Uncommon Move — Thinking https://uncommonmove.com/thinking Frameworks, teardowns, and counter-intuitive takes on Google Ads, agentic AI, measurement, and marketing strategy from Kyle Schwietz. en-us Fri, 15 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 kyle@uncommonmove.com (Kyle Schwietz) kyle@uncommonmove.com (Kyle Schwietz) https://uncommonmove.com/og-image.jpg Uncommon Move — Thinking https://uncommonmove.com/thinking The Metric That Was Never Measurable — Until Now https://uncommonmove.com/article-cost-per-decision https://uncommonmove.com/article-cost-per-decision Fri, 15 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Kyle Schwietz Every marketing KPI measures activity, not decisions. Agentic AI is the first technology that makes Cost Per Decision operable, not aspirational. (11 min read) Every marketing KPI in common use measures activity, not decisions. The gap between the two is where margin, speed, and competitive advantage quietly leak out of the modern enterprise — and it has been that way since the discipline was instrumented. Picture a CMO presenting a $40 million media budget to her CFO at the end of a quarter. The deck is sharp. Click-through rates are up. Cost per lead is down. ROAS is trending in the right direction. The CFO listens, looks at the last slide, and asks a single question. "How much did we spend per decision this quarter?" Nobody in the room can answer.…

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]]> From Cost Per Click to Cost Per Cart. https://uncommonmove.com/article-cost-per-cart https://uncommonmove.com/article-cost-per-cart Sat, 09 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Kyle Schwietz Cost Per Click is the wrong KPI for retail in 2026. The Retail Decision Stack rewrites the hierarchy around Cost Per Cart and retained margin. (8 min read) Retail marketing runs on Cost Per Click. The business runs on retained margin per cart. The space between those two numbers is where DTC brands burn through working capital, big-box buyers misallocate retail media spend, and CPGs lose the trade-vs-media argument they keep promising the CFO they will win next year. Open the dashboard at any retail or DTC marketing team — Allbirds, Target, P&G, the brand on the next floor — and the spine of the reporting is roughly the same. Impressions, clicks, click-through rate, conversion rate, cost per click, cost per acquisition, ROAS. Maybe a lifetime…

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]]> Cost Per Funded Account, Not Cost Per Lead. https://uncommonmove.com/article-cost-per-funded-account https://uncommonmove.com/article-cost-per-funded-account Sat, 09 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Kyle Schwietz Cost Per Lead optimizes for the wrong shopper. For neobanks, lending apps, and crypto exchanges, Cost Per Funded Account is the KPI that should run the budget. (9 min read) Consumer FinTechs run their marketing on Cost Per Lead. The business runs on funded, retained accounts. The space between those two numbers is where neobanks burn through working capital chasing the wrong applicant, lending platforms watch KYC abandonment quietly destroy their unit economics, and crypto exchanges discover six months later that the cohort that funded was not the cohort the dashboard celebrated. Open the marketing dashboard at any consumer FinTech in 2026 — neobank, BNPL platform, crypto exchange, robo-advisor, lending app — and the spine of the reporting is roughly the same. Im…

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]]> Cost Per Member-Year, Not Cost Per Enrollment. https://uncommonmove.com/article-cost-per-member-year https://uncommonmove.com/article-cost-per-member-year Sat, 09 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Kyle Schwietz Cost Per Enrollment optimizes for the wrong shopper. For Medicare Advantage and ACA marketing, Cost Per Member-Year is the KPI that should run the budget. (9 min read) Health plans run their marketing on Cost Per Enrollment. The business runs on member-years. That gap is where the budget gets spent on the wrong audiences, the wrong creative, and the wrong channels — every AEP, every OEP, every cycle. Pick any Medicare Advantage plan in the country and look at the marketing dashboard. The hero metric is some version of Cost Per Enrollment. It might be called CPE, CPA, cost per app, cost per member acquired — same metric in different packaging. Total marketing spend, divided by total enrollments. The lower the number, the more the team gets praised. Now look a…

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]]> Performance Max Isn't a Campaign Type. It's a Signal Feedback Loop. https://uncommonmove.com/article-performance-max-signal-loop https://uncommonmove.com/article-performance-max-signal-loop Sun, 03 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Kyle Schwietz Performance Max is a signal feedback loop, not a campaign type. The five signal layers that determine whether PMax compounds — and the audit most teams skip. (9 min read) Most teams treat Performance Max like any other campaign — a thing to set up, a thing to refresh, a thing to optimize. That mental model is wrong, and it's the reason most PMax accounts plateau or quietly underperform their potential. PMax isn't a campaign. It's a signal feedback loop running on top of Google's AI. The work isn't managing the campaign. The work is engineering the signal environment around it. The instinct to manage PMax the way you'd manage a Search campaign is understandable. The interface looks similar. The reporting borrows familiar shapes. There's a budget, a bid strategy,…

