What does paid acquisition cover?
Which channels do you buy?
Every performance channel: Meta, Google, TikTok, Snap, native networks, programmatic and the rest. The mix follows where your customers are and what each channel costs per new customer, not which platform an agency happens to know best.
How do you run search campaigns?
We run Google Search and Performance Max (PMax) with queries grouped by intent to buy rather than by vanity brand terms. Negative keyword lists are maintained continuously, because one leaked query can spend a week of budget on people who were never going to convert.
How do you run social channels such as Meta, TikTok and Snap?
Each platform gets a server-side conversion event through its conversion API, and creative made for the way people use that feed. Without a matching conversion event, the algorithm optimises for the last thing it can see, which is rarely a paying customer.
When are native and programmatic worth the budget?
Native and open-web programmatic add reach beyond the big platforms and often scale cheaply. They need landing pages that load quickly, a frequency cap, and a cost per acquisition (CPA) target based on each publisher's actual quality rather than the network average.
How are landing pages tied to the media buy?
Each group of campaigns has its own set of landing pages. Offer, language and payment cues match the traffic source. A shared homepage is not a landing page.
What is the test budget for a new market?
A test is sized to produce a CPA you can trust statistically, not to 'get presence'. If the spend cannot buy enough customers to read the number, we do not launch.
How is paid acquisition measured?
| KPI | What it tells you | When we act on it |
|---|---|---|
| CPA | Cost to acquire a new paying customer. | When it breaks the payback window for two consecutive weeks. |
| Conversion rate | Purchases as a share of unique clickers who reach checkout. | When the landing page or market mix shifts the rate without a bid change. |
| Payback days | Days until media cost is returned in net revenue. | When revenue at day 30 (D30) cannot cover CPA, even after customer relationship management (CRM). |
| Discount cost per customer | Promotional spend hidden inside a 'good' CPA. | When the discount, not the media, is doing the converting. |
What happens in the first 90 days?
- Days 1–14: event map, account access, an inventory of creative and landing pages, and market constraints written down.
- Days 15–30: campaigns live at test spend. Daily checks for broken events rather than screenshots of return on ad spend (ROAS).
- Days 31–60: we stop sources that cannot hit a provisional CPA and shift budget to the two or three that can.
- Days 61–90: we lock a target CPA per market, document the creative IDs that produced customers, and decide whether the budget grows or shrinks.
Where does paid acquisition usually go wrong?
Optimising to sign-ups
Platforms will happily scale sign-ups. A sign-up that never pays is a cost with a nice dashboard. If the conversion event is not the purchase, the algorithm is optimising for something else.
One landing page for six markets
An English .com homepage is not a market entry. Payment methods, language and the offer have to match the click, or CPA becomes a random number.
Scaling before the match rate is there
Doubling budget on a pixel that sees half the purchases trains the platform on the wrong people. Attribution has to sit in the same 90-day plan as the media, which is why our paid acquisition work always connects to analytics and creative production.
Related services: attribution that still sees the conversion after the browser drops the cookie, creative built for each platform and judged on sales and CRM that decides whether D30 value covers the CPA. For the numbers behind this approach, read how to set a target CPA from customer lifetime value.