How to use BigQuery and GA4 to prove which short-form creative actually drove revenue

I’ve been building retargeting audiences for years, and the landscape has shifted under our feet: browsers clamp cookies, platforms limit cross-site tracking, and privacy regulations and consent banners are now central to any measurement plan. That doesn’t mean retargeting is dead — it means we need to be smarter about how we collect signals. In this piece I’ll walk through a practical, privacy-first approach to building a retargeting...

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I used to take TikTok performance stalls as an inevitable part of scaling — a campaign would ramp, hit a sweet spot around day three, then sputter. Over time I realised those stalls aren’t mysterious; they’re signals. When you know how to read them, you can find the real bottleneck: creative fatigue, audience mismatch, learning algorithm limits, or a conversion problem downstream.Below is a 7-step teardown I run whenever a TikTok ad...

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I’ve built and advised small teams on tight budgets enough times to know the pressure: you need measurable growth, modern capabilities like retargeting, and you must respect privacy and compliance — all without ballooning costs or hiring an engineering team. Here’s a pragmatic way to pick a martech stack for a two-person team that supports privacy-first retargeting for under £5k/year.Define the problem, not the techBefore you buy...

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I run fast creative sessions in Figma because time pressure forces decisions, and decisions generate assets you can actually ship. Over the past few years I’ve refined a two-hour “creative lab” that reliably spits out five ad-ready concepts a small team can scale into a week-long production cycle. Below I share the exact agenda, roles, Figma setup, techniques and export rules I use — plus a few guardrails to keep things useful instead of...

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I ran into this problem last year while auditing a mid-market SaaS client: GA4 was underreporting revenue for subscription products by a worrying margin. The short story was that client-side events (browser / app) were getting blocked by ad blockers and ITP, while server-side events were firing without a reliable stitch to tie them to the original session or user. The fix was to stitch server-side events back to the client-side footprint so GA4...

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I want to walk you through a practical, privacy-first approach to building a first-party attribution layer. Over the last few years I've helped teams move away from black-box, third-party trackers toward server-side event collection and a compact, low-cost data warehouse that gives reliable attribution without leaking user data to ad platforms.This is not theory — it’s a pragmatic architecture you can stand up quickly, iterate on, and keep...

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I’ve spent the last decade helping teams turn fast-moving social trends into repeatable ad wins. One recurring problem I see: brands pour budget into scaling short-form ads before they’ve actually proven the one thing that matters most — whether the creative hook reliably grabs attention. You can save time and ad spend by running a set of quick, measurable microtests that validate which hooks truly dominate. Below I share a practical...

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Onboarding churn is the silent revenue leak that haunts every product team. I’ve seen companies pour months of work into acquisition only to watch new users evaporate within the first session or week. The good news: you don’t need a full product redesign to make a sizable dent in that churn. Instrumenting three targeted post-signup events plus running one focused retention experiment can cut early churn by half — or get you close — if...

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Running a fast, repeatable product review lab that actually predicts affiliate conversion rates sounds like a luxury — until you realise it’s a process you can standardise and run in two hours. I’ve run dozens of these at Mediaflash Co to judge gadget launches quickly, cut down review time, and give commercial teams a better read on which products will perform with our audience. Below I’ll walk you through the exact session structure,...

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I use generative AI for marketing copy all the time — landing pages, social hooks, product descriptions — but I don’t trust it blindly. Left unchecked, AI can invent facts (hallucinate), introduce subtle SEO problems, or produce copy that reads well but won’t convert. Over the last couple of years I’ve refined a short, repeatable validation checklist that catches the usual failure modes without slowing down creative velocity. Here’s...

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