Paid Advertising
Anyone can buy traffic. The question is what it costs to buy a customer.
Paid advertising can create measurable demand faster than most organic channels. But speed only matters if the economics work downstream — and the ad platform only ever sees part of that picture.
The measurement problem
The platform keeps one set of books. Your business keeps another.
Ad platforms report what they can observe: a click, a form fill, a tracked purchase. What they can’t see is whether that lead was qualified, whether it closed, or what was left after cost of goods.
What the platform can see
Clicksobserved
Conversionsobserved
Cost per conversionobserved
Conversion valueobserved
Return on ad spendobserved
What the business actually banks
How many were qualified
Booking rate on those
Close rate on the ones that booked
Customers actually acquired
Cost per acquired customer
What that customer is worth
Both ledgers are real. Only one of them pays you.
This is why a falling cost per lead can accompany a worse quarter, and why a strong return on ad spend can still lose money on a thin-margin product. We manage against the right-hand column, and report both so you can see the difference.
Which path fits
Same platforms. Completely different builds.
A lead generation account is built around forms, calls, and qualified inquiries. An e-commerce account is built around a product feed, Shopping campaigns, and margin. Both need real platform expertise. Neither performs when it’s managed like the other.
Path A
Lead generation
You sell through conversations. Revenue arrives as a booked call, a submitted form, or a request for a quote — and someone follows up.
See how we build lead flowPath B
Product & e-commerce
You sell through checkout. Revenue arrives when someone buys without ever speaking to you, so the product page and the feed do the selling.
See how we drive revenue| Lead generation | E-commerce | |
|---|---|---|
| How the sale happens | A conversation after the inquiry | Checkout, with no conversation at all |
| Success metric | Cost per qualified lead, then per customer | Return on ad spend, read against margin |
| Account built around | Forms, calls, inquiries | Product feed and Shopping |
| Tracking focus | Call tracking and form conversions | Purchase value and feed health |
| Early weeks spent on | Lead quality and keyword filtering | Feed refinement and campaign structure |
| What has to be true after | Someone follows up quickly and sells well | The product page converts and the margin holds |
What gets checked first
Paid traffic amplifies whatever is already happening.
If the downstream economics work, more spend produces more customers. If they don’t, more spend produces the same problem at a higher monthly cost.
Conversion tracking
If we can’t tell which spend produced which outcome, nothing after this point can be optimised honestly.
The landing experience
Traffic sent to a page that doesn’t convert costs more per click and produces fewer customers. Sometimes the fix is the site itself, not the campaign.
The offer
An offer people don’t want gets more expensive to advertise, not cheaper. Ads make an offer visible; they don’t make it compelling.
Lead handling
For lead generation, speed of follow-up frequently matters more than lead volume. A lead nobody calls back is a lead you paid for twice.
Product economics
For e-commerce, margin after cost of goods and shipping determines what an order can afford to cost. Return on ad spend alone won’t tell you.
Capacity
Demand you can’t fulfil turns into wait times and refunds. Worth checking before scaling, not after.
We identify which one is actually limiting you rather than defaulting to a bigger budget.
Measured outcomes
One from each side of the split.
Both figures are published in full on the case study they link to.
Lead generation — video production
8.4×
Weekly conversions, from roughly 50 to 418
The result that showed up in the business, not the dashboard
Conversion volume is the platform number. What happened alongside it is the one worth citing: over the course of the engagement the studio grew from 6 employees to 16 to handle the incoming work.
Hiring decisions follow demand from several directions, so we won’t claim the campaign was the sole cause. It is the kind of outcome the right-hand ledger is built to capture, and a click-through rate never would.
Product — supplement manufacturer
708.22%
Value-to-cost ratio
Display and remarketing built around what a purchase is actually worth
Remarketing brought back visitors who hadn’t yet purchased, and the account was managed against purchase value rather than click volume.
- Directly tracked conversions increased 245%, from 490 to 1,689
- Average cost per conversion: $9.96
The $1,935,403.02 figure is estimated total revenue, not directly tracked revenue. It includes $219,085.12 in estimated view-through revenue, calculated as a $62.56 average purchase price multiplied by 3,502 total view-through conversions, added to tracked conversion value.
Scope
Which platforms, and where the line sits.
The mix depends on your business model, your budget, and where your buyers actually are. Platforms are how the work gets executed, not how the strategy gets decided.
- Google Search
- Google Shopping
- Google Display
- YouTube
- Microsoft (Bing & Yahoo)
- Dynamic remarketing
Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Pinterest are handled separately under Paid Social — those platforms interrupt people who weren’t looking, which needs different targeting and different creative. Plenty of clients run both. For online stores, Meta Ads vs. Google Ads for e-commerce covers which to start with when the budget can’t fund both properly. Industry also shapes the mix; see industries we work in, our e-commerce marketing work, or browse the full case studies.
Healthcare-specific
Running paid ads for a HIPAA-regulated organisation?
Standard conversion tracking wasn’t built for patients. The tracking architecture needs to keep protected health information out of the ad platforms while still feeding campaigns the conversion signal they need to optimise.
Questions
Paid advertising FAQs.
What’s the difference between lead generation and e-commerce advertising?
Lead generation campaigns are built around calls, form submissions, and qualified inquiries, and the real measure is what it costs to acquire a customer rather than a lead. E-commerce campaigns are built around a product feed and Shopping campaigns, measured on return on ad spend read against margin. The platforms overlap; the account structure, tracking, and optimisation approach do not.
How do I know which one is right for my business?
If revenue arrives through calls, quotes, or form submissions, lead generation is the starting point. If people buy directly online without speaking to you, e-commerce is the fit. If you do both, or you’re genuinely unsure, a short call sorts it out faster than a page can.
Isn’t a lower cost per lead always better?
Not reliably. Cost per lead can fall because targeting got broader and the leads got worse. If booking rate and close rate drop further than cost per lead did, you’re paying less per lead and more per customer. That’s why we track the chain past the form submission rather than optimising to the cheapest number.
Does a high return on ad spend mean we’re profitable?
Not on its own. Return on ad spend compares revenue to ad cost and knows nothing about cost of goods, shipping, or returns. A 4:1 return can be comfortable on one product and unprofitable on another. Margin is what turns that ratio into an answer.
For online stores, we walk through break-even ROAS and what a first order can afford to cost in how much an e-commerce business should spend on marketing.
How long before we see results?
Search and Shopping generate activity faster than organic channels, but the first 30 to 60 days usually go toward tracking verification, campaign structuring, and cutting traffic that doesn’t convert. Accounts get stronger as conversion data accumulates, which is why judging performance in week two tends to be misleading.
Still deciding
Not sure which one you are?
Plenty of businesses sit somewhere between the two. Tell me how you actually make money and I’ll tell you which account structure fits — and whether paid advertising is the right first move at all.