# Josh Gregory

Josh Gregory shares advice on scaling ecommerce advertising profitably, with a focus on Google and Meta Ads, campaign structure, creative testing, tracking, and the foundations behind reliable growth.

- Profile: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/creators/josh-gregory/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/josh-gregory
- LinkedIn followers: 2,691
- Topics: ecommerce, paid-ads, meta-ads, google-ads, performance-max
- Based on 11 dated posts, latest 2026-09-18

## Summary

Useful for diagnosing and fixing ecommerce paid-media foundations before scaling Google and Meta spend.

- Best for: DTC ecommerce brands already spending on Google and Meta that want profitable scaling.
- Not for: Brands seeking paid creator sponsorships, rate cards, or awareness campaigns based on demographics or on camera performance.
- Check first: Confirm recent comparable ecommerce results, scope, pricing, timeline, and current availability.

### Takeaways

- Scaling breaks the system behind the ads, not the budget.
- Reported ad performance often overstates real growth.
- Tracking, product feeds, and creative cadence are the real foundations.

## Main ideas

- **Scaling breaks the system behind the ads, not the budget**: Josh Gregory argues that increasing spend does not create growth by itself; it exposes weaknesses in the account and customer journey. Once Meta or Google budgets pass roughly £25–30K a month, they say, return on ad spend falls, acquisition costs climb, and results swing unpredictably. Typical reactions — changing bids, testing random creatives, duplicating campaigns — treat symptoms and leave the cause untouched. They name three places money leaks at scale: no funnel path for cold audiences, so efficiency drops as more cold traffic arrives; Google and Meta planned in isolation even though they overlap, producing wasted clicks and broken journeys; and no lifetime-value or offer strategy, so paying more to acquire a customer only works if the spend is recovered later. Their proposed fix is structural: weekly creative testing cycles, margin and customer-acquisition-cost checks before budgets rise, offers built for first-time buyers, a mapped path from awareness to purchase, and landing pages designed for cold clicks.
- **Reported ad performance often overstates real growth**: A recurring argument is that a platform's own numbers can look strong while adding less than they appear to. In Josh Gregory's Performance Max example, four distortions are named: a large share of conversions come from branded searches and inflate results, repeat customers are counted as new revenue, display and YouTube clicks raise volume without always adding sales, and limited visibility hides where budget actually goes. They do not argue for dropping the campaign type, but for managing it — exclude branded terms so results reflect true performance, add negative keywords to cut waste, track new versus existing customers to see real impact, and run Performance Max as one part of a wider mix with Search and YouTube.
- **Tracking, product feeds, and creative cadence are the real foundations**: Josh Gregory locates scaling problems in unglamorous operational basics. In one case, they describe a brand spending £80,000 a month across Google and Meta that closely tracks click-through rate, cost per click, and return on ad spend, while the product feed is messy, tracking is inaccurate, and the creative has not been refreshed in months — leaving, in their estimate, roughly half the budget wasted. Their point: scaling without structure is expensive guessing. The response is to clean up accounts, fix tracking, and rebuild the creative flow. A companion post makes the same point about budget increases: spend raised too quickly makes the platform broaden targeting, dilute the best audiences, and depress conversion rates. They say the problem is usually how the budget is spent, not how large it is. Their recommended controls are refined campaign structure, audience signals and exclusions to keep targeting sharp, and search terms, product feeds, and creative kept aligned with intent.
- **Use a small budget to prove profitability before scaling**: Against the view that small budgets are not worth the effort, Josh Gregory argues that modest spend is the cheapest way to establish whether the structure and creative work. Small budgets, they say, prove profitability, and larger ones extend it. Agencies too often dismiss small accounts or use them to explain poor performance instead of building the right structure and following the data. This complements, rather than contradicts, the argument about scaling: the same structural requirements apply, but at a low budget they can be tested before real money is committed.
- **The offer and customer economics decide whether acquisition spending works**: Across the posts, the position is that media buying cannot outrun weak unit economics. In the scaling post, this appears as the missing lifetime-value or offer strategy: paying more to acquire a customer only makes sense if that spend comes back later. Offers need to work for first-time buyers, and margin and acquisition-cost checks belong before any budget increase. The same logic underlies the recommendation to judge campaigns on incremental rather than reported revenue, since repeat purchases counted as new growth flatter the numbers behind scaling decisions.

