Search Engine Advertising

Search is the most powerful advertising channel given everything is based on intent (people actively searching). While it’s complicated to set up, the upside is that you’ll be targeting customers the moment they search for what you offer. Search Ads are the best channel for most any business — so long as you offer products/services that people are actively seeking (we can verify search volume). If your products/services lack high-intent search volume BUT would be of interest to customers when discovered... we’d recommend Social Media and Video/Display ads given they offer granular-targeting centered on audiences, interests, topics, and placements.

There’s no “right answer” to this question. However, through discovery calls and market research, we can identify the ideal budgets for you to choose from. The biggest factor for deciding on ad budget is whether or not you’ve run ads in the past. If you have, then we can align the correct budget based on historical CPA/ROAS performance in line with your ROI targets. If you’ve never run ads, we can identify average costs of acquisition by studying your competitors, and work backwards to identify what you’ll need to spend in order to hit your monthly ROI targets. The key is to build enough data that enables our team and AI-algorithms to optimize. Another factor is the 45 to 90+ day learning period needed to to start hitting ROI targets. With that in mind, we recommend striking a balance between staying conservative (so you don’t waste money), while ensuring you spend enough to return at least 30+ revenue-centric conversion events per month. As an example... if it costs $100 to acquire a new customer, we’d recommend you start with a budget of at least $3,000 per month (30 customers/month x $100 CPA).

While many factors play into successful Search Ads... we believe conversion tracking is the most important. Your conversion events serve as north stars that guide your campaigns. That said, your conversion events need to be revenue-centric. If you only track calls, forms, or page views, you’re not informing the AI-algorithms on what truly matters (return on ad spend). This often leads to wasted spend, spam leads, and a net loss. For E-Commerce, we recommend going beyond website purchases to integrate lifetime value data so you optimize for higher value customers. For LeadGen, SaaS, mobile apps, and/or local businesses, we recommend only using online conversions where leads are qualified in some way (ideally by revenue). Separately, we recommend using offline conversions to pass back sales data so you optimize for ROI and real customers (and away from unqualified leads). Beyond conversions, successful Search Ads require a segmented approach that uniquely addresses each product/service you offer, unique selling points for each customer, and streamlined conversion paths for each segment. This requires informed execution across campaign breakouts, conversion funnels, keywords, audiences, targeting, landing page UX/UI, A/B testing, ad and landing page copy, image/video assets, bidding strategies, and many other factors. We can touch more in-depth on this during our free strategy consult.

To start, we are not a traditional agency. Our team is made up of current+former employees from all the major adTech companies. This means we have insider knowledge on what works, and that your account will never be managed by recent college grads or overseas contractors. We focus exclusively on net monthly advertising ROI with transparent tracking/reporting so we are always on the same page (shockingly, most agencies don’t). All we care about is results... and so should you.

This varies heavily between different clients, industries, and ad channels. For example, if you spend a comfortable budget and offer smaller purchase value products/services, we can generally deliver ROI within 45 to 90 days. However, if you have long lead-times, high-ticket products/services, smaller ad budgets, or underperforming sales teams, it can often take upwards of 90 days. That said, we create ROI projection models for all new clients based on these factors. As a general rule of thumb, we typically say it takes 90 days with at least 30+ revenue-centric conversions in order for us to start hitting your desired ROI.

We cannot guarantee your results. What we can guarantee is that we will optimize and double down on what does work while cutting out what doesn’t. Achieving ROI targets requires constant optimization+experiments with real data to test and validate any strategy. Any marketer that guarantees results is selling you false promises. That said, so long as we have enough budget, data, and time to execute on informed ad strategies with iterative optimization based on real data, we can hit ROI targets for most any client with a confidence interval of 90%.