Paid media and performance

Questions people ask before they commit.

Which platform should we start on?

It depends on whether you are harvesting demand or creating it. On Google and Amazon, people are already searching for what you sell, so intent is high and clicks are expensive. On Meta, TikTok and YouTube, nobody asked for your ad and the creative has to earn the attention, so reach is cheap and the work is harder. A business with existing search demand usually starts where that demand is. A new product nobody is searching for has no choice but the second route.

Why do you need to know our margins?

Because return on ad spend means nothing without them. A ROAS of 2 is excellent for one business and a slow bankruptcy for another. Break-even is one divided by your gross margin, and until that figure exists there is no line separating a campaign that is working from one that is not. It is the first question on the first call, and we would rather ask it awkwardly than run your budget blind.

Whose ad account and whose card?

Yours, in both cases. The account is created or kept under your ownership and the media is billed to your card, so the spend, the data and the history remain yours if we ever stop working together. We invoice management separately. Any arrangement where an agency puts your ad spend on its own card should be refused — it costs you control and it is the kind of billing pattern that gets accounts flagged.

How long before we know whether it is working?

Around 45 days. The first week or two produce unstable numbers while the platforms gather data, and changing things daily during that period destroys the very learning you are paying for. Week three gives the first clean read; week four gives a report against your own break-even figures. By day 45 you should have a defensible answer, including the answer that this channel cannot work at your budget.

Is conversion tracking part of the management fee?

No, and be suspicious of anyone who says it is. Fixing tracking properly — tags, events, server-side conversions, consent handling — is a defined one-off project with its own price. Running campaigns on top of broken measurement is possible but nobody can take responsibility for the outcome, because the platforms optimise towards whatever you told them a conversion was.

Why do the platform numbers never match our sales figures?

Because they are counted differently, not because anyone is lying. Attribution windows, view-through conversions, cross-device journeys and duplicated events all inflate platform-reported sales, and every channel claims the same order. The honest monthly number is total revenue divided by total ad spend across everything — it reconciles with your bank, and platform figures are then used to compare ads against each other rather than to declare a result.