most brands aren't spending too little. they're spending in the wrong places.
— we audit where the money actually went, not where the dashboard says.we engineer the path from first impression to first purchase so your roas holds as you scale. funnel architecture, channel allocation matched to where your customer actually discovered you, and incrementality framing that tells you what's real growth vs. what's cannibalizing organic.
acquisition isn't a media problem. it's a thesis problem.
we've audited 200+ paid accounts. the leaks are predictable — they show up regardless of vertical, spend level, or platform mix. six patterns repeat:
spending where the customer isn't.
platform attribution undercounts tiktok-discovered buyers by 30–50%. brands keep spending on meta because the dashboard rewards it. post-purchase data tells the real story.
demographic targeting in 2026.
"women 25–44, interested in skincare" was a 2019 strategy. behavioral segments — site actions, cart events, purchase history — outperform demographics 3–4x in every platform we test.
roas alone is lying to you.
meta says 4.2x. shopify says you grew 8% on 35% more spend. one is wrong. without incrementality framing, you're scaling cannibalization and calling it growth.
features outnumber problems in the ads.
pull 90 days of paid social. count creatives that lead with a customer problem vs. a feature. if features win, you have a messaging problem dressed up as a media problem.
four hero offers, zero clarity.
15% off here, free shipping there, bundle, subscription save. confused customers don't convert. one hero offer, tested against alternatives, beats four running at once.
cac payback window unknown.
not just cpa — cac/ltv and payback in months. that's the number that funds growth. brands that can't state their payback can't scale past a ceiling they can't see.
eight fundamentals. each with a test you can run today.
these aren't tactics, they're operating principles — the same framework we audit against on day one. ranked tactics, not opinions. every point comes with a "try this" so you can check your own account first.
post-purchase survey, always-on.
"where did you first hear about us?" on every order. the answer drives the channel mix more reliably than any attribution model on the market.
run a post-purchase survey for 30 days. compare answers to budget allocation. if the mismatch is over 20%, you're spending where customers aren't.
channel allocation matches discovery.
if 63% of customers found you on instagram, 60% of spend shouldn't be on tiktok. reality, not assumption. budget follows first-party data.
plot channel discovery % against channel spend %. anywhere the gap is wider than 15 points is a reallocation opportunity hiding in plain sight.
audiences built on behavior.
kill demographic targeting. build segments from site actions, cart events, purchase history. behavioral audiences win 3–4x in every test.
duplicate your top "women 25–44" campaign, retarget "added to cart in 30 days, didn't buy." run a week. compare cpa.
funnel architecture, not just spend.
top-of-funnel video, mid-funnel comparison, bottom-funnel offer. each stage has a job. mixing the jobs is why "scale broke roas."
map 30 days of creative to tof/mof/bof. if 80%+ is bof discount-led, you're starving the funnel of new buyers.
ad → pdp variant match.
dedicated landing pages per angle. ad creative and pdp speak the same language. the transition is where most paid traffic leaks.
click your top 5 ads. compare each ad's copy to its landing hero. any mismatch is a leak you can fix this week.
one hero offer, not four.
consolidate. confused customers don't convert. test the offer, not the noise. one clear value prop per impression beats a menu.
count the offers live on your homepage. anything over two is friction. test one for a month and watch cr.
incrementality framing.
roas lies. mmm-lite at minimum. know what spend is incremental vs. cannibalizing organic. quarterly geo holdouts confirm it.
pause your top retargeting campaign for 2 weeks in one geo. compare revenue to a control geo. flat = that spend was cannibalizing.
cac payback window known.
not just cpa — cac/ltv and payback in months. that's the number that funds growth, sets spend ceilings, and tells you when to push.
pull 6 months of new-customer cohorts. calculate average days to repeat. payback over 6 months on credit = your ceiling is already set.
priced like a rate card. month-to-month on every line.
no long-term contracts on any line. we'd rather earn the next month than lock you into twelve.
most brands aren't underspending.
they're misallocating.
one message shift unlocked a 2M audience overnight.
a fashion brand spending $30+ per acquisition with generic "anti-chafing shorts" messaging targeting 500k. the product worked; the message didn't. we repositioned to "shorts for under dresses" — same product, 4x the addressable audience. then post-purchase surveys revealed 63% discovered the brand on tiktok while 60% of budget sat on meta. we reallocated. cpa halved inside 90 days.
read the full case file →four metrics. no horoscopes.
reported weekly, in slack, every monday. if it doesn't show up in your p&l, we don't report it.
cpm.
cost to reach 1,000 people. low = the platform likes your content; high = it doesn't. a creative-health diagnostic, not a scaling target.
ctr.
click-through rate. the single best leading indicator of creative fatigue — it dips before cpa climbs, so it's the early warning.
cac.
the only acquisition number that matters at the p&l level. we optimize for lowest cac at highest scale — not roas, which retargeting inflates.
payback.
cac/ltv ratio and payback window. under 4 months, scale aggressively. over 9, fix retention before spending another dollar.
do you take over our accounts or work alongside us?
both. most engagements have us managing budget and creative directly. larger brands keep an in-house lead with us as the strategy + execution layer underneath.
what's the minimum monthly spend?
$15K/mo in paid spend is the floor below which fees outweigh the lift. under that, the growth club ($99/mo) is the right starting point until you cross it.
three channels, or three agencies?
all three under one team. siloing platforms across separate agencies is the main reason cac climbs as spend grows — nobody owns the cross-channel math.
how fast in week one?
no decks. by day 7: budget reallocation, survey live, 3 new angles in market. real performance shifts typically land between week 3 and 6.
do you charge a percentage of spend?
no. flat retainer regardless of spend — we won't build a fee structure that rewards us for pushing more budget than your p&l can support.
what happens if we want to stop?
month-to-month, no lock-in. 30 days notice and we hand over accounts, creative library, audience structures, and reporting. no holding the work hostage.
your paid is leaking. we'll show you where.
— the teardown is free. the fixes are the business.book a 30-minute call. we pull your last 90 days, run a post-purchase mini-survey, and open with your three biggest leaks across channel mix, message, and funnel architecture — not a slideshow.