Paid Performance Marketing
Most agencies optimise for the ad platforms. We optimise for your profit.
We plan and buy across Search, Social, Programmatic, Marketplaces, and Remarketing — measured against your real margin, not ROAS theatre. Same team, every channel, one source of truth.
What we do
Does this sound familiar?
Search demand is moving and your account hasn't
Brand terms still convert, but non-brand impression share is sliding and the ChatGPT/Perplexity referrals in GA4 have stopped being rounding error. Meanwhile Performance Max is hoovering up brand searches and calling itself the hero.
Search isn't one surface anymore — it's Google, AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and the keyword-less black boxes Google keeps shipping. Accounts built for 2019 search behaviour quietly haemorrhage incremental demand to whichever competitor adapted first.
We rebuild search accounts around intent, not keyword tactics — brand-protected, PMax-fenced, AI-search-instrumented, and bid against gross margin rather than platform-reported ROAS.
Diagnosis:Performance Max will happily eat your brand traffic and bill you for demand you already owned.
Social spend keeps climbing and CAC climbs with it
Meta CPMs are up, TikTok attribution is opaque, and the same three creatives have been running since March. The agency calls it 'creative fatigue'; the CFO calls it a problem.
Paid social rewards two things: audience hygiene and creative volume. Most accounts are short on both — broad targeting masquerading as Advantage+, lookalikes built on stale seed lists, and a creative pipeline that ships one concept a fortnight against an algorithm that needs ten.
We run paid social as a testing system — disciplined audience architecture, weekly creative iteration, full-funnel measurement, and retention/prospecting kept honest against each other so you stop paying retention prices for prospecting work.
Diagnosis:Most paid-social budgets aren't throttled by media cost — they're throttled by the rate of fresh creative.
Programmatic is a black box you can't audit
Your DSP partner sends a quarterly deck with viewability and CPM. You can't tell what inventory you bought, what audiences you targeted, or what share went to managed-service margin. The reach numbers look fine; the incremental sales don't.
Programmatic without first-party data, brand-safety guardrails, and incrementality reads is a category of spend designed to be unreadable. Managed-service markups, opaque inventory, and made-for-advertising sites quietly skim 30%+ before your impression ever reaches a human.
We run programmatic in-housed or transparently brokered — log-level data, first-party audiences, verified inventory, and incrementality lift tests on every meaningful line. If you can't audit it, we don't buy it.
Diagnosis:If you can't see the inventory, the audience, and the margin, you're funding someone else's strategy.
Shopping spend ignores which SKUs actually make money
Performance Max bids on every SKU as if they're equal. Your bestseller has a 12% margin; the long-tail item has a 48% margin and sells once a week. The platform optimises for revenue. You bank profit.
E-commerce media without margin-aware feeds and SKU-level prioritisation is a rebate scheme for Google. Shopping, PMax and marketplace ads will happily push your loss-leaders harder because they convert — and the CFO eats the difference.
We rebuild product feeds with margin, stock, and lifetime-value signals, then segment campaigns so the algorithm bids hardest on the SKUs that actually pay back. Amazon and own-store handled by the same team, against the same P&L.
Diagnosis:Shopping algorithms optimise for revenue; only a margin-aware feed makes them optimise for profit.
Remarketing is just buying customers you already had
Your remarketing ROAS looks heroic — 8x, sometimes 12x. It should. You're showing ads to people who already added to cart. The question nobody asks is what those customers would have done without the ad.
Most remarketing budgets are pure cannibalisation dressed up as performance. Worse, lifecycle and CRM channels (email, SMS, organic) get under-credited because paid remarketing fires last and claims the conversion.
We rebuild retention as an integrated paid+CRM motion — suppression lists synced from the warehouse, incrementality-tested remarketing windows, and dynamic creative tied to real lifecycle stage. The goal is incremental revenue, not credit theft from your owned channels.
Diagnosis:A 10x remarketing ROAS usually means you're paying to take credit for revenue email already earned.
How we run paid performance
Every account sits on three layers
Foundation
Server-side tracking, deduplicated conversions, gross-margin imported as the optimisation event, and platform algorithms wired to your own data — not theirs. This isn't optional; it's the only way the numbers above the line tell the truth.
Execution
Weekly bid and budget management, creative refresh cadence, audience hygiene, negative-keyword discipline. The unglamorous, repeatable work that separates good accounts from average ones.
Strategy
Quarterly mix modelling, incrementality reads, and full-funnel reallocation. The work that decides which channel deserves another dollar — and which doesn't. Most agencies sell strategy and skip the foundation. We start at the foundation, because nothing else matters if the data lies.
Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half.
Frequently asked questions
Paid performance, demystified
We've worked with monthly media budgets from $20k to $2M+. Below $20k/month, paid performance management usually doesn't pay back the fees — we'll tell you honestly if that's where you sit.
Google Ads (Search, Performance Max, YouTube), Meta (Facebook + Instagram), TikTok, LinkedIn, Reddit, Pinterest, DV360, The Trade Desk, Amazon Ads, and emerging AI Search (ChatGPT, Perplexity). We pick the channels that fit your audience and economics — not the ones with the biggest agency rebates.
Yes — about half our engagements augment in-house teams rather than replace them. We hand over playbooks, dashboards, and naming conventions so your team owns the work after we're gone.
Tracking and tagging fixes show value in week one. Channel optimisation typically shows lift in 4–6 weeks. Brand and incrementality work pays back over quarters, not weeks — and we set expectations clearly up front.
We run the testing systems and provide concept briefs, performance feedback loops, and rate-of-production targets. We have creative production partners we can plug in if you want a single accountable owner, or we work alongside your existing creative team.
A live dashboard wired to your data warehouse — channel performance, blended CAC, contribution margin, and incrementality reads. Weekly written commentary from a senior strategist, not just numbers in a deck.
Ready to start with paid performance marketing?
Tell us where you are today and what you're trying to fix. We'll show you exactly how we'd plan, execute, and measure.
- No commitment required
- Speak to a senior architect
- Get a rough timeline estimate
