01 · Paid acquisition that survives contact with a spreadsheet
Platform ROAS is a marketing metric. Contribution margin is a business one. We only optimise the second.
- Margin
- Optimised against contribution, not platform ROAS
- Weekly
- Creative test cycle with pre-registered hypotheses
- Geo-holdout
- Incrementality read on a rolling schedule
The problem
Every ad account we inherit is winning on paper. Meta claims a 4.1x return, Google claims credit for the same order, and the P&L says the brand is going backwards. The gap is not a reporting bug. It is what happens when nobody owns the difference between attributed revenue and new money.
We run paid media like a trading desk. Budget is capital, creative is the position, and every dollar is accountable to a marginal return, not an average one. That distinction is the whole job. Average ROAS tells you what happened. Marginal ROAS tells you what the next $10,000 will do, which is the only question a growth team actually needs answered.
The work starts with a clean read on truth: blended contribution margin, new-customer CAC, and a holdout structure that tells you what would have happened anyway. From there we build an account architecture that can absorb budget without decaying: consolidated learning, deliberate audience separation, and a creative pipeline feeding it enough new angles to outrun fatigue.
Then we scale in steps, not leaps. Every increase is a test with a pre-registered kill criterion. When a channel stops returning, we cut it the same week. No sunk-cost storytelling, no waiting for a quarterly review to admit what the data said in March.
What we actually hand over
Built in your accounts, documented as we go, and yours to keep whether or not you renew.
- Meta Ads
- Google Ads
- TikTok
- Amazon Ads
- Klaviyo
- Triple Whale
- Northbeam
- GA4
- 01
Full-funnel account architecture across Meta, Google, TikTok, Amazon and retail media
- 02
Marginal ROAS and contribution-margin modelling by channel and cohort
- 03
Weekly creative testing calendar with pre-registered hypotheses
- 04
Geo-holdout and PSA incrementality testing on a rolling schedule
- 05
Budget pacing with automated guardrails and anomaly alerts
- 06
Feed and catalogue optimisation for shopping and dynamic formats
The same discipline, run two ways
Lead generation
01High-consideration, offline close
Optimised to cost per sold job, not cost per lead. Offline conversions imported from the CRM so the platform bids toward leads that actually close, call tracking on every source, and lead quality scored before anyone argues about volume. A cheap lead that never books is the most expensive thing in the account.
Ecommerce
02Direct-to-consumer, repeat purchase
Optimised to contribution margin per new customer. Consolidated account structure so learning stops fragmenting, catalogue and feed work for shopping formats, and stepped scaling against marginal return rather than average ROAS.
What the first quarter looks like
Days 1–14
Forensics
Full account teardown, margin model, tracking audit and a baseline incrementality read. You get the unflattering version.
Days 15–45
Rebuild
Account architecture rebuilt, measurement wired to contribution margin, first creative slate in market.
Day 46 onward
Compound
Stepped scaling against marginal return, rolling holdouts, weekly creative iteration and monthly channel re-allocation.
Questions we get about this
FM Digital works with brands spending at least $150,000 per month on paid media, or those with a credible plan to reach it within two quarters. Below that, the marginal value of our modelling work is smaller than our fee, and we will say so.
Pairs with
Want to know what performance media would be worth here?
Send us your numbers. We will come back with where we think the leverage is, what it is plausibly worth, and what we would need to be true for it to work.
Engagements from $12,000 / month · 90 days, then month-to-month