The Luxe Ledger: five years, two new clients, one goodbye and why we're still fixing things

Busy week at JudeLuxe.

We wrapped up summer sale activity, spent a day at the Salesfire Summit at The Belfry, got the team together in Birmingham for a full day of training, got one of those client reviews that makes you immediately forward it to everyone, welcomed two new clients, started saying goodbye to another...

Oh, and JudeLuxe turned five.

So this week's Ledger is slightly less "here's a clever thing we found in Google Ads" and slightly more:

How the hell has it been five years?

JudeLuxe is five.

Five years ago, JudeLuxe didn't have clients, employees, processes, awards or particularly much of a clue what it was going to become.

Now we've got a team I'm incredibly proud of, some brilliant brands trusting us with serious amounts of money, and an increasingly strong opinion that half the things PPC agencies have traditionally obsessed over aren't actually the things ecommerce businesses need from them.

It's funny looking back because the Google Ads bit has probably become less important to how I think about JudeLuxe.

Not because Google Ads isn't important.

Because the better we've got at it, the more obvious it's become that the difficult questions normally exist somewhere outside Google Ads.

Should we actually be pushing this product?

How much stock have we got?

What's the margin?

What's happening to sell-through?

Is it discounted?

Are we trying to make money from it, acquire customers with it, or get 4,000 units out of a warehouse before someone in finance has an aneurysm?

Google can optimise a campaign.

It cannot decide what your business needs that campaign to accomplish.

I think that's probably the biggest lesson from five years.

We're not trying to build the world's best collection of Google Ads button-pushers.

We're trying to build the decision layer between an ecommerce business and the machines spending its money.

We've got plenty wrong over those five years.

We'll get plenty wrong over the next five.

But the business we're building today is considerably better than the one we started with.

Happy birthday to us. 🎂

We spent a whole day teaching PPC people about... not PPC.

We got the team together face-to-face in Birmingham this week.

And deliberately spent most of the day not talking about Google Ads.

Instead, we went properly into how an ecommerce business actually works.

Not the sanitised version where revenue goes up and everyone gets a nice graph.

The actual version.

Stock.

Cash flow.

Margin.

Merchandising.

Buying cycles.

Sell-through.

Discounting.

Returns.

Customer acquisition.

Repeat purchase.

Working capital.

And, importantly, how what matters changes depending on where you sit inside the ecommerce business.

The person running paid media might be looking at ROAS.

The merchandiser is looking at what needs to move.

The buyer is thinking about what's arriving next.

Finance is thinking about cash and contribution.

The warehouse is thinking about the 6,000 units nobody appears capable of selling.

The founder is wondering why revenue is up 30% but there's somehow less money in the bank.

They're all looking at the same business. They're just looking at different problems.

That's what we wanted the team to understand.

Because once you understand those perspectives, PPC starts looking very different.

A product with a 300% ROAS isn't inherently good.

A product with an 800% ROAS isn't inherently better.

If the first product has 10,000 units sitting in a warehouse with another shipment arriving in six weeks, while the second has 14 units left and won't be replenished until Christmas, the commercial decision might be to push the "worse-performing" product considerably harder.

That's the bit Google doesn't know.

And it's the bit PPC people increasingly need to.

We then spent the second half of the day translating all of that back into the work we actually do.

If merchandising has a stock problem, what should change in PPC?

If finance needs cash released, what should change?

If margin compresses, what should change?

If a product is selling through too quickly, should we actually slow down?

If new season stock lands next month, what does that mean today?

If a product is strategically important for acquiring new customers, should we judge it on the same economics as everything else?

That's the level I want our team thinking at.

Because the future of PPC isn't being slightly better at navigating Google Ads.

Google is getting very good at operating Google Ads.

The opportunity is getting much better at understanding the business Google Ads is supposed to serve.

Sometimes good client news is losing one.

We're saying goodbye to a client.

And weirdly, I'm pleased about it.

They're taking PPC in-house.

There's no dramatic agency breakup. Nobody's been summoned to a "quick catch-up" that mysteriously has six people invited. Nobody's blaming Performance Max. Nobody's threatening to turn everything off.

Their business has reached a point where bringing the capability internally makes sense.

That's a good outcome.

I think agencies sometimes get slightly weird about client retention.

Yes, retention matters enormously.

But "every client must stay forever" shouldn't be the objective.

Sometimes you've helped a business get to a point where the right next step isn't you.

If the commercial logic says they should build internally, I'd much rather help them make that transition properly than spend six months desperately trying to justify why an agency needs to remain attached.

Good agencies shouldn't make themselves impossible to leave.

They should make themselves difficult to replace while they're still the right solution.

There's a difference.

So we'll hand things over properly, wish them well and hopefully remain people they know they can call.

Meanwhile...

Two new clients are coming in the other door.

We've brought on two new brands this week.

I won't do the usual agency thing of announcing every new client like we've just completed the acquisition of Microsoft.

But I do think the type of conversations we're having with prospective clients has changed significantly.

There's far less:

"Can you improve our ROAS?"

And much more:

"We're spending a lot of money. Revenue looks good. But we're not convinced we're making enough money from it."

That's a far more interesting problem.

Because the answer isn't necessarily better bidding.

It might be product mix.

It might be margin.

It might be stock.

It might be discounting.

It might be returning customers being repeatedly "acquired".

