This is my villain origin story

When I started my digital marketing agency back in 2011, it was during the golden age of digital acquisition.

Facebook was still called Facebook, and we thought Zuckerberg was an adorable little tech genius rather than a Disney supervillain.

You could even (shock, horror) speak to a Google or Meta accounts manager about your ad account. Silicon Valley still thought of business owners as humans worth providing a level of service to, rather than pond scum standing between money and money’s rightful owner: the billionaire tech douchebro.

We were so innocent back then.

Then, as time wore on, it got harder and harder to convert. Ads got more expensive. The algorithms became more unpredictable (read: greedy). Facebook turned into Meta, which then turned into a hollowed-out data-mining operation filled with scammers and AI slop.

My clients, who had kept me around as much for my snarky jokes as my ad results, started asking inconvenient questions like, “Why is this getting so expensive?” and “Stacey, are we paying for results or just funding Musk’s new Kiwi bunker?”

In an effort to get better results, I started playing around with their landing pages.

And I realised that the real money was made on their websites.

A tiny increase in conversion there could equate to a massive improvement in sales without a single cent of extra marketing spend.

Look at the math. If you spend $1,000 on ads to get 1,000 visitors:

1,000 visitors x 1% = 10 sales

1,000 visitors x 2% = 20 sales

By moving the needle just 1%, you’ve doubled your revenue while your ad spend stayed exactly the same.

So, I set about learning everything I could about selling online. I mashed together my traditional storytelling, brand strategy, and copywriting skills with UX, data analysis and buyer psychology. Then I retrained as a conversion copywriter.

Because I am damned if I’ll give one more cent of my money to a dead-eyed, hoodie-clad egomaniac than I absolutely need to.

You shouldn’t either.