Paid ads
Useful, immediate, and a terrible foundation. Here is how we buy it without letting it become the whole business.
Quick answer
We buy paid media on Google, Meta and LinkedIn and report on one number that matters: what an acquired customer actually cost you — not impressions, not clicks, not leads, and not "opportunities". Paid is the fastest channel to switch on and the only one that stops dead when you stop paying, so we treat it as a useful accelerant rather than a foundation.
Everyone is bidding on the same moment.
Paid search sells you access to intent that already exists. That is genuinely valuable — someone typing "emergency AC repair Naples" at eleven at night is worth reaching. The problem is structural: every competent competitor has worked out the same thing, and you are all bidding for the same click.
Your cost per customer is therefore not set by your skill. It is set by whichever competitor is most willing to accept a bad return, and it drifts upward for as long as that competitor exists.
This is not an argument against paid. It is an argument against paid being the only thing you have — which is the position most local businesses are in when they call us.
Four disciplines, applied unglamorously.
- Measure to the customer, not the click
Conversion tracking wired through to closed work wherever your systems allow. A channel that produces cheap leads and no customers is worse than useless, and you cannot see that from a platform dashboard.
- Send traffic somewhere that converts
This is why the agent goes in first. Improving the landing experience usually beats improving the bidding, and it is cheaper.
- Negative keywords are the job
Most wasted spend is not bad bidding, it is paying for searches that were never going to buy. Pruning is continuous and boring and it is where the money is.
- Know when to stop
Some businesses should spend less on paid, not more. If the arithmetic says that, we will say it — including when it reduces what you pay us.
The numbers, unflattering if necessary.
| We report | We do not lead with | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Cost per acquired customer | Impressions | Nobody has ever banked an impression |
| Spend against revenue produced | Click-through rate | A high CTR on unprofitable traffic is a faster way to lose money |
| Which campaigns produced real work | Aggregate "leads" | A form fill from a competitor is not a lead |
| What was wasted, and what we cut | Month-on-month growth in spend | Growth in spend is not an achievement |
| Where paid is beaten by an earned channel | A blended average that hides it | You should know when to move budget away from us |
Questions we get asked
Do you have a minimum ad spend?
No fixed minimum, but there is a floor below which management makes no sense — if the total budget is small enough that our fee is a large share of it, you are better off running it yourself and we will tell you how.
Who owns the ad accounts?
You do, always. We work inside your accounts. Agencies that hold client ad accounts hostage are a well-known problem in this industry and we do not participate in it.
Will you also run AI advertising?
Yes — see AI advertising. It is a genuinely different discipline with different inventory and, right now, materially lower competition. We treat it as a separate workstream rather than a line item under paid search.
You say 70–90% lower customer acquisition cost. Is that a guarantee?
No, and we are deliberate about this. That range is the target we design an engagement toward — a model built from what each channel typically contributes, not an average of measured client outcomes. We do not have published before-and-after CAC data yet, and until we do we will not present it as a result. When a client's own reporting produces real numbers, we will say so and show them.
Five things we find in almost every account.
These are not exotic. They are the ordinary failures that accumulate in an account nobody has audited properly in a year.
- Paying for searches that were never going to buy
Broad match plus an unmaintained negative list is the single most reliable way to spend money on people researching a job they intend to do themselves. Pruning this is tedious, continuous, and usually the biggest single saving available.
- Conversion tracking that stops at the form
An account optimised toward form fills will happily find you cheap form fills. If the tracking does not reach closed work, the platform is optimising toward the wrong outcome with great efficiency.
- Brand spend counted as performance
Bidding on your own name is often sensible, but folding it into blended cost-per-acquisition flatters the number badly and hides how expensive genuinely new demand actually is. We report it separately.
- Landing experiences that undo the spend
Sending expensive, high-intent traffic to a page that answers a different question is the most common waste we see, and it is a content problem rather than a bidding problem. It is also why the agent goes in before the budget increases.
- Nobody has looked in months
Auctions move, competitors enter and leave, seasonality shifts. An account that was well-built eighteen months ago and untouched since is not a well-built account any more.
Find out what a customer actually costs you.
Most owners have a number in their head. It is usually wrong, and usually low.