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]]> Your GA4 Setup Is Quietly Lying to You — A Teardown https://uncommonmove.com/article-ga4-teardown https://uncommonmove.com/article-ga4-teardown Sun, 26 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Kyle Schwietz A GA4 teardown: the specific places default setups over-credit some channels and bury others. With the audit checklist most teams have never run. (6 min read) Almost every enterprise GA4 property I've audited reports numbers that are wrong in predictable, structural ways. Not catastrophically wrong. Quietly wrong. The kind of wrong that turns into the wrong budget decision six months later. The problem isn't GA4 itself. The product is a serious, capable measurement platform. The problem is that the defaults are designed to make GA4 look full of data the moment you turn it on, and the data is full of modeling, attribution heuristics, and consent-mode estimation that almost nobody on the marketing team has actually inspected. Then the data flows into …

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]]> What Agentic AI Actually Means for Marketers https://uncommonmove.com/article-agentic-ai-for-marketers https://uncommonmove.com/article-agentic-ai-for-marketers Mon, 13 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Kyle Schwietz Most marketing teams use AI like a search engine. Agentic AI is different — it plans, executes, and iterates on its own. Here's what that means in 2026. (6 min read) For the past two years, most marketing teams have been using AI the same way they use a search engine. You type something in. You get something back. You decide what to do with it. That's not agentic AI. That's a very fast research assistant. The shift happening right now is categorically different, and most marketing organizations are not prepared for it. Not because they're behind on the technology, but because they haven't updated their mental model of what AI is for. As long as you're thinking about AI as a tool you prompt, you will underestimate what's coming and overbuild for the wrong c…

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]]> Stop Building for One LLM. Build for Agentic. https://uncommonmove.com/article-dont-build-for-one-llm https://uncommonmove.com/article-dont-build-for-one-llm Mon, 13 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Kyle Schwietz Most marketing teams are building their AI capability around a specific model. That's the BlackBerry mistake. Here's what to build instead. (6 min read) In 2007, a lot of companies built their mobile strategy around BlackBerry. Not because BlackBerry was bad. It was excellent. It was the dominant platform, the enterprise standard, the thing every serious business person carried. Building for BlackBerry was the rational decision given everything visible at the time. Three years later, BlackBerry was irrelevant. The companies that survived the transition well were the ones that had built for the web rather than for a device. The underlying capability, a browser-based interface accessible from any connected hardware, turned out to be durable in a…

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]]> Full-Funnel Marketing Within Google: What It Actually Means to Run the Whole System https://uncommonmove.com/article-full-funnel-google https://uncommonmove.com/article-full-funnel-google Mon, 13 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Kyle Schwietz Most teams run Google's products as separate channels. The ones pulling ahead treat Search, YouTube, Demand Gen, PMax, and Meridian as one loop. (6 min read) The phrase full-funnel gets used constantly and understood rarely. For most teams it means running some brand campaigns alongside performance campaigns and calling the combination a strategy. Brand does awareness. Performance does conversion. The budget split is somewhere between gut feel and last year's allocation. The two halves don't talk to each other much. That's not full-funnel marketing. That's two separate campaign programs sharing a budget owner. Real full-funnel marketing inside the Google ecosystem means designing campaign architecture so that each layer of the funnel feeds signal i…

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]]> Last-Click Attribution Is Dead. Meridian MMM Is What Replaces It. https://uncommonmove.com/article-meridian-mmm https://uncommonmove.com/article-meridian-mmm Mon, 13 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Kyle Schwietz Google's open-source Marketing Mix Model isn't just a measurement tool. It's a confidence infrastructure for enterprise media investment. (5 min read) Meridian is Google's open-source Bayesian Marketing Mix Modeling framework. It estimates how much each marketing channel — including channels with no trackable signal — actually contributed to a business outcome. It is the measurement layer that finally replaces the attribution conversation enterprise teams have been losing for a decade. Most marketing measurement conversations end too early. They get to attribution, last-click, data-driven, some form of multi-touch, and stop there as if attribution is the answer rather than a proxy for one. It isn't. Attribution models are built on signals fr…

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]]> Why I Started Uncommon Move and What Move 37 Has to Do With It https://uncommonmove.com/article-why-i-started https://uncommonmove.com/article-why-i-started Mon, 13 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Kyle Schwietz AlphaGo's Move 37 looked like a mistake. It won the game. That moment explains where AI and marketing are heading — and why I started Uncommon Move. (4 min read) In March 2016, the world's best Go player sat across from a machine and lost. Lee Sedol had won 18 world titles. AlphaGo was software. Experts had given AI a decade before it could crack Go, a game so strategically complex that brute-force computation couldn't touch it. Then AlphaGo played Move 37. It was the second game of the match. AlphaGo placed a stone so far from expected territory that the commentators assumed it was a mistake. No human player would make that move. It violated every conventional heuristic the game had developed over centuries. Lee Sedol took nearly fifteen minutes to re…

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