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...
Growth Marketing That Actually Works