Performance Marketing
Add up what every platform claims and you have sold more than you shipped.
Cross-channel budget allocation decided by measured contribution, not platform self-reporting.
1.7x
Summed platform-reported conversions against actual orders
Measured at audit
The problem
Each advertising platform is measured by its own attribution model, on its own view-through and click windows, with a strong commercial interest in claiming the conversion. Run four channels and you will be shown four confident reports that collectively describe a business larger than yours. The practical damage is not the reporting — it is that budget gets allocated on those numbers. Money moves towards whichever platform is most aggressive at claiming credit, which is not the same as whichever platform is producing customers.
Process
How we approach it
Start from one number that cannot be gamed
Total media spend against total new revenue in the same period. Marketing efficiency ratio is crude, it ignores lag, and it is the only figure in the stack that no platform can inflate. We anchor planning to it, then use channel-level reporting to explain movement within it rather than to justify budget.
Reconcile platform claims against reality
We build a standing reconciliation: what each platform reported, what the analytics stack saw, what the order or CRM system recorded, and where the gaps are. Persistent gaps are informative — they usually point to view-through inflation, deduplication failures between paid social and affiliate, or conversion lag being counted twice.
Test rather than model where the stakes are high
Multi-touch attribution rebuilt on incomplete post-consent data is modelling on top of modelling. For budget decisions above a threshold we agree with you, we test instead: geo holdouts, matched-market pauses, or scaled spend changes with a pre-registered read. Slower, harder to argue with.
Rebuild the measurement plumbing
Server-side tagging, Conversions API, Enhanced Conversions and consent-mode configuration are not growth tactics, they are the difference between bidding algorithms seeing your conversions and guessing at them. We audit and fix this early because everything downstream depends on it.
Deliverables
What you get
Single cross-channel performance model reporting blended spend, new-customer revenue and marketing efficiency ratio in one view
Reconciliation of platform-reported conversions against your order or CRM system on an agreed cadence, with variance explained rather than averaged away
Server-side tagging, Conversions API and Enhanced Conversions implementation review, with a remediation list ranked by revenue impact
Deduplication rules configured across paid search, paid social and affiliate so the same order is not paid for twice
Incrementality testing on the channel carrying the largest disputed budget, with method and success criteria agreed before it runs
Budget allocation recommendations stating what moves, by how much, and what result would cause us to reverse it
Channel-level contribution reporting that survives being shown to a finance team
Industries
Where we run this
Ecommerce
Paid acquisition managed against contribution margin and breakeven efficiency, not platform-reported return.
SaaS
Demand capture and creation for B2B software, measured on payback duration rather than lead volume.
Finance
Acquisition for regulated firms, where the advertisement is itself a regulated document.
Gaming
User acquisition for free-to-play titles, measured on retention curves and payback windows.
B2B
Paid acquisition for considered purchases with long cycles, small keyword universes and offline conversions.
Frequently asked
Is this just marketing mix modelling?
No. Full MMM needs years of data, meaningful spend variance and a specialist team, and most mid-market advertisers cannot support it honestly. We use the parts that work at this scale — geo testing, holdouts, blended efficiency tracking — and we say so rather than selling a model that the data cannot carry.
We use GA4 as our source of truth. Is that a problem?
It is a reasonable source of truth as long as everyone understands that it is a last-non-direct model with consent gaps, and that it will disagree with every ad platform by design. The problem is not GA4. The problem is having three sources of truth and no agreed rule for which one governs a budget decision.
How many channels do you need to run for this to be worth it?
Two or more with meaningful spend, or one channel plus affiliate. With a single channel the reconciliation work still has value but the allocation work does not, and you would be better served by the individual channel service.
Do you run creative as well as media?
We run creative strategy, testing cadence and briefing. Production we either coordinate with your existing studio or bring in a partner. We do not pretend to be a creative agency and we do not mark up someone else’s production without saying so.
Start with the audit.
It has a defined scope and a defined deliverable, and it is deliberately separable from anything that follows. If the audit says your current setup is fine, that is a legitimate outcome and we will say so.