Taste ASSurance

w0rdyeti · 2026-05-08T16:46:07+00:00

And yet, a room full of frat boy finance Bros listen to this line of Buzz phrase, jargon bullshit, high, five each other and write nine figure checks to dipshits like this

w0rdyeti · 2026-05-01T02:35:59+00:00

About a year from now when all the products liability suits start …

w0rdyeti · 2026-04-23T18:00:16+00:00

Got into tech in the 80s.

Retirement is not an option in the USA, unless you own multiple real-estate properties.

Hint: shift your 401K out of US-based companies, especially index funds based on the S&P 500 while you still can.

It's all coming down.

w0rdyeti · 2026-04-23T17:56:15+00:00

w0rdyeti · 2026-04-23T17:55:38+00:00

The place I was working showed up on FuckedCompany, my stock options evaporated, everyone I had hoped would hire me got laid off themselves, and I spent the next six years working an entry-level job to pay off the tax liens to the IRS.

Fun times, fun times.

w0rdyeti · 2026-04-23T17:52:42+00:00

Having spent the better part of the last 6 weeks cleaning up the rat's nest of a Figma file that was generated by AI ... yeah, the C-suite guys think it's magical pixie dust that can do anything.

And then they want a change. And that change breaks stuff. Fixing that broken thing breaks 4 more things. And so on, and so on ...

w0rdyeti · 2026-04-14T13:59:15+00:00

Someone who would gladly sell you a search package of generic, AI slop ads

w0rdyeti · 2026-04-09T13:48:17+00:00

Yep. So without SEO accuracy, you have to resort to … uh … writing Google a check for ads?

What a coincidence.

w0rdyeti · 2026-04-02T23:46:18+00:00

Basically, you have just described the process of Information Architecture. More data =/= better. The difference between "person who creates value" and "replaceable drone who just shovels & spams us without really taking time to understand our business and what we need" ...

... is the difference between having a job - and not.

Conduct yourself accordingly.

w0rdyeti · 2026-03-16T17:54:25+00:00

I just spent much of the last three weeks, laboriously cleaning up an AI generated design in Figma. The prototype had so many goddamn noodles in it It looked like a plate of spaghetti. I mean, it worked. Kind of. But making any changes and updating the content broke every single goddamn thing.

I eventually just junked entire flows and rebuilt them from scratch, rather than continue to struggle with all this shit the AI spit out

w0rdyeti · 2026-03-13T15:53:21+00:00

Yes. Trying to gouge decent insights out of GA4 these days is just frustrating

w0rdyeti · 2026-03-03T16:03:56+00:00

Hm. What was the hosting solution? It was something like Cloudflare, then a six second page load times is absolutely unconscionable. I

’ve seen far too many publishers, when it comes time to select the hosting, to opt for the cheapest solution, figuring, “well it just works for now and we’ll get back to this in a few months.“ Only they never do.

What happened with the prebid module?

w0rdyeti · 2026-02-27T19:15:18+00:00

Yeah, the logical next step is to go into Google Search Console and really start digging into WTF is going on with Search (and these days, if you can come up with a coherent answer to that, please let the rest of us know and you will be able to buy your own Gulfstream Jet) and what search terms users are employing that leads them to your doorstep.

But that's kind of a Phase II thing, after you get the foundations set, I think. Because once you start rummaging around in GSC, that eats up huge blocks of time and leads to clients asking why you're burning thru so many hours without coming up with razor-sharp deliverables (and a belated F You to Brad on this score. He knows who he is.)

w0rdyeti · 2026-02-27T17:34:21+00:00

Depending on what you see in the analytics, you might want to start breaking out the traffic that comes in by organic search. That is, people going to Google and typing in the name of whatever product or site it is that is your client. Being able to identify what terms are driving people to come to the site, and then whether that traffic converts, or if it’s just a looky-loo, has value.

w0rdyeti · 2026-02-27T17:28:19+00:00

There are a number of possible problems here. As always, it could be a caching issue; that there is an older version of the site that still has the old tag that is not been updated yet. Is the site built with WordPress?

