Paid Media Services

Search first, then targeted social, then everything else. Paid search reaches people who are already looking, which is why it usually outperforms for a service somebody seeks out rather than discovers. LinkedIn works when the audience is defined by job title and company type, which describes most business-to-business AEC selling. It also costs more per click than most firms expect. Meta and Instagram work for visual proof and for retargeting people who already visited. Display and video are for awareness and are rarely where a small firm should start. Retargeting is usually the highest-return line in a small budget, because it reaches people who already showed interest. The right mix depends on whether your buyers go looking for a firm like yours, or have to be found before they start looking.

Enough conversions to learn from, which is a volume question rather than a budget question. Ad platforms optimize by watching what works, and they need a meaningful number of conversion events before that optimization is better than a guess. A campaign with a handful of conversions a month is being optimized on noise. Two things follow. First, count conversions further up the funnel where volume allows, such as a form start or a qualified inquiry, rather than only a signed contract. Second, run fewer campaigns with more volume each, instead of splitting a small budget across five. Any provider who will not discuss this before quoting a budget is not being straight with you. Bring us your current numbers and we will tell you what is realistic at that volume. Sometimes the answer is that paid search is not the right first channel.

Your firm, and this is the single most important thing to get right at the start. Ad accounts should be created inside your own business manager, with your billing, and the professional granted access to them. The tracking pixel or tag lives on your site and its history belongs to you. Audiences built from your website visitors and your customer lists are your data. Firms discover this the wrong way when a relationship ends. The account, along with years of conversion history and audience data, turns out to belong to the agency. Rebuilding that is expensive and slow. Licenses and accounts stay in your name in every engagement we run. A provider unwilling to work that way is telling you exactly what the exit will look like, before you have even started.

By measuring the steps, not just the signature. In an industry where a project is won six months after the first contact, last-click attribution on a signed contract is useless. What works is a chain: impressions to clicks, clicks to inquiries, inquiries to qualified conversations, conversations to proposals, proposals to work. Each step is measurable in a shorter window than the one after it. That requires the inquiry to be captured with its source and carried into your CRM, which is where most firms lose the thread. Offline conversion import closes the loop where your CRM supports it. Expect attribution to be approximate and say so out loud. A tidy attribution number in this industry is usually a wrong one, and it usually ends up flattering the wrong channel anyway.

A page worth sending people to, tracking that works, and somebody who answers. The landing page matters more than the campaign: traffic sent to a generic homepage converts poorly no matter how well the ads are built. Conversion tracking has to be installed and tested before spending, not reconstructed afterwards, and this is where a surprising share of wasted budget comes from. Then the follow-up. An inquiry that waits two days for a reply has usually already contacted somebody else. Firms that fix those three things before advertising often need less budget than they planned for. We would rather spend the first two weeks there than spend your money learning why it mattered.