Site index
Every page and every published piece, in one list.
The work
- Home
What the studio does, and the latest research.
- Search & acquisition
Digital Traction runs paid search and coordinates the measurement and website work it depends on.
- Advertising in AI
Getting businesses ready for advertising in AI answers: where ads run today, what each placement draws on, and how a test is designed and measured.
- Marketing systems
AI agents and workflows for paid media, market intelligence, content, measurement and reporting, each labeled Active or Experimental.
- Content Engine
Know what buyers ask, where the business stands, and what to build next.
- Bid on qualified leads, not form fills
Moving Google Ads bidding from form fills to qualified leads, once the count is right and the deeper stage comes back fast and often enough.
Inside the work
- Foundation
The brand kit, knowledge base and intent map behind Digital Traction’s content, paid search and advertising in AI work.
Research: Search & acquisition
- Performance Max or AI Max for Search: which one does what
What each one controls and reports, which serves when both match, what the upgrade changed, and how to test either one.
- Smart Bidding for lead generation: what it learns from
The Conversions column, CRM import timing, learning periods, Google’s path to qualified leads, value bidding and a checklist.
- Why one week of Google Ads data is too soon to pause or rebuild
Conversion delay, how Google’s own bidding and experiments treat fresh data, and when a policy problem, outage or bad traffic justifies acting.
- Google Ads conversion tracking, from the inquiry to the sale
The tag, the settings, the setup order, the checks, and the 2026 changes to how CRM outcomes reach Google Ads.
- Your website now writes part of your Google ads
Text customization, final URL expansion, the AI Max upgrade, URL exclusions and a page checklist for US advertisers.
- Approved is not serving
Google is extending impression caps based on account trust signals to every Ads product, and because nothing gets disapproved it looks like weak performance rather than a policy state.
- Campaign-level lift is not account-level lift
Digital Traction reads Google’s AI Max figure as a campaign-level result, the level at which reallocated conversions look identical to new ones.
- Google stopped letting your campaigns beat their target
Budget-limited campaigns used to quietly outperform their bid target, and that has stopped, which raises cost per lead in every account where the target was never really a decision.
- Local Services Ads are moving into Google Ads
The standalone LSA dashboard is being retired and campaigns migrate to a pay-per-lead Performance Max type, keeping the lead model but removing manual bidding, vertical-level targets and your historical reports.
- Where AI traffic actually lands in GA4
GA4’s AI Assistant channel covers ChatGPT and its peers but explicitly excludes AI Overviews and AI Mode, which sit in Organic Search, so there is no single AI number to report.
- Feeding real outcomes back to the platform
Form fills teach automated bidding the wrong lesson; importing qualified leads and revenue from your CRM teaches it what a real opportunity looks like.
Research: Advertising in AI
- ChatGPT ads: what a US business can buy today
Self-serve Ads Manager, the US category table, context hints, settings fixed at launch, billing, measurement limits and a checklist.
- Independent AI ad networks: what a US business can buy, and whose apps the files confirm
Gravity, Koah, Thrad, Kontext and Velocity: the US route in, the ads.txt and sellers.json check, resale, and a checklist.
- An AI agent in an ad still speaks for the business
OpenAI’s Sponsored Agents and Google’s Business Agent for Leads: where each stands in the US, the terms, and a checklist for a pilot.
- The future of search is arriving in pieces
What is live, in testing or only announced across Google, ChatGPT and Copilot, and what a business should do about it now.
- Business Agent for Leads changes what arrives in your CRM
Google’s announced Gemini chat in place of the ad’s lead form moves qualification in front of the conversion, which makes cost per lead misleading.
- What answer-engine advertising actually is today
It now spans two different models, existing ad systems extending into AI search and purpose-built conversational ad platforms, and the honest thing is to keep them apart.
Research: Marketing systems
- Before the draft, confirm the business
Business facts, review and the information that should shape the next draft.
- Query fan-out does not mean you need more pages
The model generates related queries around yours before answering, and the common response of building a page per variation is the one thing Google explicitly warns against.
The studio
- Research
Notes on search, advertising and how marketing gets done.
- About
Why Digital Traction started, how it thinks about marketing and how work starts.
- Contact
The general inquiry form. A short description is enough to start.
- How Digital Traction works with your accounts
The business owns its accounts, agents read and draft, a person approves every change, and access can be removed at any time.
- Privacy
What the site collects, why, and who else handles it.
- For agents
What this site is, for software reading it, and how crawlers are treated.
Machine-readable
- /llms.txt
A plain index of the site for language models.
- /feeds/updates.json
The research as a JSON Feed, newest first.
- /sitemap.xml
Every canonical URL, with the date it last changed.