Guides

Give Bytown admin access to your Google Ads account in two minutes — where Access and security lives in either layout, and which permission tier to pick.

Give Bytown access to your Meta Business Manager — create the account, add us as a partner or invite a user, with the exact toggles to switch on.

There is no official taxonomy of ad formats, and grouping them by layout produces a useless list. Here they are grouped by the job the creative does instead — which is what predicts where it belongs and whether it survives a cold audience.

About 5% of new creatives become winners. The smallest advertisers ship under 3 a week, which produces roughly 1 winner every 9 weeks. The arithmetic of creative testing is less about cleverness than most people want it to be.

Targeting used to be the lever. The platforms took it back, and what is left in your control is the ad itself. Here is what the evidence says about making one — including the 4 famous numbers that fall apart the moment you look for the source.

You have under 2 seconds in a mobile feed, recall roughly doubles between a glance and 10 seconds, and the share of ads getting full attention has collapsed since the early 1990s. Here is what is measured and what is folklore.

Account to live campaign in 6 steps, with the exact fields, the character limits, and the 4 things that catch people out the first time.

More than 1 million advertisers adopted Meta's generative tools inside a year. The lift Meta reports for them is 11% on click-through. Adoption exploded; the performance gain did not. That gap is the real story.

77% of B2B ads score the lowest possible effectiveness rating. 7% of B2B video shows any human emotion. Meanwhile the elements that lift engagement most are the ones B2B refuses to use.

Restricted is not prohibited. OpenAI's ad policy names 2 legitimate ways into a gated category, and 1 very fast way to lose the account. Plus what actually happened when we applied: refused every time, appealed every time, restored every time.

Most write-ups say healthcare, finance and legal are banned from ChatGPT Ads. OpenAI's policy says something more useful — those 3 are approved-advertiser categories reviewed case by case. Here's who is genuinely blocked, how the door opens, and what to run while you wait.

Every roundup publishes the prompts. Almost none publish what happens when you run them on a live account. These 10 are the ones I actually use — each with the failure I have hit, because knowing where a prompt lies to you is worth more than the prompt.

Claude connectors can read your ad accounts, run audits and stage changes for your yes. Here's how I connect Claude to Google, Meta, LinkedIn and ChatGPT Ads with Bytown, what Claude can and can't change, and 10 ad connectors compared on price, writes and approvals.

Search still works in 2026. What changed is everything around it. Google moved Display into Demand Gen, put Veo video generation inside Google Ads, simplified tagging and pushed older Search campaigns onto AI Max. Here is every release that matters, dated and in Google's words, and what I see working across our accounts.

A Google Ads freelancer costs $35 to $150 an hour in the US, or $500 to $3,000 a month on retainer, and a mid-level Canadian freelancer's median is about CA$78 an hour. Here are the rates by experience in both countries, the first-call test I use, and the one contract line that matters most.

Clicks and no conversions has 6 usual causes, and the order you check them in saves money. Start with volume, then tracking, then the searches you are paying for. The landing page and the offer come last, because they are the expensive ones to change.

When an owner tells me Google Ads doesn't work, the cause is usually the setup, not the channel. Targeting comes first, then the ad and offer, then the landing page, then tracking. Here are the 5 checks in order, with the question to ask at each one and where to look.

Connecting Microsoft Ads to Bytown is the same 4 steps as Google Ads: open Connections, sign in with Microsoft, pick your ad account, done. Here's what you need first, what Bytown can change once it's connected, and how I copy my winning Google campaigns across.

A marketing agency costs a small business $1,000 to $7,000 a month in 2026, and ads-only agencies start near $500. Here are 10 real rate cards from the US and Canada, what the retainer actually buys, and the 3 questions I would ask before signing.

Meta Muse can read your Meta ad accounts, flag what isn't working and draft a campaign, and nothing spends without your approval. It only sees Facebook and Instagram. Here's what it does, where it stops, and how I run Google, LinkedIn and ChatGPT Ads from Muse with Bytown.

Microsoft Ads (the platform most people still call Bing Ads) is the search channel small businesses forget. Here's whether it's worth your money, what it really costs against Google, what businesses like yours spend on it, who should skip it, and the 6 guides to read next.

Creator ads measurably outperform on the same media cost. They also fail to show the brand more than 50% of the time, in front of an audience that mostly leaves before 3 seconds. Both things are true.

2 independent bodies of research rank creative far above targeting, and they were published years apart using completely different methods. Then Apple removed the signal and the platforms automated the buying, and the gap stopped being academic.