Built by an agency, for agencies and in-house marketers
Unshittification was developed & is fully backed by Houdini, a New Zealand-based Search Marketing Agency .
For 12 years, Houdini has been serving a client roster of SMEs & corporates, ranging from retailers, big box brands and well loved charities to global e-commerce ventures who collectively spend millions every year online.
So What Happened?
We were losing valuable clients and didn't know why. We were delivering "best practice" campaigns. Hitting KPIs. Doing everything right. But clients were leaving, many had abandoned Google Ads entirely.
Over many months we dug into the data and discovered the truth: Google Ads placement waste was silently destroying client trust. We catch around 300 new placements each day, and sadly less than 1% of them are high enough quality to join our whitelist. The other 99%? Bot traffic, zombie sites, phishing domains, clickbait farms, made-for-ads sites and AI generated video slop. Our clients' budgets were being devoured.
Cory Doctorow's theory of Enshittification made perfect sense and became a guiding mantra for us. We considered a more generic name, but Unshittification just stuck, as it is jarring slap in the face and a hat tip to Cory.
We have always been huge fans of Google Ads, but sometimes you have to do an intervention to stop your best friend from making things worse.
Meet our team
We're a team of agency veterans, developers, and data nerds who got tired of watching client budgets burn.
We'd love to hear from you.
Still not convinced? If your Google Ads spend is over $NZ 10,000 a month then you can book a free 30 day trial and get a guided onboarding experience with our support team.
Enshittification - Cory Doctorow's original theory.
Radio NZ - How the internet became 'enshittified' - and how to fix it.
Enshittification - the Macquarie Dictionary Word Of The Year, 2024.
New Yorker - The Age of Enshittification.
Paul Krugman (Nobel Laureate) - The General Theory of Enshittification.