Suraj Dev

This isn't part of the 10-part growth marketing series — it's a live update. Google just shipped something I've wanted for years: a way to see how your Instagram, TikTok, X, and YouTube content actually performs in Google Search. Here's what it does, what it doesn't, and what I'd do with it this week. Two weeks ago, in Part 8 of this series, I wrote about the organic side of growth marketing and left social platforms out of it entirely, because there was no clean way to know if a Reel or a TikTok was actually showing up in Google Search. You could see platform-native views. You could see rankings for your website. You had no way to connect the two. On July 7th, Google closed that gap. Search Console now has a new property type — separate from a website property — that tracks how your social and video accounts perform specifically in Google Search and Discover. It's called a platform property, and if you post on Instagram, TikTok, X, or Y...

Part 10, the final post in this arc. 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 . Part 9: offer and pricing . Nine tactics don't add up to a strategy on their own. This one's about the system that connects them. Remember the founder from Part 2 — the one who couldn't answer "what happens after someone clicks your ad"? I still think about that pause every time I open a new account. Not because it was an unusual answer. Because it's the most common one. I've audited well over a hundred accounts now, and the pattern repeats every time: smart people, real budgets, a genuinely good product — and no system connecting what they're doing to what's actually happening. Just a pile of separate tactics, each one someone read about somewhere, none of them talking to each o...

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...