Paid Media & Lead Generation
Paid media run for customers acquired, not clicks bought
Google, Microsoft, Meta, LinkedIn and the rest — managed against cost per acquired customer and lead quality. If the account cannot tell you which spend produced revenue, the optimisation has been guesswork.
What we usually inherit
The account is working exactly as instructed
Underperforming ad accounts are rarely badly managed in the mechanical sense. They are usually managed competently toward the wrong objective.
- The conversion being optimised is not a sale.
- A form view, a page visit, a phone click that lasted four seconds. The platform will find more of whatever you told it to value, at the lowest possible price. If that signal is weak, the automation gets very good at buying weak outcomes.
- Nobody has excluded the demand that never buys.
- Job seekers, students, competitors, DIY searchers, other countries. In most accounts this is the single largest and cheapest available improvement, and it takes discipline rather than budget.
- Reporting and reality disagree.
- The platform reports 140 conversions, the CRM shows 31 usable leads, and nobody reconciles the two. Until they reconcile, every optimisation decision is being made on a number that does not represent the business.
- The budget has outgrown the demand.
- There is a finite number of people searching for what you sell each month. Past the point where you are showing on most of those searches, extra budget does not buy more of them — it buys progressively looser matches, and the account average deteriorates while the total holds. The symptom is a rising cost per acquired customer that nobody can attribute to a change, because the change was the budget.
The work itself
What managing an account week to week actually involves
Weekly: read the search terms and the placements the automation actually bought, check pacing against the month, clear disapprovals before they quietly halt a campaign, and take the sales team’s verdict on the leads that arrived. That last one is the part that most often does not exist, and it is the input the whole account depends on.
Fortnightly to monthly: test the things with real leverage — the offer, the landing page, the form, the creative. Then reconcile platform-reported conversions against the CRM, and make budget decisions on the reconciled number rather than the flattering one.
Quarterly: revisit the channel mix itself. Whether the money is still in the right place, whether a campaign type has been overtaken by a platform change, and whether some of the budget has become expensive insurance against demand that organic search could now carry for less.
Before comparing any two channels
Demand capture and demand creation are different products
Both are bought through an ads interface, which is where the confusion starts. Judged against each other on the same number, one of them always looks broken.
| Dimension | Demand capture | Demand creation |
|---|---|---|
| Typically | Search, Shopping, brand and competitor terms | Paid social, video, display, discovery |
| What the person is doing | Already looking for what you sell | Doing something else entirely |
| What decides the result | Which searches you buy, who you exclude, and the page you send them to | The creative, and how quickly you can make a genuinely different one |
| How fast it can be judged | Quickly — intent is high enough that a few weeks of conversions say something | Slowly — the effect shows up in enquiries that never mention the ad |
| The usual failure | Paying for demand that was never going to buy from you | One creative run to exhaustion, then the channel blamed |
| Honest measurement | Cost per acquired customer, reconciled to the CRM | Whether the whole business improved while it ran — tested by holding it back, not by counting clicks |
Accountability
How we handle your money and your accounts
Paid media is the one service where the agency touches the client’s money directly. That deserves a written position rather than an assurance.
What we commit to
- Ad accounts held in your name, with us added as a user you can remove
- Media billed by the platform to you, so no margin sits between you and the invoice
- A conversion definition agreed with the people who actually take the calls
- A change log you can read: what changed, when, and the reason for it
- Telling you when the account has reached the demand available and the budget should come down
- Reporting reconciled to your CRM, including the months where that looks worse
What we will not do
- Run your campaigns inside an account you cannot take with you
- Add an undisclosed margin to media spend
- Present platform-counted conversions as customers
- Bid on demand we know you are not able to serve
- Scale a budget on measurement we have not verified ourselves
- Quote you a cost per lead or a return before the account has produced one
Scope
What management includes
- A measurement audit before we touch bids or budgets
- Conversion tracking rebuilt around events that represent revenue, verified end to end
- CRM or offline conversion import where the sales cycle makes platform data misleading
- Campaign structure that matches how you actually sell, not the platform default
- Search term, audience and placement review as a routine, not a quarterly clean-up
- Landing page and offer testing, because most performance ceilings are on the page
- Budget managed to cost per acquired customer
- Monthly reporting that reconciles with your CRM and states what changes next
Sequence
Measurement first, spend second
Audit the measurement
What is being counted as a conversion, whether it fires correctly, and whether it corresponds to anything the business values. Scaling spend on top of broken measurement is the most expensive mistake available in this channel.
