Stop killing Ads under illusion
🥴All metrics are not what they look like on the surface, LinkedIn and Google release practical AI tools for marketers, and more!
Howdy Readers 🥰
In this newsletter, you’ll find:
🥴Your Brand Is Pausing Ads That Are Actually Working
📊 LinkedIn and Google Both Dropped AI Tools for Marketers This Week
🏆 Ad of the Day
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🥴Your Brand Is Pausing Ads That Are Actually Working
Most media buyers have killed a YouTube or video campaign that was quietly driving revenue. The creative gets blamed. The audience gets blamed.
The channel gets written off. The real problem was never any of those things. It was the measurement.
Why Video Looks Like It’s Failing When It Isn’t
Last-click attribution is the default, and it destroys video performance on paper every time. A consumer watches your ad, doesn’t click, sees your product three days later on Instagram, searches your brand name, and converts.
Google gives video zero credit. Your dashboard confirms your suspicion that the campaign wasn’t working. You pause it. Your retargeting pool quietly shrinks, and your brand search volume dips two weeks later, and nobody connects the dots.
Before you pause any video campaign, check these first.
Six Things to Audit Before You Kill It
View-through conversions. These are purchases made by people who saw your ad but never clicked. Most DTC accounts have this data sitting in Google Ads completely unread. It’s your first signal that the campaign is touching real buyers.
UTM-tagged landing page behavior. Tag your video campaigns and check how those visitors behave on-site compared to paid social traffic. Time on page, scroll depth, pages per session. A viewer who spends four minutes on your product page after watching a 30-second ad is not a cold lead.
Branded search lift. Google Ads has a Branded Searches metric that measures whether users search your brand within seven days of seeing your video ad. It works across Demand Gen and Video campaigns and often needs to be manually activated. Check if it’s live in your account.
Video viewer remarketing audiences. Build an audience of everyone who watched 25% or more of your video ad and add it as an observation layer on your brand search campaigns. You’ll see exactly how many people watched, searched, and converted through a different touchpoint.
Post-purchase survey data. Add a single “how did you hear about us” question to your order confirmation flow. When YouTube spend goes up, watch whether organic or direct attribution rises in the survey responses. That gap is your real influence number.
Creative quality going into the campaign. Weak creative makes all of the above irrelevant. The brands getting measurable lift from video are running content that doesn’t feel like an ad in the first three seconds.
Insense connects you to 80,000+ vetted creators with lifetime usage rights included on every asset and first applications within 48 hours, so your video pipeline stays full without slowing down campaign velocity. You can book a free strategy call by May 8 and get a $200 platform credit towards your first campaign.
YouTube and video are demand creation channels. The customer journey they influence is longer, less linear, and invisible to last-click models. Measuring them like paid search is why every brand eventually concludes video doesn’t work, right before their best customers start citing it unprompted in post-purchase surveys.
The campaign probably isn’t broken. The measurement is.
📊 LinkedIn and Google Both Dropped AI Tools for Marketers This Week
LinkedIn launched a model comparison tool for Premium members while Google expanded its Ads Advisor with real-time policy reviews, security monitoring, and instant certifications.
The Breakdown:
LinkedIn lets you taste-test AI Models - LinkedIn launched Crosscheck for Premium members in the US, letting users submit a prompt and receive two anonymous responses from models, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Microsoft, then rate which one is better.
Leaderboards Show Which Models Win by Vertical - Crosscheck includes leaderboards showing top-performing models across different query types, giving professionals a clearer picture of which AI tool performs best for their specific use case and industry.
Google Ads Advisor Gets Proactive Troubleshooting - Google updated Ads Advisor with Real-Time Policy Reviews that flag violations as you build campaigns. It now proactively scans for fixes and in some cases resolves issues without any prompting.
Security and Certifications Now Automated - Ads Advisor monitors accounts around the clock, flags dormant users and suspicious domains, and handles Google certifications automatically, turning weeks of paperwork into instant approvals with a single click.
LinkedIn’s parent Microsoft has invested billions in OpenAI, raising questions about Crosscheck’s neutrality, though leaderboards appear diverse. On Google’s side, Ads Advisor will always ask for approval before acting and tracks a full change history so advertisers stay in control.
🏆 Ad of the Day
What Works:
The Hidden Conversion Mechanism
This ad sells belonging before benefit. “Caffeine Army” + “membership” reframes the product into an identity you join, not a supplement you buy. Once you’re “in,” the purchase feels like alignment, not evaluation.
“Your best version starts now” creates a personal upgrade moment, making the decision feel like a turning point rather than a routine buy.
The falling products mimic constant supply, reinforcing the subscription model visually.
Turn your product into a group or identity. People commit faster to who they want to be than what they want to buy.
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