## Work to read

- [Why ecommerce brands struggle to scale profitably past £25–30K a month](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/josh-gregory_ecommerce-googleads-metaads-activity-7376865590667321345-BJ4H)
- [The hidden side of Performance Max most brands miss](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/josh-gregory_ecommerce-googleads-ppc-activity-7378307563559211008-qNfm)
- [An £80K-a-month account with broken foundations](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/josh-gregory_ecommerce-googleads-metaads-activity-7386692855463063552-kIKe)
- [Why spending more on ads can lower conversion rates](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/josh-gregory_ecommerce-googleads-paidmedia-activity-7389556741291757568-HNbM)
- [What a £700-a-month budget proved before the spend was scaled](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/josh-gregory_ecommerce-googleads-metaads-activity-7388831893368066048-sLKN)

## Partnerships

The posts do not publish sponsorship products, a media kit, rate card, or partnership policy. They document account-level paid-media work: Josh Gregory describes cleaning up tracking, product feeds, campaign structure, and creative for ecommerce brands that already spend heavily on Google and Meta. They also offered free Google Ads audits to a limited number of ecommerce brands. For campaign work, contact them about ad accounts rather than a packaged creator sponsorship. Ask about scope, pricing, and current availability.

## Alternatives

- Martin Davies: Choose Martin Davies when the Google account is the main lever, especially if spend has increased and results have worsened after a run of changes. The two posts show a diagnostic method for exactly that situation: run an impression share report by day across the past 30 days and compare it with the period before sales dipped. Steady impression share points to lower market demand; a falling one points to competitor aggression. Change strategy accordingly. On Performance Max, the post offers a concrete way to answer the brand-inflation question a scaling brand will face: track brand versus non-brand clicks, conversions and share of brand revenue over time. Where brand takes a high share of PMax traffic, move it into search campaigns and add it as a negative in PMax, accepting a short-term return-on-ad-spend drop for overall business growth. Josh Gregory's posts name branded-search inflation inside Performance Max as a leak to fix; Martin Davies supplies the day-by-day test to establish whether it is happening in a given account, along with the demand-versus-competition check a brand scaling on Google Ads needs before blaming its own structure.
- Ujla Shakoor: Choose Ujla Shakoor when the constraint is Meta creative fatigue: an account was built around one winning ad, and a budget increase has revealed there is nothing behind it. The post describes the failure precisely: spend rising from $1K to $10K behind a single hook, angle and message, then cost per acquisition climbing and sales slowing as the creative tires. It also describes a habit of always asking what is being tested next, with tests across different hooks, angles, customer problems and formats. For a brand whose scaling plan keeps stalling at the creative layer, that pipeline discipline is more specific than anything in the Josh Gregory posts, which set a weekly creative testing cycle as a rule but stay at the level of the rule. Ujla Shakoor is the better call when the brand already has a Google structure it trusts and needs the Meta creative engine rebuilt to carry higher spend.
- Mark Tran: Choose Mark Tran when the brand suspects its reporting is flattering it and has generative creative in the pipeline. The two-account post is the most detailed measurement case among the alternatives: two ecommerce accounts, a cricket store and a tennis store, each running one Advantage+ campaign with broad targeting, campaign budget optimisation and no exclusions for existing customers. They reported strong ROAS, low acquisition cost and strong ad performance, but closer inspection showed that a large share of “new” sales came from existing customers cycling back. The platform optimises for the cheapest conversion, often someone who was going to buy anyway. The prescribed fix addresses the tracking seam in a scaling campaign: separate new from returning customers, exclude past buyers from prospecting, push retention into email and SMS, and accept a lower reported ROAS while measuring new-customer volume. The post also names its outside sources — Cody Wittick's breakdown of a $71K version of the same problem and audits of Australian ad spend estimating up to 44% wasted or misattributed — giving a brand a way to test the claim against other work rather than take it on faith. The second post covers AI disclosure: Meta auto-labelling AI-generated ads where background, image generation or animation is used; auditing the creative pipeline; checking live ads for the “AI info” label; and briefing designers and media buyers. It also notes Google's own AI ad labels and the EU rules as the direction of travel. A brand scaling paid social with AI-assisted creative should read that alongside its scaling plan.

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AI-assisted summary of public posts. Audience demographics are not available. Engagement appears only where we checked recent posts. Method: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/methodology/