Who this is for
Businesses that measure marketing in leads or sales rather than awareness: clinics, education consultancies, real estate, finance and insurance, home services, stores, and B2B companies with a defined enquiry. It works when you can name what a customer is worth to you, or at least what a qualified lead is worth. If you cannot yet, the first job is working that out, and that conversation belongs in consulting and strategy.
It suits businesses that already sell something proven and want more of it. It is a poor fit for a brand-new product with no demand and no proof, where the honest answer is testing rather than a CPA target.
What sits inside a performance engagement
- Paid search for people already looking, run under Google Ads management.
- Paid social for people who need to be shown the offer, run under Meta Ads management, and LinkedIn Ads where the audience is professional.
- Landing pages built for each offer rather than a homepage everyone shares, covered by PPC landing page design.
- Tracking and attribution, verified before a single campaign starts, under analytics and tracking.
- Follow-up. Lead routing, instant response and reminders, because a lead nobody calls for two days costs the same as one nobody generated. Where that needs building, it is lead generation automation.
- Testing. Offers, audiences, creative and landing pages, changed one variable at a time against the same target.
- Reporting on one number that everybody agrees on, with the channel detail underneath it.
How a performance engagement runs
- Define the number (week one). What a customer is worth, what proportion of leads close, and therefore what a lead can cost. Without this, “performance” is a word rather than a target.
- Fix the measurement (week one). Conversion tracking verified on every platform, deduplicated, with offline conversions imported where sales close on the phone.
- Build the offer and the page. One clear promise, one action, and a page that matches the ad rather than a homepage carrying six messages.
- Launch small. A controlled budget in the channel most likely to work first, not everything at once. Spreading a small budget across four channels teaches you nothing about any of them.
- Optimize weekly. Search terms, audiences, placements, creative and bids, with the changes and their reasons written down.
- Scale what clears the target. Budget moves toward what works, and channels that cannot reach the target are paused rather than defended.
- Report monthly on spend, volume, cost per acquisition and, where you can supply closed-won data, revenue.
Expect the first leads within days of launch, and expect the target to be provisional for the first six to eight weeks while the account gathers enough conversions to optimize on.
What you receive
- A written target with the assumptions behind it, so it can be revised honestly rather than quietly.
- Ad accounts in your name, with your billing, that you keep.
- Landing pages on your own domain.
- Verified conversion tracking with a documented event list.
- A weekly change log and a monthly report.
- A test backlog showing what has been tried and what is next.
What performance marketing cannot fix
- A price the market will not pay. No campaign structure closes that gap.
- Slow follow-up. If leads are called two days later, cost per sale stays high no matter how cheap the lead is.
- No demand. Paid search only captures people already searching. If nobody searches for what you sell, the channel is paid social plus content, and it takes longer.
- An unmeasurable sale. If purchases happen in a shop with no way to attribute them, the target becomes a proxy and everybody should know that.
- A budget too small to learn from. Below a certain spend there are not enough conversions per week to optimize on, and a management fee is hard to justify. I will say so on the call.
Results I can point to
For an Australian finance client, Better Broking, a full Google Ads rebuild with proper conversion tracking, tighter ad group themes and negative keyword management produced a 35% reduction in cost per acquisition within 60 days, at 40 or more leads a month. That is the pattern this service is built around: fix the measurement, tighten the structure, then buy more of what clears the target. The detail is in the case studies.
Pricing pointer
Performance engagements are scoped against the target rather than sold as a fixed tier, and priced as a management fee with ad spend paid by you directly to the platforms. I never take a percentage of ad spend, because that pays me to spend more rather than to spend well. Indicative tiers are on the packages page; engagements are month to month.
Next step
Tell me what a customer is worth to you, what you currently pay per lead and what you spend a month. I reply within 4 business hours with whether the target is realistic in your market and what I would change first.