A stack full of assumptions
PPC Land founder Luís Rijo, whose reader-funded publication has published daily since 2016 and passed 10,000 articles, frames it as a game: every tool in the stack assumes you learned it elsewhere.
Think about your own setup. The ad platform assumes you know how auction dynamics work. The analytics tool assumes you know what a conversion path is. The creative testing tool assumes you know how to isolate one variable. The CRM assumes you understand lifecycle stages.
No single vendor owns the fundamentals. They build for advanced practitioners and let onboarding fill the rest.
Why the gap hits performance teams
The insight hits hard for performance marketers. Junior buyers are often hired, handed access to Google Ads, Meta Ads and a reporting suite, and expected to operate. The tools won’t flag that the real issue is a weak hypothesis, not a weak feature.
- Tools optimize mechanics, not marketing judgment.
- Vendors teach their interface, not the craft behind it.
- Teams mistake tool proficiency for strategic skill.
This creates a compounding problem: the more point solutions you add, the more baseline knowledge you assume.
Close the training debt before it compounds
If every layer presumes prior learning, then the fix is to make the fundamentals explicit. Build a short curriculum around the ideas your stack depends on: auction pricing, attribution, experimentation, funnel economics and creative hierarchy.
Use tools as case material, not as teachers. For each new tool, ask: what did we already need to believe for this to work? Document the answer.
The frame is useful: treat your stack as a test. If your team can’t explain the concept a tool automates, the tool is masking a skill gap.
It’s a reminder that automation assumes a competent operator, and competency still has to be built somewhere.
Source: PPC Land
