Things we've written down.

The Google Ads dashboard looks healthy. Cost per lead is down. Forms are coming in. Sales says the leads are rubbish. That doesn’t automatically mean Google Ads is failing. It may mean the system is optimising successfully towards the wrong definition of success. If you tell an advertising platform that a form fill is success, […]

Traffic is up. The phone isn’t ringing. The contact form is quiet. The instinct is often to buy more traffic. That’s exactly the wrong move until you know why the traffic you already have isn’t becoming business. If a page turns good prospects away, more traffic simply lets you lose more prospects, more expensively. Why […]

Google Ads says 64 conversions. GA4 says 47. Before you rebuild the tracking, understand this: the two platforms are not designed to produce the same number. They answer different questions, apply different attribution logic and can put the same conversion into different reporting dates. A difference is normal. A sudden, unexplained change in the difference […]

Most businesses asking “How can we use AI?” are starting with the wrong question. The useful question is: what is happening repeatedly in this business that is slow, expensive, inconsistent or dependent on someone remembering to do it? Find that first. Then decide whether AI is actually the right fix. Don’t start with AI use […]

Google’s AI Overview answers the candidate’s question before anyone reaches your careers site. Index data on why UK employers so rarely get quoted in it, and what changes that.

The SetpointHQ Index · Sector report 3 of 14 The AI assistants are more willing to recommend UK care employers than they are the banks, the retailers or the tech firms. On the latest scoring run, most of the sector still isn’t converting that goodwill, and the reason is sitting in its own markup. The […]

It has never been easier to apply for a job, and never been harder to get one. That paradox is the whole youth jobs market in one sentence, and understanding it is the difference between applying into a void and actually getting hired. A graduate in the 1990s might have posted a dozen job applications […]

The SetpointHQ Index · Retail and consumer goods Everyone in Britain can name these 10 employer brands. The AI assistants candidates now ask first can name them too. What the assistants will not reliably do, on the evidence of the latest scoring run, is recommend them. Each month The SetpointHQ Index scores 100 UK employer […]

A candidate weighing up a banking career in 2026 doesn’t open your careers site any more. On a Sunday evening she asks an AI assistant which UK banks are actually worth working for, and reads the short answer it gives back. The assistant names three employers in a couple of sentences. If yours is a […]