Paid Media
Google Ads and Meta, run by the team that owns your organic — so paid stops paying for clicks you already had.
Paid media is the only channel where money converts to visibility immediately, which is exactly why it is the easiest place to waste it quietly. An account can run for two years, report a healthy cost per conversion, and still be buying traffic you would have received for nothing.
We run Google Ads and Meta in-house, on the same team that owns your organic search. That is not an efficiency claim about headcount. It is the only arrangement in which someone is actually looking at both reports at once, which is what it takes to notice that your best-performing keyword is a term you already rank first for.
Accounts stay yours. Google and Meta bill you directly, on your own payment method, so the spend is never routed through us and the history never leaves with us.
At a glance
Structure and waste audit
Campaign and ad-group structure, match types, negatives, placements and audience overlap — the layer where most wasted spend actually lives, well before creative.
Overlap control with organic
A standing check on which paid terms you already own organically, so budget moves to demand you are not capturing rather than demand you are paying twice for.
Creative and audience rotation
Ad copy and creative refreshed on a schedule against fatigue, with the variants that lose retired rather than left running quietly.
Remarketing that respects the funnel
Audiences segmented by what someone actually did, not one list of everyone who ever loaded the homepage.
Want results like this for your brand?
Talk to a Growth StrategistThe overlap nobody owns
The single most expensive defect we find in ad accounts is not a bad campaign. It is paid bidding on terms the site already ranks first for.
Nobody chooses this. The paid vendor is handed a keyword list, the list contains your strongest commercial terms because those convert, and no one whose job it is to notice is reading both the ad report and Search Console. You start paying six dollars for a click that arrived free last quarter. Worse, the organic numbers get quietly worse, because the ad is taking the click that used to land on the listing below it.
It survives because it looks like success from inside the account. Those terms convert well — they always did. The paid report shows a strong cost per acquisition and everyone is pleased.
Running both channels on one team removes the failure by construction rather than by coordination meeting. The overlap check is a standing item, not a quarterly review, and when a term is safely owned organically the budget moves to demand you are not capturing.
Structure before creative
Most agencies open with creative because it is visible and it is what a client can react to in a meeting. It is almost never where the money is going.
The waste sits one layer down: match types pulling queries nobody intended, a negative list that has not been touched since launch, Performance Max quietly absorbing branded search and reporting it as its own win, placements running on apps you would not choose, and audiences that overlap so two of your own campaigns bid against each other.
So the first pass is structural. It is duller to present and it is where the recoverable spend is. Creative work follows once the account is no longer leaking, because refreshing the ads on a badly structured account just buys the wrong traffic with a nicer image.
What the first 30 days look like
Read-only access first, then a full account read before anything is changed. Existing performance is the baseline, and changing things before you have one is how a rescue story gets told about an account that was fine.
Then tracking, because no budget decision is safe on numbers that are wrong. The recurring finding is a conversion event that counts a page view on the thank-you page, which also counts everyone who bookmarked it, and a platform-reported conversion count that does not reconcile with the CRM. Both get fixed before a dollar is moved.
Then the structural pass and the overlap check, then budget reallocation, then creative. Anything unambiguous and cheap — an obviously missing negative, a placement exclusion — ships immediately rather than waiting for a plan.
What we will not promise
Not a cost per click, not a cost per acquisition, not a return on ad spend. We control account structure, targeting, budget allocation, bidding and creative. We do not control what your competitors bid, what the platforms change, or what demand does in your category.
CPCs in most categories drift upward regardless of how well an account is managed. An agency quoting you a CPA target at proposal stage is quoting a number from someone else's account in someone else's market, and the only reliable thing about it is that it will be renegotiated in month three.
What is guaranteed is the work and the reporting: the account managed on the agreed cadence, actual spend reported against actual outcomes rather than platform-reported conversions alone, and a straight answer when a month goes badly.
Your account, your data
Campaigns run in accounts you own, under your billing. The platforms invoice you directly and no media spend passes through us, which means there is no markup to disclose because there is no mechanism for one.
That structure matters most at the end of an engagement rather than the start. Account history, conversion data and remarketing audiences are genuinely expensive to rebuild, and they are exactly what disappears when an agency runs campaigns from its own account and then parts ways with a client.
If you leave, you keep all of it and nothing needs migrating.
When paid is the wrong spend
If the landing page does not convert, paid buys you a more precise measurement of that. Traffic is not the constraint and more of it will not help; fixing the page first is cheaper and the ads perform better afterwards anyway.
If you have no tracking worth trusting, paid is a budget spent in the dark. That gets fixed before spend scales, not after.
And if your category's auction is dominated by companies who can profitably pay several times your maximum, the honest answer is that paid search is not your channel and the money belongs in organic and lifecycle. We would rather say that in the first month than manage a losing account competently for a year.
Paid Media: common questions
Do you actually run the ad accounts or just advise?
Run them. Account structure, negatives, budgets, bidding, creative rotation and remarketing audiences are managed in-house by the same team that owns your organic search. Advisory-only arrangements are where the organic-overlap problem survives, because nobody has both reports open.
Is ad spend included in your fee?
No. The retainer fee covers the work; Google and Meta bill you directly on your own payment method, in accounts you own. No media spend passes through us, so there is no markup — there is no mechanism for one. There is also no minimum spend attached to the retainer.
What is the minimum budget worth running?
It depends far more on your category's cost per click than on a general number. What matters is whether the budget can buy enough clicks in a month to tell signal from noise. Below that threshold you are not running a campaign, you are collecting anecdotes, and the money is usually better spent on organic and conversion work. We will tell you which side of that line you are on before you commit.
Will you guarantee a cost per lead?
No, and we would treat a quoted CPA at proposal stage as a warning sign. Account structure, targeting, bidding and creative are within our control and are guaranteed as work. Auction prices, competitor bidding and platform changes are not within anyone's control. Any number promised before an account has been read is borrowed from a different business.
Can you work with our existing agency's account?
Yes, provided you own it. We start read-only and produce a full account read before changing anything, so there is a documented baseline. If the account is owned by the outgoing agency, getting ownership transferred is the first thing to sort out and it is worth doing regardless of who runs it next.
How does this fit with SEO?
It is the point of buying them together. One team, one keyword and demand picture, and a standing check on where paid and organic overlap. Paid also functions as a fast test bed: ad copy that converts tells you what a landing page and a title tag should say, and it produces that answer in weeks rather than quarters.
Want to be the brand the models name?