Paid search puts your offer in front of people at the exact moment they’re looking for it. That’s the good news. The bad news is it’s an auction, costs rise every year, and an unmanaged account will happily spend your budget on clicks that never convert.
Our paid search discipline comes from two places: managing $250M+ in annual ad spend at enterprise scale, and spending our own money on our own brands, where every wasted dollar is personally felt. The rules are the same at both scales:
- Kill criteria before launch. We define what failure looks like and when we pull the plug, before a dollar is spent.
- Testing as a system. Creative and keyword tests run on a cadence, structured so we know which variable actually moved the result.
- Payback math over platform metrics. The ad platform will tell you ROAS. We track what a customer costs all-in and how long until they’re profitable.
- The landing page is part of the campaign. Most “ad problems” are page problems. We fix both, because tuning one without the other burns money.