting was their best channel. Their dashboard said so. Last-click had Meta responsible for 41% of revenue. We split the country into two matched groups by past sales volume. Paused all Meta prospecting in one group for three weeks. Left everything else running exactly as normal in both groups. Revenue in the paused regions dropped 4%. Not 41%. Four. 4% Actual revenue drop when Meta prospecting was paused, versus the 41% last-click credited it with Most of the sales Meta was "generating" were people who'd already decided to...

Part 6 of the growth marketing series. Part 1: what actually moves the needle . Part 2: finding your funnel leak . Part 3: landing pages . Part 4: paid media budget waste . Part 5: where AI actually helps in paid media . This one's about the customers you've already paid for — and why most brands lose them right after the sale. A skincare brand came to me spending well on acquisition — CAC was healthy, first-purchase conversion rate was solid, the ads were working exactly as intended. Then I asked for their repeat purchase rate. 90 days after first order: 11%. Eleven percent. Which meant 89 out of every 100 people they'd paid to acquire bought once and vanished, from a product category — skincare — where repurchase should be the entire business model. This wasn't a traffic problem or a paid media problem. Nobody had ever built a single lifecycle email beyond an order confirmation. We built four flows over three weeks: a proper welcome series...

Part 5 of the growth marketing series. Part 1: what actually moves the needle . Part 2: finding your funnel leak . Part 3: landing pages . Part 4: where your ad budget goes to waste . This one's about AI — where it's actually earning its place in the account, and where it's quietly costing you money while the dashboard tells you it's working. A client called me in a panic three months ago. Their Performance Max campaign was reporting a 6.8x ROAS. Best number they'd ever seen. They wanted to double the budget immediately. I asked one question before we touched anything: "What was your branded search ROAS doing before PMax launched?" Nobody had checked. We pulled it. Branded search conversions had dropped 40% in the same window PMax "grew." PMax wasn't creating new customers — it was intercepting people who were already about to buy through branded search and taking credit for the sale. Same customers, same revenue, rea...

Part 4 of the growth marketing series. Part 1 was what actually moves the needle . Part 2 covered finding your funnel leak . Part 3 got surgical on landing pages . This one is about where your ad budget is actually going. A client came to me spending ₹9 lakh a month across Meta and Google. Good product, decent margins, and a marketing team of three people who genuinely worked hard. I pulled the account. Forty-one active ad sets. Fourteen of them had spent money in the last 30 days without a single conversion. Nobody had touched the campaign structure in five months because nobody wanted to be the one to "break something that's working." It wasn't working. It was just running. We killed 26 ad sets in one afternoon, rebuilt the account into four campaigns instead of eleven, and redirected the budget those dead ad sets were quietly eating. Same total spend. CAC dropped 34% in five weeks. Nothing about the creative changed. Nothing about t...