Eight years spent making advertising pay for itself, across Google Ads and Microsoft Ads, e-commerce and lead generation, in more than twenty markets. Feed and Shopping specialist: Merchant Center, Channable, Performance Max, GA4 and server-side measurement. Based in the Netherlands, working in English and French.
Why I left the agency side
In a large agency you are one part of a machine. You are held inside constraints that have nothing to do with the account in front of you, you cannot always say what you think, and you cannot help the way you would if the decision were yours. The thing that decided it for me is how the money works: an agency sells hours, so whether your revenue goes up or down changes nothing for it.
The rest of what I saw there, I will say plainly. The senior who runs the pitch is not the person who opens the account afterwards. New accounts are handed to whoever joined most recently, because nobody else wants another one. And in the big shops the mid-sized brands, which is where the interesting work actually is, get left alone while everyone crowds around the largest logo in the building.
How I work
I run my own tooling: a weekly sync that pulls every account campaign by campaign and conversion action by conversion action, merges change history past the platform’s thirty-day window, and raises an alert when a pinned basis drifts. It exists because I got tired of finding out about a budget change three weeks after it happened.
Every change to a live account arrives as a written list with a reason per line, and goes in after you say yes. Nothing is applied silently, ever.
What I turn down
Accounts under 3,000 a month, engagements with no agreed objective, hourly billing, and anything that needs me to write ad copy in a language I do not work in.
A note on proof
Most of my results were produced under subcontract for an agency, which means I cannot name the brands and there are no logos on this site. What I can do is show the mechanism in detail, and open a real account on a screen share so you can look at it yourself.