Paid acquisition
Search, social and display, managed against cost per real outcome rather than cost per click. Budget moves toward what is working, monthly.
Paid, organic and lifecycle marketing run against your numbers — not vanity metrics.
It is easy to produce a marketing report that looks excellent and means nothing. Impressions up, reach up, engagement up — and the number of people who actually bought something completely unchanged.
So we agree the figure that matters before we spend anything. Bookings, qualified enquiries, signups, revenue per customer. Everything else is diagnostic: useful for working out why the real number moved, never a substitute for it.
That also means being honest when a channel is not working. Cutting spend on something that is not returning is a better month’s work than optimising it forever because it was in the original plan.
If the report looks great and sales are flat, the report is measuring the wrong thing.
Because acquisition and retention are usually the same problem viewed from different ends.
Search, social and display, managed against cost per real outcome rather than cost per click. Budget moves toward what is working, monthly.
Consistent presence built around what your audience actually searches for and shares — the compounding channel, which is exactly why it gets cut first and should not be.
Onboarding, re-engagement and retention. Usually the cheapest growth available, and almost always the most neglected.
Tracking set up so the numbers can be trusted, and a monthly read in plain language: what moved, what did not, what we are changing.
Businesses with something that already converts, who need more of the right people finding it. If the product or the offer is the real problem, more traffic will just make that clearer and more expensive — we will say so before taking the budget.
Usually not the ad account. Usually something upstream of it.
“The numbers look great but sales are flat.”
Reach, impressions and engagement all up, revenue unchanged. That gap almost always means the reporting is measuring activity rather than outcome — and that nobody agreed which number mattered before starting.
“We do not trust our own tracking.”
Two dashboards disagree, so neither gets used and decisions go back to instinct. Most reporting arguments are tracking bugs, and fixing them is unglamorous but comes before any optimisation.
“Costs keep rising and we cannot say why.”
Spend creeping up with no matching return, usually because budget stays with channels for historical reasons. Cutting something that is not earning its place is a legitimate month of work.
Mostly about budget, timelines and what is fair to expect.
Enough to gather signal, which depends on your price point and sales cycle. Spending too little for too short a time produces data you cannot learn anything from, which is the most common way marketing budget is genuinely wasted.
Paid channels give signal within weeks. Organic and lifecycle compound over months. Anyone promising fast organic results is either overpromising or planning something you would not want associated with your domain.
Yes, including when it reduces what we manage. Continuing to optimise a channel that is not returning is the easiest way for an agency to look busy, and we would rather keep the relationship than the line item.
Then we will say so before taking the budget. More traffic to something that does not convert just makes the problem more expensive and more visible. That conversation is uncomfortable and much cheaper than the alternative.
Start there, and we will work backwards to the channels that can actually shift it.
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