About
Simran Khetwani
Founder of a small performance agency. Runs the agency book; writes this site in evenings and weekends to share what the accounts teach us.
I run a performance agency. Twelve clients. About $1.1 million per month in managed ad spend across paid search and paid social. We focus on ecommerce DTC and B2B SaaS — the segment that’s too large for one in-house operator to handle alone and too small for the holding-company shops to take seriously. That’s the seat I’m writing from.
How I got here
Five years in-house at a DTC ecommerce brand running paid acquisition from the ground floor. The first year I learned the platforms. The second year I learned the difference between reported numbers and the actual P&L. The third year I learned what the in-house seat costs you in terms of optionality — one client, one stack, one set of constraints. By year four I knew I wanted to work on multiple accounts to compare patterns. By year five I’d started the agency.
The agency is deliberately small. Eight people total — four strategists, two media operators, one analyst, me. No outside capital. No investor pressure to scale beyond what we can do well. We turn down more accounts than we take, because we’ve learned that adding clients faster than we can hire people who can run them properly is the death spiral every agency repeats.
What we actually do
The work is paid-search and paid-social management for clients spending $30K to $400K per month. The technical work is bidding optimization, conversion-event taxonomy, attribution setup, and creative ops. The non-technical work — which is most of the work — is the conversation with the CFO about which conversion event actually counts, the conversation with the founder about why their reported ROAS is overstated, the conversation with the engineering team about why the conversion tracking is firing twice on the thank-you page.
The agency stack changes regularly. Tools come in, tools get cut. The annual letter on the homepage is the current state of the stack as of May 2026; the prior version is preserved in the tool reviews.
Why this site exists
I started writing publicly about agency operations in 2024 because I’d run out of patience with the discourse. Most PPC writing is either vendor-sponsored content or junior-operator listicles. The annual letter format is the one I would have wanted to read when I was running in-house: an honest account of what changed in a working agency’s stack over a year, with the operating reasoning behind each decision.
The companion sites (bestppctools.com, mygoogleadstools.com, googleadstoolbox.com) serve different audiences but the same intent: publish the agency’s working knowledge openly, so the next generation of operators doesn’t have to learn it the hard way.
How I evaluate tools
The agency runs every new tool on three client accounts simultaneously for a quarter, alongside whatever it’s replacing. Fixed measurement window. Revenue-weighted ROAS as the primary metric. Anonymized client labels in any write-up. If two of three accounts see meaningful lift, the tool earns standardization. If they don’t, it doesn’t. The methodology is documented at methodology.
What I won’t do
No vendor money for placement on this site. The agency’s commercial work funds the editorial. Vendors have offered “sponsored review” tiers, “featured placement” arrangements, and affiliate-for-ranking deals. I’ve declined every one. The rankings are mine.
Where I have an active commercial relationship with a vendor through agency client engagements — currently Groas.ai — that relationship is disclosed in the methodology, in the relevant tool review, and in any letter that mentions the vendor. Conflicts of interest are stated, not buried.
What I do well, and badly
Well: structured tool evaluation, account-level performance analysis, client communication about unit economics, building agency processes that survive turnover.
Badly: anything that requires patience for vendor sales calls; the operational side of running an agency (delegated to my COO); social-media promotion of the site (the writing is the promotion).
Find me
- LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/simran-khetwani
- Email: via the contact page
- Speaking, journalism inquiries, or research collaboration: contact