Live campaigns in 14 days. ROAS curve in 30. Predictable scale by day 90.
Paid advertising is the only channel that delivers traffic on the day you turn it on. SEO takes 90 days. Content takes six months. Email takes a list. Paid takes 14 days from kickoff to live campaigns producing tracked conversions. The catch is that paid advertising is also the channel where the most money disappears fastest when it is run badly, and most agencies run it badly. We run it properly.
Here is what kills service businesses without serious paid advertising. You “boost the post” on Facebook and call that PPC. Your Google Ads account is the auto-generated one Google built from their setup wizard, full of broad-match keywords burning budget on irrelevant queries. You have no conversion tracking, so the platform algorithm is optimising blind and your reporting is platform screenshots that bear no relation to closed revenue. You have one ad creative, two years old, that you keep refreshing budget into. Your landing page has not been touched since 2022. You spend thousands a month on ads and cannot tell the agency which campaign closed which deal because the attribution is broken. Meanwhile a competitor with a properly built paid stack is running positive ROAS at scale.
What this pillar actually does
Paid Advertising is the productised stack of PPC, Google Ads, Meta Ads, LinkedIn Ads, TikTok Ads, conversion tracking, server-side tagging, GA4, and Performance Max — run as one programme with full closed-loop attribution back to your CRM. We pick the right two or three platforms for your category, set up proper conversion tracking with server-side tagging on day one, ship ad creative that we test and refresh weekly, build conversion-tested landing pages, and report on cost-per-acquisition and ROAS — never on impressions or clicks alone. Live campaigns by day 14. Measurable ROAS curve by day 30. Predictable scale by day 90.
What we deliver every week:
- Campaign management and optimisation — Google Ads, Meta Ads, LinkedIn Ads, TikTok Ads — campaigns reviewed daily, bids adjusted, negative keywords expanded, audiences refined, budget rebalanced toward what is winning.
- Creative production and testing — new creative briefed and shipped weekly on paid social, hook tests run in 48-hour cycles, winning creatives scaled, losers killed on Friday.
- Landing page conversion testing — A/B tests live continuously, conversion rates tracked weekly, headline and CTA variants iterated against the data.
- Conversion tracking and server-side tagging — full GA4 setup, server-side tagging via GTM, Meta CAPI, Google Enhanced Conversions, TikTok Events API, LinkedIn Insight Tag — all configured, all monitored, all feeding the algorithms enough signal to optimise properly.
- Closed-loop attribution and reporting — every click, every lead, every booked call, every closed deal tagged with channel, campaign, ad, landing page — reported weekly inside your portal against ROAS and cost-per-acquisition.
Who this is for
Service businesses with a defined offer, a sales process that can handle inbound, and at least £1,500 per month of ad spend on top of the retainer — below that the platforms cannot collect enough data to optimise. Multi-location operators who need regional campaigns with proper attribution by territory. E-commerce operators ready to scale with Performance Max and full product-feed campaigns. Founder-led SMEs at £500k to £10m turnover who want predictable enquiry volume and are willing to run the engine properly rather than throwing budget at boosted posts. If your average customer value is under £500 and your sales process is broken, fix product, offer, and process first — paid will magnify whatever you are already doing.
Why our approach works
Most paid agencies do one of three things. They take a percentage of ad spend, which incentivises them to push you to spend more, not to spend better. They run campaigns on broken conversion tracking, which means the platform algorithms cannot optimise and the reporting is fiction. Or they refresh the same three ads for nine months, watch performance decay, and blame “the algorithm”. We do the opposite — flat retainer, proper conversion tracking and server-side tagging on day one, weekly creative iteration, closed-loop attribution all the way through to closed revenue.
Live campaigns by day 14 — Google Ads launched, Meta warming, conversion tracking validated, first clicks landing in your dashboard. By day 30 the ROAS curve is measurable. By day 60 the platform algorithms have learned what works and cost-per-acquisition is trending down. By day 90 the scale is predictable — same spend, more leads; or held leads, lower spend; or scaled spend with held cost-per-acquisition. You pick the curve.
Conversion tracking is what most agencies get wrong, and it is what makes most paid budgets disappear. Apple killed half your ad data in 2021 with iOS 14. Cookie deprecation is killing the rest. We rebuild the picture on day one — server-side tagging via Google Tag Manager, Meta CAPI, Google Enhanced Conversions, TikTok Events API, LinkedIn Insight Tag, plus CRM-based offline conversion uploads. The platform algorithms get enough signal to optimise properly — the difference between a Meta campaign that decays in week three and one that scales for a year.
Creative is the other half. We brief, produce, and ship new creative weekly on paid social, run hook tests in 48-hour cycles, scale winners, kill losers on Friday. By month six you have 30+ proven creatives across formats — a bench competitors do not have. Landing pages get the same treatment: A/B tests live continuously, conversion rates tracked weekly, until the page converts at the ceiling for your category. Performance Max and Advantage+ are deployed only when the underlying data infrastructure can support them — they are powerful fed properly and budget-hosing fed badly.
