Do you charge a percentage of ad spend?

No. Flat monthly retainer. We never touch your ad accounts as billing payers -- the platforms invoice you directly. This keeps the incentive clean: optimize, don't inflate.

How much do I need to spend to start?

We typically start engagements at $1,000 to $3,000 in monthly ad spend depending on the vertical and the goal. Below that it's hard to gather statistically meaningful data. Our Growth retainer is built around managed spend up to $500/month; Premium covers up to $2,000/month managed.

Can you take over an existing ad account or do you need a fresh one?

We prefer to take over the existing account so we keep the audience signals, conversion history and learning that's already there. We do an audit first, document the existing setup, and migrate cleanly. Fresh accounts are only better when the existing one is so corrupted that the learning is misleading -- rare.

What if I'm running ads myself or with another agency now?

We do a free 30-minute audit first. If your current setup is performing, we say so. If we see specific things to fix, we lay them out plainly. The audit is genuinely free -- there's no follow-up sales call unless you ask for one.

Will you run TikTok and LinkedIn from day one?

Usually no. We start with the channels where the audience and the buying cycle align (typically Meta + Google for hospitality, F&B and wellness; LinkedIn for B2B real estate). New channels get added once the core program is performing -- adding too many at once means none of them are clean.

Service / Paid media

Campaigns that book rooms, sell units, and fill calendars.

Most agencies report on impressions and reach. We report on direct bookings, qualified leads, and cost per acquisition. If we can't track it through to the CRM, we won't run it. Flat monthly fee, never a percentage of your ad spend.

Book a paid-media review See pricing

Why paid media works differently for boutique brands.

A 200-room resort can run a $40,000 awareness campaign and barely register the cost per booking. A 12-room boutique inn cannot. The math is unforgiving at our scale -- which is why most agency-run paid programs fail boutique operators.

Boutique paid media has to be precise. The audience is narrower (the right kind of guest, the right kind of buyer). The creative cycle is faster (you can't reuse an ad set for nine months). The reporting has to roll up to bookings or signed contracts, not vanity metrics. And the budget allocation has to flex monthly based on what's actually converting -- not what looked good in last quarter's deck.

That's the model we run. Smaller, sharper campaigns. Tracking wired through to the CRM. Monthly reallocation based on real data. Flat monthly fee so we have zero incentive to inflate your spend.

Why most paid media programs underperform.

We see the same five problems on almost every audit we run.

Tracking is half-built. The Meta Pixel is on the home page but not the booking confirmation. Google's conversion event fires on form submit, but the CRM doesn't know which lead came from which campaign.
Creative refreshes are too slow. The same three ads have been running for six months. Click-through rates have decayed. Frequency is over four. Audiences are saturated.
Audiences are too broad. Lookalikes built on a 2,000-person list are noise. Interest stacks copied from a competitor have nothing to do with this brand's actual buyer.
The agency is paid as a percentage of ad spend. So when performance plateaus, the recommendation is always 'spend more' -- because that's how the agency gets paid.
Reporting talks about impressions, reach and engagement. The principal looks at the report, doesn't see bookings, and slowly stops opening it.

What we run.

Every paid program we run reports on three numbers: cost per qualified lead, cost per booking or signed contract, and contribution margin. Anything else is supporting context.

Brand, conversion, and retargeting campaigns across Meta (Facebook + Instagram), Google (Search, Display, YouTube, Performance Max), TikTok and LinkedIn
Tracking implementation -- Meta Pixel, Google Tag Manager, server-side Conversion API, GA4 events, click-IDs preserved end-to-end
Creative production in-house -- copy, static, motion, vertical video, all produced by our team, never outsourced
Audience strategy -- exclusion lists, value-based lookalikes, retargeting windows tuned to the buying cycle (a 30-day window for restaurants, 90 days for hotels, 180 days for real estate)
Landing-page coordination so paid traffic lands on pages that match the ad's promise -- not the home page
Monthly budget review with reallocation, scale-or-cut decisions, and a written 'what worked, what didn't, what's next' summary
Quarterly creative refresh cycles so frequency stays low and CPM stays competitive
First-party attribution preserved through to the CRM so a six-month buyer journey still credits the channel that started it

Platforms we run.

