Suraj Dev

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...

Part 3 of the growth marketing series. Part 1 covered what actually moves the needle . Part 2 was about finding your funnel leak . This one gets surgical on landing pages. Landing pages are where money is made or lost. Not in the ad. Not in the product. On the page someone lands on after they've already shown interest. I've audited over 50 landing pages in the last three years — D2C brands, SaaS tools, service businesses, local agencies. Different industries, different budgets, wildly different traffic sources. But the same seven mistakes keep showing up. Every single time. Some of these you'll read and think "obviously." And then I'll ask you to go check your own page. Because nine times out of ten, the obvious mistakes are the ones nobody's actually fixed. Mistake 01 The headline talks about you, not them Most landing page headlines lead with what the brand does. "India's leading performance ma...

This is part 2 of an ongoing series on growth marketing that actually works. If you haven't read part 1 , start there. A founder reached out to me last year. Decent-sized brand, ₹3 lakh a month in Meta ads, solid creative, good product reviews. But conversions were dying. His first instinct was to blame the ads. "Maybe the targeting is off. Maybe we need better creatives. Maybe we should try Google." I asked him one question: "What happens to someone after they click your ad?" Long pause. That pause told me everything. He had no idea what the experience felt like on the other side. Nobody on his team had mapped it out. They were so focused on getting people to click that they'd completely ignored what happened next. We audited the funnel. The ads were fine. The product page was fine. The problem was everything in between — a slow landing page, a confusing offer, no follow-up sequence, and a checkout flow with four unneces...

6 years. 100+ brands. A lot of wasted budget and a few campaigns that actually changed things. This is the unfiltered version. Let me tell you about a campaign I was genuinely proud of. Spent three weeks on it. Beautiful creative. Tight copy. Segmented audiences. The works. Launched it on a Tuesday because I'd read somewhere that Tuesday was optimal for engagement. The results? Flat. Embarrassingly flat. Meanwhile, a quick retargeting ad I built in 40 minutes — ugly banner, basic copy, ₹8,000 budget — ran the same week and brought in 23 qualified leads. That gap between what looks like good marketing and what actually works — that's been the most expensive lesson of my six years in this industry. And nobody really talks about it honestly. So this is me being honest. Why I'm Writing This I've worked with 100+ brands across industries. Startups burning VC money on brand awareness before they had retention figured o...