We do not take a percentage of ad spend. Flat retainer, you keep the upside. Pay-per-percent deals push agencies to scale spend instead of efficiency, and the worst sin in paid advertising is to scale a campaign before the unit economics work. We optimise for cost-per-acquisition and ROAS first; spend follows the maths.
What you own at the end
- Every ad account — Google, Meta, LinkedIn, TikTok, Microsoft Advertising — under your billing, your access, your control.
- Every conversion tracking pixel, server-side tag, and CAPI feed — installed under your accounts, documented end-to-end.
- Every campaign structure — campaigns, ad sets, ads, audiences, exclusions, schedules — exportable and rebuildable on any platform.
- Your creative library — original files, source video, raw photos, editable templates, every winning hook and variant — archived to your storage.
- Your landing-page library — every variant, every test, every conversion-rate baseline — under your CMS and your domain.
- Your attribution data — every click, every lead, every closed deal — exported as CSV any month, queryable inside your CRM forever.
The compounding curve
Paid advertising does not compound the way SEO does, but it builds a learning curve that does. Month one is setup, conversion tracking, baseline campaigns, first creative tests. Month two is creative iteration, audience refinement, landing-page A/B testing. Month three is when cost-per-acquisition starts trending down because the platform algorithms have learned what works and we have killed what does not. By month six, average lead cost is typically 30 to 50% lower than month one — same spend, more leads. The asset that compounds is the data, the creative library, and the audience signals — which is why retainers run forever, not just for the launch sprint. We are also the early-warning system for when a channel is decaying and you need to shift spend before cost-per-acquisition spikes.
Frequently asked, frankly answered
How fast can you go live?
Live campaigns by day 14 — Google Ads launched, Meta warming, conversion tracking validated. Measurable ROAS curve by day 30. Predictable scale by day 90. The 14-day setup includes proper conversion tracking, server-side tagging, GA4 configuration, landing-page review, and creative production for the first batch of ads — not just clicking “launch” on a default campaign.
Do you take a percentage of ad spend?
No. Flat retainer. You keep the upside. Percentage-of-spend deals incentivise agencies to scale your spend, not your efficiency. We optimise for cost-per-acquisition and ROAS first; spend follows the maths. If a campaign is producing at positive ROAS, we scale it. If it is not, we do not scale it just because the cheque to us gets bigger.
How much should we spend on ads on top of the retainer?
Minimum useful spend is around £1,500 per month per platform — below that the platforms cannot collect enough conversion data to optimise. £3,000 to £10,000 per month per platform is where most service businesses see efficient scaling. Above £10,000 per platform you start needing more sophisticated attribution and bid management, which is where Architect tier becomes the right fit.
What if conversion tracking is broken?
It usually is. We rebuild it on day one — server-side tagging via Google Tag Manager, Meta CAPI, Google Enhanced Conversions, TikTok Events API, LinkedIn Insight Tag, and offline conversion uploads from your CRM. By the end of week one, every meaningful event in the buyer journey is being tracked properly, deduplicated, and fed back to the platform algorithms.
Revenue or vanity metrics?
Revenue. We report on cost-per-acquisition, ROAS, and closed deals attributed back to channel, campaign, ad, and landing page through your CRM. Click-through rate, cost-per-click, and impressions are diagnostic — they tell us whether the auction is working — but they are not the deliverable. The deliverable is closed deals you can take to the bank.
What does it cost?
Foundation tier from £1,500 per month plus ad spend for one or two platforms on a single brand. Compound tier from £3,000 per month plus ad spend for full multi-platform PPC, paid social, and Performance Max programmes. Architect tier from £6,000 per month plus ad spend for national programmes, complex multi-channel attribution, large e-commerce, or B2B account-based programmes on LinkedIn. Minimum useful ad spend on top of the retainer is around £1,500 per month per platform.
Stop doing this. Start doing this.
- Stop boosting the post. Start running properly tracked Google Ads, Meta Ads, LinkedIn Ads, and TikTok Ads with full conversion tracking and server-side tagging.
- Start refreshing creative weekly on paid social. Hook tests in 48-hour cycles, winners scaled, losers killed on Friday.
- Stop paying agencies a percentage of your ad spend. Start paying a flat retainer that incentivises efficiency, not scale-for-the-sake-of-scale.
- Start measuring on cost-per-acquisition and ROAS. Closed-loop attribution from click to closed deal inside your CRM, not platform screenshots.
Buy clicks that turn into closed deals — predictably
You can keep boosting posts and watching budget disappear into a platform that nobody in your team can audit. Or you can spend the next 30 days building the paid stack with proper conversion tracking, weekly creative iteration, and closed-loop attribution to your CRM. The first move is a free paid audit — we review your existing accounts, score your conversion tracking, audit your creative and landing pages, and map the 90-day plan that delivers a measurable ROAS curve by day 30. You keep the audit either way. Book the audit, see the leaks, decide afterwards.