Paid Social

Platform targeting has been steadily commoditised. Broad targeting with strong creative routinely outperforms narrow interest stacks, which means the lever that still moves performance is the work itself: the hook in the first second, the specificity of the claim, the proof, the offer, and how quickly the ad tells someone whether it is for them. We treat creative as a production line rather than a one-off shoot, because an account that runs three assets a quarter has no chance against one running twenty.

Our creative process starts with message testing rather than aesthetics. We map the reasons people buy and the reasons they hesitate, then build assets that each attack one of those, so a losing ad still teaches you something about the market. Static, UGC-style video, founder-to-camera, demo, review-led and offer-led formats all get a run, because the winning format is rarely the one the brand team expected.

Every asset is briefed with a hypothesis and judged on a metric agreed in advance. That discipline is what stops creative testing degenerating into taste arguments, and it is why accounts we run tend to keep improving after the obvious early wins have been taken.

Over-segmented accounts are the most common problem we inherit. Twenty ad sets each getting a trickle of budget means none of them ever exit the learning phase, so the platform never gets the signal it needs and performance stays permanently mediocre. We consolidate aggressively, then use exclusions and creative variation to do the segmenting that used to be done with audiences.

Budget is split deliberately across prospecting, retargeting and retention audiences, with a fixed share held back for testing so that new creative always has somewhere to run. Retargeting in particular is chronically mismanaged — either starved of budget or allowed to eat the credit for sales that would have happened anyway.

For brands with a physical or seasonal component, we build the calendar around demand rather than fighting it: heavier prospecting ahead of peak, heavier retention and lifetime-value work after it, and a clear plan for what happens to CPMs when everyone else in the category starts bidding at the same time.

Platform-reported ROAS is a marketing number, not a finance number. We set up a measurement stack that combines platform data, server-side tracking, blended performance against total revenue and, where budget justifies it, geo or holdout testing to establish what paid social is genuinely adding rather than what it is claiming credit for.

For considered purchases we push measurement past the form fill into qualified enquiries and closed revenue, because the cheapest lead source is very often the worst one, and no amount of platform reporting will tell you that.

Reporting is monthly, plain-language and tied to the metrics agreed at the start: contribution after ad spend, blended acquisition cost, and the leading indicators that tell us whether next month is going to be better or worse.

Paid social rarely works hardest in isolation. It compounds when the landing experience matches the ad, when email and CRM catch the people who did not convert first time, and when organic content gives the paid work a bank of proven messages to draw from. We build those connections deliberately rather than leaving them as someone else's problem.

That integration is the practical difference between an agency that manages ad accounts and one that is accountable for growth. We would rather cut spend and fix the conversion path than keep buying traffic into a page that leaks.