Sam Nouri
Founder, ADSRUNNER
Sam Nouri is the founder of ADSRUNNER, a performance marketing agency in London that manages ad spend across ecommerce, SaaS, lead generation, and education accounts. He founded the agency in 2020 after more than a decade operating paid media accounts directly.
His work sits at the intersection of two jobs that are usually kept apart: running accounts and building the systems that run accounts. Rather than renting a stack of third-party tools, he led the build of ADSRUNNER’s own infrastructure — first-party tracking, a unified cross-platform data layer, multi-touch attribution, and AI agents that monitor every account continuously and propose changes for a human to approve.
He writes about the decisions that actually move accounts — measurement and attribution, account architecture, budget allocation, and the economics of scaling paid media profitably — and about where AI genuinely helps versus where it is marketing copy.
Performance dropped: a systematic method for finding out why.
Performance drops trigger a predictable panic: bids get changed, campaigns get restructured, budgets get shuffled — all before anyone has established what actually happened. We work a fixed diagnostic order instead: measurement, market, platform mechanics, then the account. In that order, for a reason.
Server-side tracking and the Conversions API: a practical 2026 setup.
Server-side tracking is no longer optional. The browser pixel misses too much, and the gap is widening every year. This is a practical look at how Conversions API and Enhanced Conversions work, what a trustworthy setup looks like, and where implementations go wrong.
The first 90 days: how we approach a foundation rebuild.
The interesting work in paid media, the bid strategy and creative testing and audience expansion, only compounds once the foundations are right. So our first 90 days on any account are deliberately spent on the unglamorous work first. Here is the sequence.
Incrementality testing without a data team.
Every attribution model, however sophisticated, is still an allocation of credit among ads. None of them can tell you what would have happened without the ad. Only a controlled test can, and you do not need a data science team to run one honestly.
Why most Google Ads audits miss the real issue.
Most accounts we audit have great-looking dashboards and broken foundations. The interesting issues are never bidding strategy or keyword choice. They are upstream of those — in measurement, attribution, and architecture decisions made years ago and never revisited.
Attribution after iOS 14: what actually works.
Pixel-based attribution is not coming back. Conversions API helps but does not solve everything. After iOS 14, after GTM consent mode, after third-party cookie deprecation — what does a measurement stack that actually works look like in 2026? We have rebuilt this for dozens of clients now. Here is the pattern.
Profit on ad spend: bidding to margin, not revenue.
A 4x ROAS on a 15% margin product loses money. A 2.5x ROAS on a 70% margin product prints it. Revenue-based bidding cannot tell the difference, which means most accounts are systematically over-buying their worst economics. The fix is to bid to margin.
MER vs ROAS: which number is actually telling you the truth.
Platform-reported ROAS measures each channel in isolation, and every platform over-claims its own contribution. MER measures the whole business at once. Understanding when to trust each is one of the highest-leverage shifts a growing brand can make.
Brand vs non-brand: the measurement error most accounts make.
When someone searches your brand name, they were probably going to find you anyway. Counting that as paid acquisition is a measurement error most accounts make routinely, and it quietly corrupts every decision downstream. Here is how to fix it.
What good looks like: our standards for a healthy paid-media account.
Most advice about paid media is tactical and contradictory. Far more useful is a clear standard for what a healthy account looks like structurally, so you can measure any account against it. This is the checklist we hold our own work to.
Want this applied to your account?
Run a free AI audit of your Google or Meta account, or talk to the team about what scaling profitably would take.