Suraj Dev

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...