Meta AdsGoogle AdsTikTokLinkedIn

How we run a paid-media engagement.

Paid media compounds slower than people expect and faster than they're patient for. The first 60 days are often a dip while we fix tracking and rebuild audiences. Months 3 through 6 are the honest window. Here's how we run it.

Tracking audit

Weeks 1 to 2

We test every conversion event end-to-end. We verify the Pixel fires on the right pages, the Google event sends the right values, the CRM receives the gclid and fbclid, and the form's hidden attribution fields populate correctly. If the tracking is broken, no campaign can be honest -- this is non-negotiable.

Audience and creative reset

Weeks 2 to 4

We rebuild audiences from clean first-party data. We retire stale ad sets and produce a new creative pack -- 8 to 12 variants per campaign in our default cadence. Ads ship with consistent UTMs and tracking parameters so attribution stays clean.

Soft launch

Weeks 4 to 6

We run at 50 to 70 percent of target spend for the first two weeks. We watch CPMs, click-throughs, and conversion rates. We kill bad ad sets fast and double on what works. The goal is to learn, not to scale.

Optimization and scale

Weeks 6 to 12

We move to full budget on the winning ad sets. We A/B test creatives weekly, audiences fortnightly, landing pages monthly. By week 12 we have a written, defensible 'this is what works for this brand' playbook.

Steady-state operations

Months 4 to 12+

Quarterly creative refreshes, monthly budget reviews with the principal, weekly performance check-ins. We add new channels (TikTok, LinkedIn) once Meta and Google are running cleanly -- never before. Scaling happens when the metrics are stable, not when the budget is large.

What you should expect.

Paid media is the channel where claims get tested fastest. Within 90 days you should be able to point to specific campaigns and say 'this booked X rooms' or 'this generated Y signed contracts'. If you can't, the program isn't working and we're the first to tell you. The numbers we typically point to from prior engagements include 30 to 50 percent reductions in cost per qualified lead within the first 90 days (mostly from killing what wasn't working), 2 to 4x improvements in landing-page conversion rates after coordinated landing-page work, and ROAS that holds steady across creative refresh cycles -- the sign of a system, not a lucky ad.

Cost per booking or signed contract reported every month
Server-side conversion API so iOS 14+ traffic still attributes correctly
Creative refresh cycles that keep CPMs competitive over a 12-month engagement
Audience hygiene that prevents saturation and frequency runaway
Budget reallocation based on real conversion data -- not gut feel

How we price paid media.

Paid-media management is a flat monthly fee, included in our Growth and Premium retainers. Ad spend is paid by you directly to the platforms -- Meta, Google, TikTok, LinkedIn -- so it never moves through us and we never take a cut. This keeps our incentive aligned with yours: optimize the spend, don't inflate it. If you want to see the tier breakdown, head to pricing.

See pricing

Common paid-media questions.

Do you charge a percentage of ad spend?: No. Flat monthly retainer. We never touch your ad accounts as billing payers -- the platforms invoice you directly. This keeps the incentive clean: optimize, don't inflate.
How much do I need to spend to start?: We typically start engagements at $1,000 to $3,000 in monthly ad spend depending on the vertical and the goal. Below that it's hard to gather statistically meaningful data. Our Growth retainer is built around managed spend up to $500/month; Premium covers up to $2,000/month managed.
Can you take over an existing ad account or do you need a fresh one?: We prefer to take over the existing account so we keep the audience signals, conversion history and learning that's already there. We do an audit first, document the existing setup, and migrate cleanly. Fresh accounts are only better when the existing one is so corrupted that the learning is misleading -- rare.
What if I'm running ads myself or with another agency now?: We do a free 30-minute audit first. If your current setup is performing, we say so. If we see specific things to fix, we lay them out plainly. The audit is genuinely free -- there's no follow-up sales call unless you ask for one.
Will you run TikTok and LinkedIn from day one?: Usually no. We start with the channels where the audience and the buying cycle align (typically Meta + Google for hospitality, F&B and wellness; LinkedIn for B2B real estate). New channels get added once the core program is performing -- adding too many at once means none of them are clean.

See exactly where your spend is leaking.

30-minute paid-media audit. We'll review tracking, audiences, creatives and budget pacing. You leave with a written list of fixes whether or not we work together.

Book a paid-media review How we work