Lower cost per acquisition
Cutting waste and lifting relevance beats simply bidding harder.
Paid advertising is the fastest way to buy attention and the fastest way to waste money. The difference is almost never the platform — it is whether the account is structured around intent, and whether the conversion data can be trusted.
We audit a lot of accounts. Four issues explain the majority of wasted spend.
Tracking that counts page views as conversions, fires twice, or misses form submissions entirely. Every optimization decision after that is made on fiction — and automated bidding amplifies the error rather than correcting it.
Someone researching a category and someone ready to buy get the same ad and the same landing page, so the account bids the same for two completely different visitors.
The ad promises something specific; the page talks about the company. Quality Score falls, cost per click rises, and conversion rate drops — three penalties for one mistake.
Reports full of impressions, clicks and click-through rate, with nothing connecting any of it to enquiries, sales or margin.
We start every engagement by verifying what the account is actually counting. Until conversion data is trustworthy, there is no point touching bids — and in accounts using automated bidding, bad data actively trains the system to buy the wrong traffic.
Then campaigns get rebuilt around intent rather than catalogue structure, with landing pages that continue the promise the ad made. Only once cost per acquisition is understood and stable do we scale budget, because scaling a campaign that loses money just loses money faster.
Every account optimises for one of these four. Most stop at the second. The whole job is moving the optimisation target as far right as your data allows.
Scope is agreed in writing, and you keep ownership of every account we touch.
Cutting waste and lifting relevance beats simply bidding harder.
Unlike SEO, paid campaigns produce enquiries from the first week.
Verified tracking turns the account into evidence about your market.
Once unit economics are proven, more budget reliably means more customers.
Everything learned from paid testing improves the organic site too.
Paid holds the ground for months that organic work has not reached yet.
What a customer is worth, what you can afford to pay for one, and whether paid is viable at your margins. We will say if it is not.
Existing accounts reviewed and conversion tracking verified end to end before any bidding decisions.
Campaigns rebuilt around intent, with negatives, exclusions and audience signals in place.
Pages built or improved so the ad's promise continues after the click.
Search terms, bids, budgets, creative and placements reviewed weekly.
Monthly reporting on cost per acquisition; budget moved toward what pays back.
On the learning phase. Automated bidding needs roughly two to four weeks and a steady flow of conversions before performance stabilises. Judging a campaign in week one — or restructuring it then — resets that clock and guarantees poor results.
There is no single best platform. There is a best platform for what you sell and how people decide to buy it.
| If this is you | Start with | Add next |
|---|---|---|
| Customers actively search for what you sell | Google Ads Search | Remarketing + Microsoft Ads |
| You sell physical products online | Google Shopping + Performance Max | Meta catalogue ads |
| Demand exists but nobody searches for it | Meta Ads | YouTube + remarketing |
| You sell to businesses by job title | LinkedIn Ads | Google Search + remarketing |
| Long consideration, high value | Search + remarketing | YouTube + LinkedIn |
| Small budget, local service area | Google Ads Search | Local SEO alongside |
| Traffic arrives but nobody converts | Fix landing pages first | Then scale paid |
Every engagement is scoped individually. These ranges give you a realistic idea of investment before you speak to us.
Prices are in USD and indicative starting points for scoping — final quotes depend on scope, competition and current site condition. [Confirm or edit these figures before launch.]
Project slots are ready for real client work — screenshots, brand names and outcomes drop straight into these cards.
Replace with channel, spend level, cost per lead and volume.
Replace with catalogue, spend and return on ad spend.
Replace with the waste found in audit and the improvement after rebuild.
Metrics below are editable placeholders. They will be replaced with verified client results — nothing here is invented.
Pay-per-click advertising: you bid to show ads and pay only when someone clicks. It covers Google and Microsoft search ads, Shopping, YouTube, Display, and paid social on Meta and LinkedIn. The appeal is speed and control — you can be in front of buyers today and stop instantly if it is not working.
Every search triggers an auction. Your position and cost per click depend on your bid and your Quality Score — Google's assessment of expected click-through rate, ad relevance and landing page experience. That is why a more relevant advertiser can outrank a higher bidder and pay less for the privilege.
Enough to gather statistically meaningful data — for most lead generation businesses that means roughly $1,000–1,500 per month per channel as a floor, more in expensive markets. Work backwards from what a customer is worth: if one customer is worth $2,000 and one in five leads closes, you can afford far more per lead than most businesses assume.
Both. Most of our work is inheriting existing accounts. The audit tells you what is salvageable, what is wasteful, and whether restructuring beats rebuilding from scratch.
Yes, and we verify it before touching bids. Broken tracking is the single most common problem we find, and with automated bidding it is actively harmful — the system optimises toward whatever you told it was a conversion.
Yes, along with Microsoft, LinkedIn and YouTube. Running them under one strategy avoids the common situation where two agencies claim credit for the same conversion.
Yes, segmented by how far someone got rather than as one blanket audience. Someone who abandoned a cart and someone who bounced in three seconds should not see the same ad.
Yes. Sending paid traffic to a homepage is one of the most expensive mistakes in the account, so landing pages are included from the Growth tier upward.
Cost per acquisition and return on ad spend, tied to revenue wherever we can attribute it. Clicks and impressions are diagnostics, not results.
Yes — Google Shopping, Performance Max, Meta catalogue and dynamic remarketing, with product feed optimization underneath them.
Return on ad spend: revenue divided by advertising cost. A ROAS of 4.0 means $4 of revenue per $1 spent. It is useful for e-commerce but ignores margin — a 4.0 ROAS on a 20% margin product still loses money, which is why we look at contribution rather than ROAS alone.
Cost per acquisition: total spend divided by the number of conversions. For lead generation it is usually the more meaningful metric, and it should be compared against what a lead is actually worth once your close rate is factored in.
Give us read access to your Google or Meta account. We will show you the wasted spend, the tracking problems and the structural issues — before you commit to anything.
No obligation. If we are not the right fit for your goals, we will say so.