Scale & Strategy
This is Scale & Strategy ,Hope you had a great 4th of July, baaaaaby!
Who lit the fireworks? (We celebrated… and maybe lost a finger or two.)
Now that we’re back, here’s what we’ve got for you today:
- Don’t Fear Churn — Use It as a Feedback Loop That Actually Matters
- How to Start Using AI Agents in PPC — And What You Can Actually Build
Don’t Fear Churn — Use It as a Feedback Loop That Actually Matters
Churn isn’t just a number on a dashboard — it’s your product’s reality check.
If retention is slipping, it’s not a one-off blip. It’s a warning: You’re falling out of sync with your users. And in a world where AI can shift entire markets overnight, ignoring that signal is a fast way to lose ground.
Elena Verna recently laid out one of the clearest breakdowns on how to treat churn for what it really is: honest feedback from your market. Here’s the playbook.
Churn starts at activation — not cancellation
Most teams think churn happens when a user hits “cancel.” Wrong. It starts much earlier — usually right after signup, when someone doesn’t hit a real outcome.
Too many companies confuse setup with success. Creating an account, importing contacts, connecting integrations — those are setup steps, not value moments.
Value looks like this:
- Publishing a piece of content
- Getting a first result or response
- Inviting a teammate and actually collaborating
If you haven’t nailed what that “aha” moment is, your users never really activated. And unactivated users always churn — eventually.
Feature adoption ≠ feature overload
Let’s say someone does activate. Great — but now they need to stick around.
That won’t happen if your core features are buried, hard to find, or overshadowed by bloat. More buttons ≠ more retention.
Here’s how to fix that:
Step 1: Look at your data.
What features correlate with users who stay 3+ months? Highlight those. Push them forward. Remove distractions.
Step 2: Re-engage with purpose.
Generic “we miss you” emails don’t cut it. Show users what’s changed.
What did you ship that solves a pain they had? Lead with that.
Free users? Try nudging them with time-bound trials when you launch something big.
Inactive users? Use a drip that reminds them of what they left behind — but better.
Churn is a product signal. Treat it like one.
Sure, you can patch things up with discounts and automated retries. But those are Band-Aids. They don’t solve the underlying problem.
Instead:
- Listen to the data
- Find where users drop off
- Fix the experience
- Rebuild trust with proof
Retention is earned every day. And churn? It’s not failure. It’s your cue to get back in sync.
Ignore it, and you’ll lose more than a customer. You’ll lose your edge.
How to Start Using AI Agents in PPC — And What You Can Actually Build
AI agents in paid media aren’t coming — they’re already here.
Campaigns are getting managed faster, more intelligently, and with way less hands-on work. But this isn’t just another automation tool. It’s a shift in how we run PPC.
We're moving from:
- Scripts (rule-based, repetitive),
- to rules (automated but rigid),
- to agents (goal-driven, adaptive, and autonomous).
Benjamin Wenner recently mapped out what that progression looks like and how marketers can actually use it. Here’s what matters.
Scripts and rules are fine — until they’re not
Scripts are still useful. They’re great for things like:
- Pausing underperforming keywords
- Exporting reports to Sheets
- Sending budget alerts
But they’re dumb logic. Everything has to be manually defined. And if something changes or falls outside the conditions? It breaks.
Automated rules aren’t much better. They reduce some grunt work, but they can’t reason. They can’t weigh tradeoffs. They definitely don’t learn.
Enter: AI agents
Agents operate differently. They don’t just follow instructions — they interpret goals, plan actions, and make decisions across systems.
A basic agent could:
- Monitor Google Trends
- Identify rising keywords
- Sync them to your ad platform
- Generate a creative brief in Notion
And that’s just one agent.
More advanced setups use multi-agent frameworks. Think of it like a small team:
- One agent is the strategist
- Another manages keywords
- One writes copy
- Another handles bidding
- All of them talk to each other
You get full-funnel automation. Search, copy, budget allocation, performance checks — all coordinated.
You can even ask your system questions like:
“Which keywords are converting well but losing impression share?”
And it answers. Not with a dashboard, but a direct, actionable response.
If you want to get really deep, frameworks like LangChain, CrewAI, and AutoGen let you build this logic yourself. Custom workflows, cross-platform coordination, context-aware agents. All of it.
Don’t get overwhelmed. Start small.
This isn’t about replacing your whole stack overnight.
Start with one job:
- A script you already use
- A reporting task you hate
- A simple optimization rule
Swap it for an agent. Then expand.
Move into areas like:
- Daily keyword expansion
- Budget reallocation
- Competitor research
- Weekly performance summaries
Any task that’s repeatable, logical, or driven by data is fair game.
The big shift
The future of PPC isn’t just smarter dashboards or nicer UI.
It’s intelligent systems that understand what you want — and make it happen.
The question is whether you’ll be using them... or competing against someone who does.
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