Service 03
Paid acquisition & lifecycle orchestration
Growth programmes fail quietly when budgets lack kill criteria, when creative is not tied to hypotheses, and when finance discovers that refunds were never modelled in the ROAS narrative you defended on Friday.
We can operate as interim growth leadership, as an extension of your in-house team, or as audit-only reviewers before you re-tender an agency—always with written definitions of success your CFO already recognises.
We translate envelope budgets into channel mixes with explicit guardrails: minimum sample sizes before you judge a cohort, maximum acceptable CAC drift, and the signals that force a creative rotation before fatigue poisons learning velocity. Channel strategy states not only where money goes but where we deliberately do not buy until creative or landing proof reaches a threshold—so “test everything” does not become an excuse to burn learning budget.
Lifecycle rules state which behaviours graduate a contact from paid retargeting into nurture, which suppression windows protect deliverability, and how partner co-marketing lists stay segregated from first-party audiences. We document frequency caps, competitive conquesting boundaries, and brand-safety exclusions your comms team cares about so media buyers do not improvise under end-of-month pressure.
Budgeting, pacing & governance
Spend plans include pacing curves aligned to pipeline targets—not flat daily splits that ignore seasonality or product release windows. Governance covers who can move budget between markets, how intra-month reallocations get logged for finance, and which alerts fire when spend deviates from plan by more than an agreed band.
- Weekly and monthly reporting packs with definitions frozen for the quarter.
- Incrementality or geo-holdout design where your volume supports it; honest “not yet” when it does not.
- Partner and affiliate rules: tagging, disclosure, and payout reconciliation.
- Refund and chargeback handling in ROAS models, including lag windows by payment method.
Creative & experiments
Briefs ship with hypothesis IDs, primary metrics, and links to experiment tickets so designers and analysts never debate which variant answered which question when results land Monday morning. Naming conventions propagate into your ads manager, CRM, and warehouse so downstream reporting does not require a Rosetta stone spreadsheet.
We catalogue creative archetypes (problem agitation, proof forward, category education, competitor contrast) and map each to funnel stages where they are allowed to run, reducing the chance that an awareness ad accidentally becomes your only retargeting asset. Asset production notes cover format constraints per platform so designers do not ship 4:5 hero shots into placements that crop critical legal copy.
We document how refunds, chargebacks, and trial conversions affect attributed revenue so finance and growth can reconcile a single definition of “return” before the quarter closes. When platforms disagree on attribution, we publish a hierarchy of sources of truth for internal reporting versus investor reporting so two teams stop optimising against different numbers.
Operating rhythm
Weekly readouts separate noise from decisions: what we are scaling, what we are pausing, and what requires a stakeholder vote before the next spend tranche. Each readout ends with three written decisions and owners, not with a recording nobody transcribes.
That rhythm carries into handover documentation so internal owners inherit budgets, alerts, and escalation paths without inheriting a private inbox thread. We include a thirty-day transition checklist: token refreshes, agency access revocation, and archive locations for final creative exports and bidding history.