Performance marketing · Paid search, paid social, measurement
Paid acquisition gets more expensive over time on its own. The question is whether yours is rising because of the auction, because of saturation, because the creative has stopped working, or because the conversion you are optimising toward is not the one that makes money.
The engagement separates those, then fixes the ones that are yours to fix.
Experience includes
Efficiency problems are rarely one thing, and they are almost never solved by bid adjustments alone.
Where cost is actually increasing: impressions, click cost, conversion rate after the click, or lead quality.
What each channel is accountable for, and how demand creation is measured differently from demand capture.
Campaign and audience structure that produces readable data. Structure decides what you can see, and what you cannot see you cannot manage.
Conversion tracking, value assignment and an attribution choice that matches how your buyers actually behave.
A roadmap with hypotheses, sample size expectations and a rule for when a test ends.
Why it matters: tests stopped early are how teams accumulate confident false beliefs.
Allocation logic, incrementality thinking, and the conditions under which spend should increase.
Spend decisions rest on contribution margin rather than platform ROAS.
Demand creation stops being defunded by a last-click report.
Scaling becomes a decision with evidence behind it instead of a hope.
These are mechanisms. The size of the effect depends on the account, the category and how much the current measurement is misleading you.
01
Input: account access, margin data, CRM outcomes.
Output: the actual driver of the cost increase, named.
02
Action: rebuild conversions and values so the algorithms optimise toward revenue.
Output: a signal worth bidding on.
03
Action: rebuild account and audience architecture for readability.
Output: data you can act on.
04
Action: a prioritised testing roadmap with defined end conditions.
Output: learning that accumulates.
05
Action: increase spend only where efficiency holds under load.
Output: growth that survives its own scale.
Every ad platform reports the version of reality that flatters it. Platform ROAS ignores cost of goods, ignores returns and generously claims conversions it merely touched.
The work here is joining those numbers to yours — margin, close rate, deal value, repeat rate — so a channel that looks efficient and loses money stops being defended.
Both, depending on your team. Many engagements are strategy plus measurement with your team or agency executing.
Primarily Google Ads and Meta, with LinkedIn and TikTok where the audience justifies them. Channel choice is an output of the diagnosis, not an input.
Frequently the first phase does exactly that, because early gains come from stopping waste and fixing measurement. I will not put a number on it before seeing the accounts.
By being explicit about its limits. I use platform data, analytics and CRM outcomes together, and say plainly where the three disagree rather than picking the flattering one.
If the honest answer to “what does a customer cost us?” is a blended number nobody fully trusts, that is the place to start.