You get: Measurement audit and fixes
Define what a good customer is
Agreed with sales, not assumed by marketing. This becomes the signal everything optimises toward.
You get: Agreed conversion definition and values
Rebuild and consolidate
Structure the account for the demand that matters, remove what is buying noise, and set bid strategies against real economics.
You get: Restructured account
Test the page, not just the ad
The largest gains are usually after the click. Offer, form length, proof and clarity get tested deliberately.
You get: Landing page test plan and results
Scale what works, cut what does not
Including telling you when the honest answer is to reduce spend.
You get: Monthly decisions, reconciled to CRM
Questions
Paid media questions
Why are our ads producing unqualified leads?
Nearly always because the account is optimising toward a conversion that is not a sale. If every form submission counts equally, the platform will efficiently find you the cheapest form submissions, which are rarely the valuable ones.
The fix is to feed the platform a signal that reflects what a good customer looks like — qualified lead, booked appointment, or closed revenue imported from your CRM — and then let the automation optimise toward that instead.
Do you guarantee a cost per lead?
No. Cost per lead depends on competition, seasonality, your offer, your landing page and your sales follow-up — and several of those are not ours to control.
What we commit to is delivering the agreed management work, being honest about what the numbers show, and telling you early if the account is not going to reach the economics you need.
Should we run ads if we are also investing in SEO?
Usually yes, at least at first. Paid covers the gap while organic builds, and it produces query-level evidence about which searches actually convert — which makes the organic work considerably sharper.
Over time the mix normally shifts. If organic is carrying demand profitably, we will tell you to reduce spend rather than defend the budget we manage.
How much do we need to spend before this is worth doing?
There is no universal figure, and anyone who quotes one has not looked at your market. The threshold that matters is not a budget number: it is whether your budget, at the click prices in your auction, produces enough conversions for an automated bid strategy to have something to learn from.
A trickle of conversions a month leaves the automation guessing, and the account behaves erratically no matter who manages it. Where that is the situation, we would rather narrow the targeting hard, run manual control on a small set of high-intent searches, or tell you the budget belongs in another channel entirely.
When would you tell us not to advertise?
Three situations. When the margin on what you sell cannot absorb the click prices in your category, which is arithmetic rather than opinion. When nobody is searching for what you do and the creative could not realistically create that demand either. And when enquiries already arriving are not being followed up properly — buying more of them then just increases the waste.
The third is the most common, and it is why we look at what happens after the enquiry before recommending a budget. That work is usually cheaper than the media it would replace.
Who owns the ad account and the data in it?
You do. We work inside accounts held in your name, with us added as a user, and we ask the platforms to bill your media spend to you directly so there is no margin sitting between you and the invoice.
This matters beyond principle. An ad account carries the conversion history that automated bidding depends on, so an agency-owned account means that history leaves when the agency does, and the next team starts from nothing. Ask any agency this question before you sign, including us.
Find out what your ad spend is actually producing
Give us access to the account and your lead data and we will tell you where the money is going, what is being counted that should not be, and whether the economics can work.
If we don't deliver the work we agreed to deliver for reasons within our control, you don't pay for the undelivered work. Read our guarantee
Related
Where to go next
- search campaignsWhere most of the qualified demand usually sits.
- Meta advertising
- what you still control inside Performance MaxThe campaign type most often blamed for a measurement fault.
- advertising to a buying committeeOnly defensible when one contract pays for a great many clicks.
- retargeting, used with restraint
- organic searchWhere paid demand should eventually be cheaper.
- the measurement underneath all of itFix this before scaling anything.
- the page after the clickMost paid performance ceilings are on the page, not in the auction.
Last updated · Reviewed by Zubair Afzal