Hey folks—quick note: I’m out this entire week for the holiday of Pesach (yes, I was named after it). That doesn’t mean the machines get to run wild. I already produced this four-part series in advance—because if you let the algorithm take over while you’re out of office, you’ll come back to your brand selling crypto knives on cat meme websites.

Each section of this series has a free teaser for everyone, and a deeper dive for paid members—because just like your ad strategy, not everything should be free.

We’ve all been sold the idea that more data + more automation = better results. But sometimes, when you let the AI cook, what you get isn’t a gourmet meal—it’s spam casserole.

🗺️ Brief History of Optimization Metrics
Let’s take a little trip down Memory Lane—the one paved with dashboards and false confidence:

🤖 Rise of the Black Box: Smart Bidding, Dumb Strategy
“Let the algorithm decide,” they said. “It knows better,” they whispered. And you believed them.

Enter: Smart Bidding. Google’s black-box bidding engine claims to optimize for your goals based on hundreds of contextual signals—device, time of day, user intent, moon phase, maybe your ex’s Spotify playlist.

But here’s the thing:
You don’t know what it’s really doing.
And if you’re not careful, it starts optimizing for the easiest conversions—the low-hanging, half-rotten fruit.

Let’s say you tell it to go after clicks.
Guess what? You’ll get clicks. Lots of them.
From who?
People who love to click on everything.
(And buy absolutely nothing.)

You tell it to go after cheap sales.
You’ll get them.
From bargain shoppers who churn faster than you can say “cart abandonment.”

Here’s where it gets dangerous. When you only look at the now, you miss what really matters:

It’s like picking fruit before it’s ripe. Sure, it looks good today, but bite into it and you’re left with bitter pulp and regrets.

Let’s just get this out of the way: your algorithm doesn’t care about your brand. It cares about math. And when you give it blind faith, it optimizes your marketing into a neat little death spiral—one where your best case scenario is a 0.1% boost in CTR and a long-term relationship with... nobody.

Here’s how this cult of “perfect” optimization ends up lighting your budget on fire:

Look, if your ad sounds like it was written by a blender trying to sell SaaS, that’s a problem.

Too clever by half. Too creepy by design.

Yes, there is such a thing as too much “optimization.” Ask anyone who got slapped by Google's Panda, Penguin, or whatever animal they’re unleashing next.

Even the robots get sick of your split tests.

When you obsess over a single KPI like it’s the North Star, you’re just building a funnel for a very specific—and very small—type of person.

Also: congrats, your ad creative is now the brand equivalent of an overused stock photo of a “happy millennial using a laptop.”

Aggressive retargeting is how you go from “interesting brand” to “why do I keep seeing this toothpaste ad on every website I visit?”

But hey—your dashboard looks fantastic.

When everything is optimized, nothing is optimized.

Congratulations. You’ve created a self-fulfilling prophecy that does nothing but confirm your worst instincts.

🧯How to Actually Avoid This Mess
(And still keep your job)

✅ Use automation, but keep your brain turned on.
✅ Focus on the human—natural language, organic content, and creative that doesn’t scream “optimized.”
✅ Let campaigns breathe. Data takes time to cook.
✅ And maybe, just maybe... chase value, not just conversions.

Because here’s the truth: over-optimization isn’t strategy. It’s panic with a spreadsheet.

And panic never scales.