Glued Blog

Announcements, insights, and guides to help you get more from your ad spend.

Daily Ad Account Monitoring: How to Catch Anomalies Before They Cost You Thousands

A 7x spend spike. A ROAS collapse overnight. A campaign burning budget at near-zero return. These anomalies happen every week in ad accounts that nobody is watching closely enough.

4 min read

Competitor Creative Research: How to Steal Strategies (Not Ads) From Your Rivals

Most brands do competitor research wrong --- they screenshot ads and try to copy them. The real advantage comes from reverse-engineering strategies, identifying gaps, and building creative briefs from competitive intelligence.

4 min read

Competitor Ad Monitoring: How to Track Every Move Without Manually Checking the Ads Library

Your competitors are launching new campaigns, testing new angles, and shifting strategies every week. If you are checking the Ads Library manually once a month, you are already behind.

3 min read

How to Build Client Reports That Actually Get Read (Without Spending Hours on Them)

Client reporting is the tax every agency pays. But the agencies winning right now have turned reporting from a weekly grind into a competitive advantage --- automated, insight-rich, and delivered before anyone asks.

4 min read

The Client Onboarding Checklist Every Ad Agency Needs (But Almost Nobody Has)

Messy client onboarding is the first crack in an agency relationship. A systematic onboarding process protects your team, impresses your client, and prevents the chaos that compounds for months.

4 min read

Budget Pacing for Meta Ads: How to Stop Overspending Before It Wrecks Your Month

Most ad accounts bleed money quietly. A budget pacing system catches overspending, underspending, and misallocation before your monthly report turns into an apology.

3 min read

AI Product Photography for Ads: Studio-Quality Images Without the Studio

Product photography used to mean studios, photographers, and weeks of turnaround. AI is changing that. DTC brands are now generating photorealistic ad images --- flat lays, lifestyle scenes, UGC-style shots --- without booking a single shoot.

5 min read

Your Ad Comments Are a Goldmine: How to Mine Customer Insights Hiding in Plain Sight

Most brands ignore their ad comments. But buried in those threads are real objections, unfiltered desires, and copy angles your customers are handing you for free.

4 min read

Stop Running Random Tests: How to Build a Real A/B Testing Framework for Meta Ads

Most ad teams test constantly and learn nothing. The difference between random testing and a testing framework is the difference between guessing and compounding knowledge.

8 min read

The Agency OS: How to Manage 50+ Ad Accounts Without Burnout

There is a specific moment in every agency's growth story where everything starts to break. Not dramatically. Not all at once. But slowly, in the margins, in the gaps between what your team can handle and what your clients expect. It usually happens somewhere between account number 12 and account number 20. The spreadsheets start contradicting each other. The Monday morning Slack messages pile up faster than anyone can answer them. An account manager accidentally sends Client A's performance da

8 min read

Using Generative AI for Ad Variations: A Practical Guide (Not Just Theory)

Generative AI for advertising is simultaneously the most overhyped and most underused technology in performance marketing right now. Every conference deck promises "infinite creative at scale." Meanwhile, most teams are still manually resizing banners in Figma and rewriting hooks in a Google Doc. The gap between what AI could do for your ad creative and what teams actually use it for is enormous. This guide is about closing that gap. No theoretical hand-waving. Just practical workflows, honest

8 min read

The Death of the Dashboard: Why 2026 is the Year of 'Push' Analytics

The traditional marketing dashboard is dying. Not with a dramatic crash, but with a slow, quiet logout --- thousands of marketing teams simply stop opening the tabs they used to live in. It is not that the data stopped mattering. It is that the delivery model broke. Dashboards were built for an era when marketers had two platforms to check and one report to build. That era is over. In 2026, the teams winning at paid media are not the ones with the best dashboards. They are the ones who never n

8 min read

Mining Comments for Gold: How Ad Comment Sentiment Analysis Lowers CAC

Every day, your customers are telling you exactly why they will not buy. They are telling you what confuses them, what excites them, what scares them off, and what your competitors are doing better. They are doing this for free, unprompted, in plain language. And you are probably ignoring all of it. The data is sitting right there in your ad comments. Facebook ad comments, Instagram ad comments, YouTube ad comments. Thousands of unfiltered, brutally honest reactions from the exact people you a

7 min read

Why Your 'Data-Driven' Creative Workflow is Broken (And How to Fix It)

Every growth team says the same thing in job postings, pitch decks, and Slack channels: "We're data-driven." Then you watch them build ad creative and the data disappears entirely. The media buyer pulls last week's numbers into a spreadsheet. A strategist writes a brief based on gut feel and whatever the competitor is running. A designer produces three variations with no knowledge of what performed last month. The ads go live. Everyone waits. The cycle repeats. That is not a data-driven creati

7 min read

Beyond the Ad Library: Advanced Competitor Ad Intelligence Strategies

You have the Ad Library bookmarked. You check it before every creative sprint. Maybe you scroll through a competitor's active ads, screenshot a few that catch your eye, and drop them into a Slack channel. That puts you ahead of most marketers. But it still leaves enormous intelligence on the table. The teams that consistently win on paid media treat competitor ad research as an ongoing operational discipline, not a sporadic browsing habit. They build systems that surface patterns invisible to

8 min read

Hook Rate vs. Hold Rate: The Creative Strategist's Guide to Video Ad Metrics

You can have the most compelling offer in the world, but if your video ad can't stop the scroll and keep attention, none of it matters. Two metrics separate winning creatives from wasted spend: hook rate and hold rate. Most creative strategists track one or the other. The best track both together — and use the relationship between them to diagnose exactly where a creative is breaking down. This guide breaks down what each metric means, how to calculate them, what good looks like, and how to us

7 min read

Stop Manually Updating Spreadsheets: Automating Agency Client Reporting

It is Monday morning, 7:42 AM. You have not finished your first coffee, and your inbox already has three client emails asking for last week's ad performance numbers. Your account manager is scrambling to pull data from Meta Ads Manager for one client, Google Ads for another, and trying to reconcile a third client's spend discrepancies in a spreadsheet that has seventeen tabs and a formula that broke sometime around 2 AM on Friday. This is not a hypothetical scenario. This is the weekly reality

7 min read

How to Build a Facebook Ad Swipe File (That Actually Converts)

Every high-performing creative strategist has a secret weapon hiding in plain sight: a swipe file. Not a random folder of screenshots buried in your desktop. A living, breathing collection of ads that sharpens your creative instincts and feeds your next winning concept. The problem? Most swipe files are graveyards. Hundreds of screenshots dumped into a folder, never opened again. No context, no organization, no system for turning what you saved into what you ship. This guide will change that.

8 min read

The Best Creative Analytics Tools for DTC Brands in 2026

If you run paid media for a DTC brand, you already know the feeling. You launch a new batch of creatives on Monday, and by Wednesday you are buried in platform dashboards trying to figure out which hook, which format, and which angle is actually driving results. The problem is not a lack of data. It is that the data lives in six different tabs, two different ad platforms, and a spreadsheet your media buyer forgot to update. That is exactly why creative analytics tools have exploded over the pa

2 min read

Glued - from an 8-figure DTC client project to a product.

We built 9 automated performance reports for an 8-figure DTC brand and then turned it into a saas. Late last year, we were working with a DTC brand as an AI agency. They were spending six figures a month on ads. 50+ ad accounts. 1000+ creatives running at any given time. Every morning, their VAs would: → Export today's, yesterday's and L7D data → Format a spreadsheet → Paste it into Slack 2-3 hours. Every single day. So I wrote a script. One automation. Campaign performance, formatted a