Guides & insights

Find the original sources, practical reading and people behind the collective. These links open the full public pages.

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• Paid media guides and insights

  Research, practitioner perspectives and practical playbooks for better advertising decisions, with credit to the original authors.

• The Responsive Search Ads Handbook

  Examines responsive ad construction, pinning and message testing with account-data comparisons.

• Best practices for your Sponsored Products ads

  Covers launch preparation, product-detail readiness, bids, reporting and the first month of optimisation.

• A simple guide to effective targeting with Sponsored Products

  Covers automatic, keyword, product and negative targeting for Sponsored Products.

• Track Key Events with Google Analytics 4 (GA4 Conversions)

  Walks through key-event configuration, validation, counting and reporting in GA4.

• A Guide to UTM Parameters in Google Analytics 4

  Explains UTM naming, URL construction, GA4 reporting dimensions and common campaign-tagging mistakes.

• Consumer Heterogeneity and Paid Search Effectiveness: A Large Scale Field Experiment

  Uses eBay search experiments to examine substitution and differences between customer groups.

• Landing page optimization process for high conversion rates

  Reviews the connection between paid traffic, visitor intent and landing-page messaging.

• PXL: A Better Way to Prioritize Your A/B Tests

  Introduces a structured way to rank test hypotheses using observed problems and implementation effort.

• A Comparison of Approaches to Advertising Measurement: Evidence from Big Field Experiments at Facebook

  Compares observational advertising estimates with randomized experiment results.

• 95-5 Rule

  Explains why future buyers matter alongside people currently ready to purchase.

• Understanding Account-Based Marketing

  Sets out account research, tailored content and coordinated execution for account-based marketing.

• LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms Playbook: 10 Ways to Supercharge Your Lead Gen Strategy

  Links the offer, form, lead handling and follow-up into one campaign plan.

• 16 Ways to Improve Lead Quality

  Diagnoses different lead-quality problems and proposes changes to offers, forms, follow-up and optimisation signals.

• Meta’s Creative Testing Tool: Setup, Strategy, and Results

  Walks through a Meta creative test and discusses the author’s experience and tool limitations.

• The Master Brief: My Complete Approach to Meta Ads

  Consolidates Loomer’s approach to Meta structure, creative, targeting and measurement.

• How to increase conversions from Performance Max

  Explains Microsoft Performance Max inputs: tracking, goals, assets, audiences, bids and budgets.

• Broad Match is Winning the Budget War. Is It Winning on Performance Too?

  Compares match-type performance across brand, non-brand and account segments.

• We Analyzed ~20,000 Google Ads Accounts. Here’s What Actually Drives RSA Performance (Hint: It’s Not Ad Strength)

  Studies relationships between responsive-ad attributes and performance metrics.

• Pinterest Ads: Creative Best Practices

  Combines Pinterest creative principles with visible examples and format guidance.

• 2026 Creative Best Practices

  Offers Reddit-specific guidance on creative variety, mobile composition, branding, context and copy.

• Category Entry Points In A B2B World: Linking Buying Situations To Brand Sales

  Provides a roadmap for identifying buying situations and developing relevant brand associations.

• Creative Codes

  Six creative principles covering native content, production, structure, attention and sound.

• AdRoll reports lower display CPMs in its advertiser sample

  AdRoll’s Q3 report covers July to 8 September and reports year-on-year CPM declines of 45% for prospecting and 29.1% for retargeting. These are vendor-sample observations, not a market-wide price guarantee.

• Amazon SQP can indicate visibility bands, but not replace rank tracking

  Alexander Swade’s study analyses six US brands across 44 weeks, covering 61,098 keyword-weeks. Its findings support broad visibility comparisons more than precise week-to-week rank tracking; advertising also complicates the relationship.

• An agent cannot repair an undefined audience by itself

  The audience-data discussion highlights a familiar implementation problem: automating decisions does not establish that the input data represents the intended customer. Review provenance, definitions, freshness and permitted use before connecting an agent.

• An AI Mode experiment examines referrals to publishers

  Stephanie T. Wang and co-authors report a preregistered experiment involving 1,100 participants.

• Comscore’s AI report measures usage, not advertising returns

  Comscore’s Q2 research describes changes in prompt share across AI services, including gains for Gemini and Claude within its measurement scope. Prompt share should not be confused with ad spend, revenue, unique users or conversion performance.

• Creator partnerships need a relationship model as well as a media plan

  Victoria McNally’s interview with Jennifer Quigley-Jones explores how creator marketing is developing. Use it to consider briefs, ongoing relationships and performance objectives before treating creators as interchangeable ad assets.

• CTV buying amid media consolidation: keep the discussion practical

  Sarah Sluis’s podcast, with Allison Schiff and Victoria McNally, discusses buying in a changing television landscape. Use the conversation to examine supply relationships and measurement questions.

• CTV measurement needs to account for demand creation

  Victoria McNally’s reporting explores the space between immediate response and longer-term brand effects in CTV. Separate creative testing, response measurement and attribution assumptions when reviewing a plan.

• Meta One: compare the paid-plan features with your actual needs

  Jon Loomer’s comparison of Meta One business plans is a reference for evaluating account tiers and their conditions. Separate the features your team would use from the subscription’s broader positioning.

• Metricool compares Meta and TikTok campaign benchmarks

  Metricool’s study covers 628,969 campaigns and compares January–June 2025 with the same period in 2026. Treat the figures as context from its advertiser sample.

• More budget does not automatically create more qualified demand

  Pauline Jakober’s guide examines why additional PPC spend can fail to produce additional leads. Use it to distinguish between limited budget, limited demand, weak query relevance, and poor conversion quality.

• Pinterest’s optimisation score is a recommendations signal

  Pinterest describes a campaign optimisation score based on recommended practices. Use the score to inspect the underlying actions, not as a forecast of ROAS or proof of campaign quality.

• Programmatic podcast buying still needs frequency discipline

  Anthony Vargas’s reporting examines podcast buying and ad load as more inventory becomes available programmatically. The practical question is how frequency, audience overlap and the listening experience are controlled across supply paths.

• Reserve Share of Voice is an existing branded-search option

  Amazon’s Reserve Share of Voice documentation describes how to reserve eligible branded-search visibility through Sponsored Brands. Official coverage dates to 2025, so Ivan Marynych’s post is a reminder rather than a new launch.

• Separate deterministic tasks, AI judgement and human approval

  Anthony Katsur’s opinion piece argues for hybrid advertising workflows. A practical application is to use deterministic steps for calculations and validation, AI for suitable interpretive tasks, and people for consequential approvals.

• Short-drama research offers a creative hypothesis

  Snap and Ipsos examine interest in short dramas as a content format. The research can inform experiments with recurring characters, episodic storytelling and compact narrative arcs.

• Spot & Tango makes a defined bet on brand investment

  Julia Waldow’s interviews describe Spot & Tango committing $3.5 million to brand marketing after previously allocating no budget to it. The useful lesson is the decision framework behind a shift in allocation.

• Use excluded destinations deliberately in Merchant Centre

  Sarah Vlietstra’s guide explains selective destination exclusions in product data. The practical task is to decide where a product should remain eligible, then validate the submitted attributes against Google’s current specification.

• YouTube’s Performance Four is a campaign-planning reference

  YouTube for Business’s framework offers a structured way to review performance-oriented video activity. Use it to examine campaign inputs and creative hypotheses alongside the Demand Gen changes in this edition.