Good digital marketers know “best practices”. Great ones know when to question them.
Digital marketers love a good “best practice”. Maybe a little too much.
It sounds reassuring. It suggests experience, expertise and a certain level of confidence that the person managing your advertising knows what they’re doing. And to be fair, best practices usually become best practices for a reason. They represent things that have worked often enough, across enough advertisers, that they’re worth paying attention to.
The problem is what happens when we stop paying attention after that.
Best practices are useful as starting points, but dangerous as stopping points. They tell you what generally works across lots of advertisers. They do not tell you what is right for this business, with this reputation, this sales process, this website, this data, this budget, this market and this customer.
That distinction matters more than ever in paid media, where platforms increasingly encourage advertisers toward similar campaign structures, targeting approaches and optimization strategies. There is nothing inherently wrong with any of that. The danger comes when a reasonable recommendation becomes a rule, the rule becomes a formula, and eventually nobody remembers to ask whether the formula makes sense for the business sitting in front of them.
Computer pioneer Rear Admiral Grace Hopper once said, “Humans are allergic to change. They love to say, ‘We’ve always done it this way.’ I try to fight that.” In marketing, “we do it this way because it’s best practice” can sometimes be the more sophisticated version of exactly that.
Expertise Should Create More Questions, Not Fewer
This is particularly important when businesses are evaluating agencies with deep experience in, or focus solely on, a specific industry.
Industry experience can be enormously valuable. An agency that has worked exclusively with healthcare organizations, law firms, home service companies or other businesses like yours has probably learned a lot along the way. They should understand common challenges, recognize patterns, and know which questions are worth asking early.
But there is an important distinction between industry experience and having an industry template.
If an agency has worked with 50 healthcare organizations, that experience should help them ask better questions when client #51 walks through the door. It should not mean client #51 automatically gets the same campaign structure as the previous 50.
The problem starts when patterns become formulas. Something works well for several clients, so it becomes a recommendation. The recommendation gets repeated often enough that it becomes a best practice. The best practice eventually becomes a rule, and before long the reasoning behind it disappears completely.
At that point, experience is no longer helping you think more deeply about the next client. It is giving you permission not to.
The benefit of experience should be knowing where to start, what to question and which hypotheses are worth testing. Previous clients should inform the strategy for the next business, not dictate it.
Sometimes the Obvious Decision Isn’t So Obvious
Consider something as seemingly straightforward as connecting a Google Business Profile to Google Ads as a location asset.
For a local business, that sounds like an easy yes. Why wouldn’t you want more visibility for your location and more opportunities for someone nearby to find you?
But now consider the business itself. Maybe the Google Business Profile has mediocre reviews. Maybe the photos are poor or the listing hasn’t been maintained particularly well. Maybe the company sells a complicated service that needs much more explanation than a map listing can provide. Maybe its website, on the other hand, does an excellent job establishing credibility, explaining the product and guiding a prospect toward the right next step.
Suddenly, more visibility is not automatically better visibility.
A local search or Maps experience can also place the business directly alongside competitors, complete with ratings, photos and other information that makes comparison incredibly easy. Depending on the company and the buying decision, that may be exactly where you want to compete. In another situation, you may be better served by bringing the prospect directly to an experience you control and giving your website the opportunity to do the selling. Neither choice is universally right.
The useful question is not, “Are location assets a best practice?” It is, “What happens when we use them for this particular business?”
The Better the Automation Gets, the More the Inputs Matter
Automation gives us another good example.
Modern advertising platforms can make an extraordinary number of decisions about audiences, bids, placements and which prospects are most likely to convert. Giving those systems more freedom can work incredibly well. But what exactly have we told the system a good conversion looks like? That question gets overlooked surprisingly often.
If your “conversions” include spam, junk leads, existing customers, low-value inquiries or other garbage signals, giving the algorithm more freedom may simply help it find more garbage faster. The automation isn’t failing. It may be doing exactly what you told it to do.
That is why “use more automation” cannot be treated as a strategy by itself. In a weird way, the more capable these platforms become, the more dependent they become on excellent input. It’s important to make sure the business is feeding them the right definition of success.
Even the Sacred Landing Page Deserves Some Pushback
Dedicated landing pages are another great example because the conventional wisdom is so deeply ingrained.
Paid traffic should go to a focused page. Remove the navigation. Eliminate distractions. Match the headline to the ad. Put the form front and center. Keep the visitor moving toward the conversion.
That thinking made a lot of sense in an earlier era of digital marketing, when the prevailing approach was often to create a tightly controlled funnel and remove almost every opportunity for the user to wander away from it.
But people do not always make decisions that way, especially when the purchase is expensive, complicated or built heavily on trust.
A prospect may want to learn more about the company. They may want to understand the full range of services, read FAQs, look through photos, examine credentials, see who they are dealing with or simply spend some time getting comfortable before they raise their hand.
Those things are sometimes described as distractions. The customer may describe them as research.
And if the main website already provides an excellent experience, creating a separate stripped-down version of it simply because “paid traffic needs a landing page” may not improve anything at all.
This does not mean dedicated landing pages are obsolete. In plenty of situations, they are exactly the right tool. But the decision should come from the product, the audience, and the way customers actually buy, not from an old funnel diagram that has been passed from agency to agency for 15 years.
The Point: Best Practice Is Not a Substitute for Judgment
None of this is an argument for ignoring established knowledge. We should learn from other campaigns. We should understand what works across an industry. We should know what advertising platforms recommend and why. Starting from zero every time would be just as foolish as blindly copying what worked before.
The problem is treating best practice as a substitute for judgment.
When an agency recommends something because it is a best practice, a perfectly reasonable follow-up question is: Why is this the right choice for our business?
A strong answer should connect the recommendation back to the company itself. Its customers. Its sales process. Its reputation. Its priorities. Its limitations. Its definition of a valuable lead.
Sometimes the answer will be exactly what conventional wisdom recommends and sometimes it will not. That is not a failure to follow best practice. It is what good strategy looks like.
Best practice is a good reason to try something. It is a poor reason to stop thinking.
