A founder asked me a question on a call recently that I wish more people asked,
By Ted Gibson · September 24, 2026 · Curated by George's Blog
A founder asked me a question on a call recently that I wish more people asked, which was what I would actually do if this were my brand and budget was not the constraint.
The easy answer would have been more ads, because that is the thing I control and the thing I am paid to run. It was not the right answer. What the account needed was content, price and reviews, in that order, and none of those are advertising.
The ads were doing what ads do, which is buying visibility, and they were buying plenty of it. People were arriving at the page in decent numbers and then not buying, and no amount of bid work fixes a page that is not persuading anybody.
The price sat above the category average with nothing on the page doing the work to justify it, the review count was under thirty, which reads as unproven to a shopper even when the average rating is fine, and the gallery never got round to answering the objection that comes up in half the reviews.
So the useful thing I did that month was say that my part of it was already near the limit of what it could do on its own, and that the next move sat with them. That is a harder conversation than proposing a budget increase, and in my experience it is the one that actually moves the number.
Has anyone you pay ever told you the answer was not more of the thing they sell? I am genuinely curious how rare that is.