How we research, write, and correct.
We publish operational writing about how to spend money on advertising, which is a subject where being confidently wrong has a price. This page states how the writing is produced, where the numbers come from, and what we do when we get something wrong — so you can decide how much weight to give any of it.
Who writes it
Everything published here is written by people who operate paid media accounts, not by a content team working from a keyword brief. That is the whole basis on which we ask you to take any of it seriously.
Bylines work two ways. Where a named person wrote and owns a piece, their name is on it and links to a bio page listing what they actually work on. Where a piece reflects the collective method rather than one person’s argument — a checklist we all audit against, a benchmark table compiled from many accounts — it carries the company byline. We do not attach a named author to something that person did not write in order to make the page look more authoritative.
Where the numbers come from
Figures in our writing come from one of three places, and we say which:
- Accounts we operate. Aggregated across clients and never attributed to a named brand without that client’s explicit agreement. Case studies are the exception — those are published with permission and name the client.
- The platforms’ own published documentation and disclosures. Cited when the exact wording matters, because Google and Meta both revise these quietly.
- Our own estimates and rules of thumb. Labeled as such in the text. When we say a threshold is "roughly" or "around" a number, that is not hedging for style — it means the number is a working heuristic from experience rather than a measured constant.
What we do not do
No affiliate links, anywhere. No paid placements, sponsored mentions, or vendor-funded reviews. Nobody pays to be recommended here, and no tool we name has any commercial relationship with us unless the page says so explicitly.
We do not publish comparison content designed to lose. If we write about when a freelancer beats an agency, or when you should keep paid media in house, the answer is the one we would give a friend rather than the one that routes to a contact form. Several pieces on this site end by telling a segment of readers not to hire us.
We do not restate a platform’s help center and call it analysis. If a piece does not contain something you could only know from operating an account, it should not exist.
Accuracy and freshness
Paid media documentation goes stale fast, and stale advice on this subject is not merely unhelpful — it costs money. Pieces that describe platform mechanics are reviewed when the platform changes them, not on a calendar, and a piece whose substance has changed shows its revision date rather than quietly keeping its original one.
Benchmarks and cost figures carry the year in their title deliberately. A CPM benchmark without a date attached is a number pretending to be a constant.
Corrections
If something here is wrong, we would rather hear it than not. Email hi@adsrunner.com and say which page and what is wrong.
Substantive errors — a wrong figure, a mechanic we described backwards, a recommendation that would lose money — are corrected in place and the revision date updated. We do not silently delete a piece that turned out to be wrong, because the reader who acted on it deserves to find the correction rather than a 404. Typos and clarity edits are made without ceremony.
Where AI is and is not used
We build AI infrastructure for our own account operations, so it would be strange to pretend we do not use it. Being specific matters more than being pious about it.
AI is used in our product to analyze account data — that is what the audit and the platform do, and it is the thing we are actually good at. In our writing, models assist with editing passes, structural suggestions, and checking a draft against our own data. What does not happen is a model generating a published article: the argument, the judgment about what is worth saying, and the operational experience behind it come from a person, because a model has never run a budget and cannot tell you what it feels like when one goes wrong.
Nothing here is published without a person who operates accounts reading it and agreeing with it.
Who you can hold responsible.
Sam Nouri
Founder of ADSRUNNER. Twelve years running paid media, now building the AI infrastructure the agency runs on.
Sophie Mills
Performance marketing strategist at ADSRUNNER, working across Google and Meta for ecommerce and lead-gen accounts.
Questions or corrections: hi@adsrunner.com. Our writing lives in insights.