The Journal
Field notes on
getting found.
Real takeaways on PR, brand, social, paid, and growth from the work we do every day. No fluff. No "5 tips" listicles. Just things that move the needle.
More posts
Members Were Paying for Courses They Couldn't Open
We audited a paid Skool community as an ordinary member and found four of its ten courses locked behind point levels nobody had ever reached. Here's how Skool's levels actually work, why gating backfires in a young community, and the four settings that fix it.
Bakersfield's Two Top-Rated Roofers Have 467 Reviews. AI Named Neither.
When a customer asks ChatGPT or Perplexity for a local recommendation they get one to six names, not ten blue links. We ran the test across three Bakersfield industries and found that ranking at the top of Google does not mean AI knows you exist.
Your Instagram Caption Link Goes Nowhere
Links pasted into most Instagram captions aren't clickable, and the comment a keyword, follow first, get the link flow runs on a paid tier. Here's where links actually work and how to start an email list without guessing.
The Ads Filled the Cart. Nobody Paid.
A jewelry brand's Meta ads delivered 972 landed visits, 7 add to carts and 8 checkout starts in twelve days, and nobody bought. Here's how two checkpoints we wrote in advance pointed us past the ads to the offer and the checkout, and what we found there.
Google Ads Reported 444 Conversions. None of Them Were Signups.
A software client's Google Ads program closed at $470.83, 2,726 clicks and 444 conversions. Every conversion was a YouTube channel subscription. Here's how the conversion column decides what a campaign chases, and how to report a real result that isn't the result you needed.
Ten Creator Slots Produced One Post
Matching with creators is the easy part. We audited a live campaign and found the failures are all downstream: shipping, approval, payment, disclosure, and a status label that means something other than what it says.
The Dashboard Said One Lead. There Was No Lead.
A counter read one. The record surface read zero. The download produced no file, three times, on three different days. Here is what we have learned about marketing numbers that restate themselves, and the six rules we now report by.
Our Warmest Audience Was Our Most Expensive One
We ran the same LinkedIn ad against a 59,000-person customer list and against cold attribute targeting. The warm list cost six and a half times more per click and produced nothing. Here are both sets of numbers.
Your Sitemap Might Be Publishing Pages You Have Never Seen
One photography studio's own sitemap listed 2,124 online casino pages, all returning 200 inside their template, all set to index. Here is how to read the two files that tell search engines what your site is, and what we keep finding in them.
We Published 16 Blog Posts and Got Two Clicks
Our own journal earned two clicks in three months. It was not a content problem or a speed problem. Google had never fetched most of the posts. Here is the diagnosis, in full, with our own numbers.
The Contact Button That Dials Nothing
We have crawled a few hundred small business websites this year. The most common revenue-costing defect is not SEO or design. It is that the phone link, the email link, or the form quietly does not work.