It might be affiliates sitting underneath your brand traffic taking commission for sales that were already happening.

It might simply be that Google is doing exactly what you asked it to do.

You've just asked it to optimise the wrong thing.

Those are the accounts we love getting into.

Not because they're broken.

Because there's usually a second layer of performance hiding underneath the one everyone has been reporting.

Summer sale: wrapped.

We've also been doing the post-mortems on summer sale activity.

And this is the bit I think ecommerce teams routinely skip.

The sale finishes.

Everyone looks at revenue.

Someone announces it was "up 24%".

Everyone celebrates.

Normal trading resumes.

But a sale isn't interesting because of how much revenue it generated.

It's interesting because of what it taught you.

Which products responded disproportionately to discounting?

Which ones sold perfectly well without needing the deepest discount?

Where did conversion improve but contribution collapse?

What happened to new versus returning customer mix?

Which categories accelerated sell-through?

Which products did we spend heavily advertising when stock would probably have cleared anyway?

And the really uncomfortable one:

How much full-price demand did we simply pull forward?

The post-sale analysis is arguably more valuable than the sale reporting itself.

Because Black Friday is coming.

And the objective shouldn't be to run the same playbook with bigger numbers.

It should be to take everything summer taught you and make the next trading event smarter.

We escaped PPC LinkedIn and went to The Belfry.

A few of us headed to the Salesfire Summit at The Belfry this week.

Which meant a day talking ecommerce, CRO, retention, acquisition and everything else that sits around the transaction.

These events are useful for a reason that has almost nothing to do with discovering the latest "hack".

You get reminded how interconnected everything is.

Paid media doesn't exist in a vacuum.

Neither does CRO.

Neither does retention.

Neither does merchandising.

You can make Google Ads 10% more efficient and still lose because your conversion rate has fallen.

You can improve conversion rate and make less money because you've achieved it through discounting.

You can acquire customers profitably and discover six months later that they're terrible customers.

You can have the best-performing campaign in the account pushing a product the merchandising team desperately wants you to stop selling because there's barely any stock left.

That's ecommerce.

The interesting bit isn't any individual lever.

It's understanding what happens when you pull one.

We came back with plenty of notes.

And, importantly, no new three-letter marketing acronyms.

A successful conference.

Callum got one of those reviews.

One of the best bits of the week had nothing to do with JudeLuxe turning five.

Callum received an absolutely brilliant client review.

And I love these because client feedback about an individual tells you far more about the health of an agency than an awards cabinet ever will.

You can build processes.

You can build dashboards.

You can build reporting templates.

You can write positioning until LinkedIn begs you to stop.

But eventually someone from your team has to sit opposite a client and make them feel:

"This person understands my business and I trust them with it."

That's the job.

Great account management isn't sending a report on Friday.

It's knowing enough about the client's business that when something changes on Tuesday, you understand why it matters.

It's challenging them occasionally.

It's explaining why you're not spending more.

It's noticing something outside the ad account that changes what should happen inside it.

It's giving enough of a shit that the client notices.

So Callum getting recognised for exactly that meant a lot.

The review has his name on it.

The standard behind it is what we're trying to build across JudeLuxe.

And we've been trying to remove some work.

Perhaps the least sexy thing we've done this week is look at our processes.

Not because we want everyone working like robots.

The opposite.

We're looking at everything our team does and asking:

Why does a human still do this?

Pulling the same data.

Formatting the same reports.

Moving information between systems.

Checking predictable things.

Writing repetitive summaries.

Doing administrative work around work.

Every hour somebody spends doing something a machine could reliably do is an hour they're not spending thinking about a client's business.

And after the Birmingham session, that feels even more important.

If we want our team thinking about stock, margin, cash flow, merchandising and the commercial consequences of the decisions they're making, we have to give them the time to actually think.

The value of an agency cannot be:

"We operate the Google Ads interface faster than you."

That's disappearing.

Our people need their time back for the bits Google cannot automate.

Commercial thinking.

Stock decisions.

Margin analysis.

Merchandising.

Creative thinking.

Forecasting.

Challenging assumptions.

Talking to clients.

Making decisions where the answer isn't conveniently sitting in a column inside Google Ads.

So we're streamlining aggressively.

Not to replace people.

To stop talented people spending their day doing jobs beneath their ability.

That's an important distinction.

The week in numbers.

5years of JudeLuxe.

2new clients.

1client graduating in-house.

1full day in Birmingham learning why ecommerce is much bigger than PPC.

1very happy Callum.

1day at The Belfry.

Several summer sales dissected.

And an unreasonable number of internal processes now beginning with the question:

"Why the fuck are we still doing this manually?"

Five years in, I think that's probably the theme.

We're proud of what we've built.

We're also nowhere near finished rebuilding it.

The agency that got us here isn't automatically the agency that gets us through the next five years.

Google is changing.

Ecommerce is changing.

AI is changing what a good agency should actually employ humans to do.

And I increasingly think the agencies that win won't necessarily have the best PPC people.

They'll have the best ecommerce people who happen to be exceptional at PPC.

That's what we're trying to build.

Here's to year six.

Scale profit, not just revenue.

Chris

P.S. To everyone who's worked at JudeLuxe, worked with JudeLuxe, referred someone to us, challenged us, recommended us, or trusted us with their business over the last five years: thank you.

Genuinely.

Now back to work. We've apparently got another five years to do.