The Judgment Business

our dashboard says the ads are working. Your bank account isn't so sure.

After ten years running Google Ads for ecommerce brands, Dan Kabakov keeps finding the same thing inside accounts of every size: the problem is almost never the bids, the keywords, or the algorithm. It's the foundations. Conversion data that doesn't match reality. Product feeds nobody has opened in a year. Campaign structures that blend brand and cold traffic until every report flatters itself.

The Judgment Business walks store owners through the order of operations that actually fixes accounts: measurement first, then the Merchant Center feed, then campaign structure, and only then budgets, bidding, and scale. You'll learn how to test your own tracking end to end, spot the bot traffic inflating your analytics, read the search terms report like an operator, and grow spend without watching ROAS collapse. You'll also see exactly where AI genuinely compresses the work, and where handing it the wheel produces confident, well-formatted nonsense.

Drawn from real client work, including a jewelry brand whose ad budget scaled 18x while holding a 4.5x sustained return, this is the literacy layer between you and everyone who wants to manage your money. Whether you run your own account or pay someone who does, you'll finish able to open Google Ads and verify what's true.

The tools keep getting better. Judgment is still the business.