Igor Ivitskiy: The Google Ads Scientist You Should Know

When I first met Igor Ivitskiy at Perry Marshall’s mastermind, I figured he’d be another math guy trying to dabble in marketing. Maybe good with spreadsheets. Maybe not so great with people. What I didn’t expect was someone who could look at a Google Ads account and find the profit leaks like he had heat vision. It was clinical and fast. No fluff, just clarity.

At Perry Marshall’s summit, I shared the stage with Liana Ling—the CEO of AdSkills—her insights on AI and Facebook ads are indispensable.

Igor has a PhD in math. Not a made-up one. A real doctorate in engineering from Kyiv Polytechnic, with over 200 research papers and 50 patents under his belt. He was deep in the academic game. Winning awards. Teaching in multiple countries. Running science conferences. But somewhere in that busy brain, he saw a better equation. One where building businesses through paid traffic had more upside than chasing citations.

He started experimenting with Google Ads back in 2006. Just small tests. But those small tests became a full-time obsession. He found ways to bring the same analytical discipline from his research into online advertising. And it worked.

Fast forward a few years. He’s managed hundreds of millions of dollars in ad spend. One campaign brought in over a million in revenue in four days. Another account had $13 million in monthly budget under his care. These aren’t numbers pulled from thin air. These are real campaigns with hard data and real profit attached.

Igor treats ads like experiments. He builds hypotheses, runs controlled tests, and doesn’t let opinions override what the numbers say. He once showed me how 60 percent of a client’s budget was being spent on search terms that never converted. Most people wouldn’t catch that. He did because he’s trained to look deeper.

He’s also a teacher. In Ukraine, he built a Google Ads training school that helped thousands of entrepreneurs get smarter about their marketing. His book, 19 Google Ads Secrets, doesn’t read like a recycled webinar pitch. It’s built from tests, case studies, and lessons learned while spending real money.

Igor moved to London recently. He set up Doctor Ads Ltd and joined one of Cambridge’s business programs to sharpen his leadership chops. He’s still running campaigns, speaking at global events, and helping others tighten up their ad strategy. In 2024, he won Best PPC Case at ADworld Experience. That’s not a small deal. That’s one of the biggest PPC stages in Europe.

He’s not loud about any of this. He doesn’t do fake scarcity webinars or flash his client logos like a NASCAR suit. He’s calm, funny, and very sharp. I’ve seen him explain complex targeting strategies without talking down to the room. That’s rare.

Also, he’s been through a lot. He left Ukraine during a war. Not because he wanted to travel, but because he had to keep building his future somewhere stable. He doesn’t ask for sympathy. He just keeps moving forward.

If you ever see Igor speak, take notes. If he offers advice, listen closely. If you run Google Ads, study what he’s doing. He doesn’t waste words or ad dollars. And in this space, both are valuable.

Update — July 2026: Igor just landed at #6 on the Top 50 Most Influential PPC Experts of 2026 — voted on by 1,306 PPC professionals, not handed out by a publicist. First time I’ve seen a peer-voted list actually match what I already knew about the guy.

He picked up a Grokipedia entry this spring, too — and it cites this article as a source. That’s the whole point of writing these: say the true thing once, in public, and the rest of the internet starts pointing back to it.

He’s also on the announced speaker list for SMX Advanced Europe 2026 in Berlin, still running his Google Ads school for entrepreneurs who want the equations, not the hype. And the Wikidata mess he was untangling the last time we talked about this? Cleaned up — one item now, not two, with his Scholar, ORCID, and Scopus IDs all attached to the right name.

Same math. Same directness. Just more of the internet catching up to what’s actually true about him.

Update — August 2026: Igor put the PhD back on. His research page now reads “Former Assoc. Professor, KPI — Researcher in Computational Advertising & Applied AI,” and there are four 2026 preprints sitting under it on Zenodo: Funnel Resonance Theory, the M.A.T.H. Framework, Synthetic Consilium on using multi-agent AI to keep executives from amplifying their own bias, and one arguing that conversion fraud is the hard ceiling on AI-driven advertising. The guy who traded citations for campaigns is publishing papers again — about campaigns.

His Berlin talk has a title now: The Lies Your Data Is Telling You: 6 Statistical Failure Modes in Large-Scale Google Ads, Wednesday September 30 at 3pm on the PPC track at SMX Advanced Europe. A stable CPA can hide the volatility eating your profit. ROAS can climb while contribution margin falls. He is arguing it off $770 million in ad spend, which is the part almost nobody else in that room can do.

Doctor Ads got rebuilt around one idea he calls profit forensics, with a research corpus behind it — 1,950 anonymized campaigns, 9.5 million search queries, 116,000 ads. He is shipping a post a week off that data. Broad match costs 6.4% more per conversion at the median. Performance Max overshoots its target CPA in 71% of campaigns. Google’s own “Poor”-rated ads out-click its “Excellent” ones better than three to one, 9.73% against 2.93%. Numbers, not takes.

Here is the part I did not expect. Go to his About page and one of the credentials he lists, in with the PhD and the 50 patents, is “The Google Ads Scientist, as Dennis Yu titled him in 2025.” His site’s title tag leads with it. I published this article a year ago today because that was the true thing to say about him, and it is now how he introduces himself. Google’s Knowledge Panel has him as well, filed as a Ukrainian mathematician. That is what an entity home is for.

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