Paid Social
Paid social, run as media rather than content.
Prospecting, retargeting, audience development and the creative volume the channel actually requires. Measured against your revenue data, not only against what the platform reports.
Where this sits in the system
Paid Social
Paid social both creates demand and captures it, so it never belongs cleanly to a brand team or a performance team. It usually lands with whoever also handles organic posting, and it gets run on a content calendar.
The specific failure: social treated as a content channel produces engagement that never enters the measurement model, which means it cannot be defended when budgets tighten.
The problem
Three things quietly drive the cost up.
Creative fatigue is the dominant cost driver and it is rarely tracked
The same people see the same asset until it stops earning attention, and the auction charges more to keep showing it. What that looks like in an account is a slow rise in cost with no obvious cause, so budgets get cut or bids get raised, and neither fixes it. It is rarely tracked because most reporting is built at campaign level, where an asset in decline and a fresh one average into a number that looks stable.
Prospecting and retargeting budgets get blended, so retargeting flatters the whole account
Retargeting buys people who were already going to consider you, so it almost always reports well. Blended into one account-level number, a strong retargeting return covers a prospecting effort that is not working. The tell arrives when you try to scale: spend increases and revenue does not follow, because the retargeting pool is capped by how many new people prospecting introduced, and nobody was watching that number separately.
What we do
What the work actually includes.
- • Account structure that separates prospecting from retargeting, permanently
- • Audience development from first-party data, customer lists and modeled cohorts
- • Platform mix across Meta, TikTok and emerging platforms, chosen by audience rather than by habit
- • Creative iteration at the volume the channel needs
- • Creative fatigue monitoring and scheduled replacement
- • Conversion signal quality and event configuration
- • Measurement reconciliation against analytics and revenue data
How we run it
Run
Creative cadence, not a bidding hobby.
The weekly routine is creative first: what is holding, what is decaying, what ships next. Bidding and budget follow. Fatigue and pacing signals surface automatically across accounts. A senior strategist decides what changes.
Measure
Three numbers, and we will tell you when they disagree.
Platform-reported conversions. Analytics-attributed conversions. Your own revenue data. When those three disagree, that is information rather than a problem to hide, and we report the gap rather than picking the flattering number.
Scale
Audiences and creative, in that order.
Scaling paid social is mostly a creative supply problem and an audience supply problem. Spend rises when there are new concepts to run and new cohorts to run them against. Bid strategy matters least of the three, which is the opposite of how most accounts are managed.
How this works
-
Readiness is engineered. So is the next stage of growth.
Public Safety & Industrial Equipment
Connected Capabilities
Creative & Content
This channel consumes creative faster than any other.
Social Media Management
Owned social and paid social work on the same audience with different economics.
Measurement & Attribution
Platform-reported numbers need reconciling against something.
FAQ
Questions we get asked
Why do platform-reported conversions differ from analytics?
Because they are counting different things. A platform counts conversions it believes it influenced, including views that were never clicked, inside its own attribution window. Analytics counts sessions it can trace to a source, and drops what it cannot see. Neither is lying and neither is complete. The number that settles it is the one in your own revenue system, which is why we reconcile to that rather than arguing about which report is right.
How much creative volume does paid social need?
Enough to keep the audience from seeing the same asset too many times, which is a frequency question rather than a fixed number of assets per month. Narrow audiences and heavy budgets burn through creative quickly. Broad audiences at lower spend do not. If production cannot sustain the required pace, the honest move is to reduce the number of concurrent audiences rather than to keep spending behind an asset that has already stopped working.
How should paid search and paid social budgets be split?
Not as a fixed ratio. Paid search is capped by how many people are already looking for what you sell, so once you are capturing that demand efficiently, more budget mostly buys worse traffic. Paid social is one of the things that creates that demand in the first place. The split follows how much unmet search demand exists today, and it should move as that changes, which means checking it rather than setting it once.
We will audit the account before we quote on it.
You will work with the people who set the strategy.