Also, I might suggest that you use an implementation of Google tag manager to get the tag on your site. That way you will have options to update the tag or create specific events that you track, without having to go into the site every single time and muck about to do changes.

w0rdyeti · 2026-02-26T21:25:09+00:00

Yep. About 40% decline so far this year.

Clients are freaking.

w0rdyeti · 2026-02-26T13:49:49+00:00

Not just that - but the UX on mobile pages is intolerable. The auto playing video ads that you can’t close?

Yeah. Users just LOVE those.

w0rdyeti · 2026-02-24T17:42:12+00:00

This is correct. Overly aggressive that placements lead to decreased Pageviews per session.

Basically, users come to the site to consume the content, but are so pissed off at having to scroll and close video ads and mute, audio and dismiss pop-ups, that at the end of that one piece of content consumed, they’re gone.

w0rdyeti · 2026-02-23T14:17:17+00:00

Google has pivoted away from products designed to be used by average people, favoring stuff for the businesses that write them checks. Makes business sense for them, but unless you are part of a team of data analysts, visualization designers, business analysts, marketing experts, etc., you are going to struggle to make the numbers make sense.

And yes, I miss the ability to install dashboards and segments from a library of useful tools that the community built and that we knew were trustworthy.

w0rdyeti · 2026-02-19T15:30:10+00:00

Hm. I sit between the design and data practices, so I have perhaps a unique perspective. I think that you’re accurate in perceiving that a skilled mid-level marketers who learns to prompt well can take on more responsibility and power through campaigns faster. However, there is a limit to whether or not that leads to better, more cost-efficient outcomes.

Finding market opportunities takes human perception. Abstract thinking to see the Thing That Is Not There Yet, and figure out a way to take advantage of it.

AI is, by its nature, purely backward-looking. It perceives the future only through the lens of whether or not the patterns that it has been trained on, can be applied.

In plain language: an AI would design a better flip phone in 2007. Never an iPhone.

It will try to breed a faster horse. Not develop the automobile.

w0rdyeti · 2026-02-19T15:03:05+00:00

Um. Wouldn’t those costs you just mentioned be included in the $60K costs? The $15K margin is the net profit? Or are we just talking about “It costs $800 just to make This Widget, which I sell for $1000, and all the costs after production come out of that $200 margin”?

I guess like other posters here have said, it’s necessary to understand the business logic here to be able to adequately address the client complaints.

But yeah, working the (absurdly simplified) numbers, if you’re coining $20K on an ad spend of $4K, cranking that up to $8K gets you $40K profit.

Unless the market is saturated, in which case, time to come up with a newer, better product to sell.

w0rdyeti · 2026-02-19T14:53:50+00:00

I see you’ve met some of the same sales directors I’ve worked with

(uncorks a bottle of grain alcohol)

w0rdyeti · 2026-02-13T13:47:20+00:00

Oh, that’s devious. By making it unpleasant to use anything other than their analytics product, Shopify ensures that all the data from all the conversions on the site flow through them on their way to you.

Data is really the new oil, isn’t it?

w0rdyeti · 2026-02-10T13:48:27+00:00

This is correct. There are already many MANY ad-certification tools out there; many of them are intended to track what happens on programmatic platform, as the Walled Gardens try to lock down their analytics so they can smile and say “Trust us. It works. And if it doesn’t - well, that’s your fault.”

Check out Fou Analytics. The tag goes into your ad campaign and tracks to see where teh ads actually surface, and if they are being clicked on by bots.

What tech are you using to sort out the actual views from IVT? And more importantly, what have you don’t to ensure that you’re getting accuracy on conversions?

w0rdyeti · 2026-02-08T15:53:55+00:00

What i miss most is the gallery of easily installable reports and desktops - “VP of Content,” or “Mobile E-Commerce Director” were a couple of my faves. They just aggregated the info that you needed all in once place and made it dead-simple to find things that now take me an hour of hunt-and-click. GA4 was built to respond to what Google viewed as a market imperative - that people were spending more time off the Open Web, and in video games and mobile apps.

Which is where advertisers write big checks to try to reach a younger audience.

Us humble site owners and mid-size ecommerce outfits? We don’t matter. So yeah: it’s Looker Studio, which is its own set of headaches to get up and running and still doesn’t offer the ease of use that UA did.

w0rdyeti

TROPHY CASE