Service detail
Paid Ads &
Performance
Most companies do not come to us because the ads are broken. They come because the ads are doing exactly what they were told to do, and the numbers still refuse to add up. Impressions climb. Clicks arrive. The sales team quietly stops calling the list.
Deliverables
- Paid campaign strategy
- Audience, offer and creative
- Pilots, testing and optimisation
- Measurement and reporting
- What you own when the engagement ends
Overview
Most companies do not come to us because the ads are broken. They come because the ads are doing exactly what they were told to do, and the numbers still refuse to add up. Impressions climb. Clicks arrive. The sales team quietly stops calling the list.
Paid media is the fastest lever on this page, which is also why it is the easiest one to pull too early. It does not create demand out of nothing. It takes whatever you already have, your offer, your journey, your follow-up, and pushes it in front of more people, faster. That is a very good thing when the underlying structure is sound, and an expensive thing when it is not.
Why it matters
- Paid campaign strategy. A written strategy covering which platforms, which audiences and which offers, including what we deliberately chose not to run and why
- Audience, offer and creative. Audience and offer alignment: an explicit match between who is targeted and what they are being asked to do next
- Pilots, testing and optimisation. Controlled lead-generation pilots, each with a defined question, a capped spend, a defined sample and a stated stopping point
- Measurement and reporting. Campaign-to-lead tracking wired across the whole path, from the ad click to the form submission to the record in your CRM
Our process
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We look at what the spend would be amplifying.
Can a stranger repeat your offer after one page? Does the journey after the click hold together? Can you connect a click to an outcome that matters? If any of the three fails, that gets fixed first.
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Campaigns are built from the position, not from platform defaults.
Which audience, which offer, and which moment in their decision we are speaking to. Ads are written from the same message architecture as your website, so they never promise what the next page cannot support.
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Controlled pilots before committed budget.
A deliberately limited spend aimed at one question, with one variable moving at a time and a stated point at which we call it. Being wrong should cost you very little.
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The number you scale on has to be real.
Tracking is wired before the budget grows. Reporting is written against qualified inquiries and enrollment rather than reach, because reach has never appeared on a financial statement.
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Budgets grow only when results earn it.
Written decisions at each cycle: continue, adjust, or stop, with the reasoning behind it. Winning structures are documented so your internal team can run and audit them.
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Where paid sits next to the other disciplines
Paid traffic always lands somewhere. If the destination is the constraint, start with Web, Funnels & Search; if the message is unsettled, with Strategy & Positioning.
Before You Ask
The questions that come up first
These are the six we are asked in almost every first conversation about paid. The answers here are the same ones we give in the room.
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Will you take over the ad accounts we already have?
Usually, and we start by reading them rather than rebuilding them. Existing accounts carry history: what was tried, what was paused, which audiences responded and which never did. That history is one of the cheapest sources of evidence you have, and deleting it to start clean throws away months of learning.
What we will not do is keep spending inside a structure whose results cannot be read. If the account is organised in a way that makes cause and effect impossible to separate, we will rebuild that part and say exactly why.
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What budget do we need before this is worth doing?
Enough to reach a decision, not enough to hurt if the decision turns out to be no. A pilot is sized against the question it has to answer and the length of your sales cycle, so a school with a fixed enrollment calendar and a professional services firm with a long consideration period will land in very different places.
Ongoing paid work begins at starting investment pending approval, and media spend sits separately from that. We put both in writing before anyone commits to anything.
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Can you guarantee a cost per lead or a number of leads?
No. Anyone quoting you a guaranteed cost per lead before seeing your data, your offer and your follow-up process is guessing, and the guess is usually engineered to win the pitch rather than survive the quarter.
What we do commit to is a defined question, a capped spend, a stated point at which we call the result, and an honest read of the answer even when the answer is that paid is not your lever right now. If a guarantee is the requirement, we are not the right agency for that engagement.
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We have no CRM and almost no tracking. Can we still run ads?
You can. We would rather you did not, at least not yet. Without a way to connect a click to a conversation, optimisation quietly becomes preference: the campaign that feels right gets the budget, and nobody can prove otherwise.
The fix is rarely as heavy as people expect. A working form, a consistent record of where inquiries came from, and one agreed definition of a qualified inquiry will carry a first pilot. We build that in the design step rather than treating it as a separate project.
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Do you replace our internal marketing team?
No, we work alongside them, and the structure is designed for the people who actually have to run it. An internal team of one needs a different testing cadence from a team of six, and a plan that ignores that is a plan that stops the month we leave.
Where the internal team wants to own execution, we stay on the strategy, the measurement and the review of results. That is closer to how an Embedded Advisory engagement works.
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How long before we see results?
It depends on your sales cycle, and any agency that answers this without asking about yours is telling you what you want to hear. A category where people decide in a week reads clearly within a pilot. A category where an enrollment decision takes a family two months will not, and pretending otherwise leads to campaigns being killed before they have said anything.
The first thing a pilot produces is not results. It is readable information: which audience responded, which message did the work, and where the journey lost people. Results follow from acting on that, and the budget grows only once it has earned the increase.
Start with the diagnosis
Bring the spend you cannot account for.
The campaigns running now, the dashboards nobody trusts, and the number you are being asked to defend. We look at what the spend would be amplifying before anyone builds another campaign.