Field notes from Máximo

what we learn, written down.

Practical playbooks on Shopify paid acquisition — Advantage+, Performance Max, AI search visibility, and the boring engineering details that quietly determine whether your ads earn or burn.

PMAX & Google %
May 9, 2026 · 11 min

Google's Automated Discounts and the always-on-sale trap: how perma-promotion is eating your margin.

Automated Discounts is a smarter way to discount than a sitewide sale. But it can only protect margin you haven't already given away.

AI search AI
April 22, 2026 · 11 min

product feeds are the new SEO: structuring catalogs for ChatGPT, Perplexity, and AI Overviews.

When an LLM cites your product, it's pulling from structured data — not your blog post.

Tracking & attribution
April 15, 2026 · 9 min

the silent killer of Meta match quality: catalog and event ID drift.

Your match quality scores are dropping. Odds are your catalog and your events disagree on what a SKU is.

Subscriptions
April 8, 2026 · 8 min

subscriptions in PMAX: how to stop attributing recurring revenue to net-new acquisition.

If Recharge or Skio fires recurring orders the same way as initial purchases, your CPA looks better than it is.

Tracking & attribution 7
April 2, 2026 · 10 min

Safari ITP, three years on: what 7-day attribution actually does to your numbers.

Roughly 30% of your traffic is Safari. Anything you do with third-party cookies has a 7-day half-life.

Tracking & attribution
March 26, 2026 · 7 min

"first-party tracking" doesn't mean what most apps say it means.

If the cookie is set on a third-party domain and proxies through yours, that's not first-party.

Meta & Advantage+ +
March 19, 2026 · 12 min

the Advantage+ Shopping readiness checklist: 23 things Meta scores you on.

Advantage+ doesn't just need a catalog; it needs a complete one. Here's every signal Meta uses.

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