Paid advertising Search catches demand. Social creates it.
Nobody opens Facebook looking for a plumber. They are shown one, at the moment the tap is still dripping. That is a harder job than answering a search, and it is worth doing properly — because it reaches the people who have not started looking yet.
250+ active client engagements · Campaigns running in Australia, the UK, the UAE, Saudi Arabia and New Zealand · One team across paid, organic and tracking
See how we did it for businesses like yours.
- Robust Facility Solutions$109.06Cost per enquirySelected period · a 20-day period in 2026See how we did it
- PCCS Clean$220.59Cost per enquirySelected period · a 19-day period in 2026See how we did it
- Any Car Towing$19.22cost per enquiry, from 32 enquiriesSelected period · a 12-day period in 2026See how we did it
Seven ways paid
social leaks.
None of these are exotic. They are what we find in almost every underperforming social account we open, and not one of them shows up in an engagement report.
Boosted posts standing in for campaigns
The boost button buys reach. It cannot pick an objective, exclude an audience, hold a budget, or tell you what a booked job cost. Most accounts we open have spent thousands there and have nothing to read.
One creative, running until it dies
Paid social burns through creative in a way search never does. The same image against the same audience for three months is not a strategy, it is the reason the cost per lead keeps climbing.
The pixel fires, the conversion never lands
Browser tracking alone loses a large share of conversions to privacy settings and blockers. Without server-side tracking behind it, the algorithm is optimising toward a picture of your business that is missing pieces.
Every platform run the same way
Facebook creative pasted into TikTok, Instagram copy pushed into LinkedIn. Each of these platforms rewards a different behaviour, and the one that punishes borrowed creative hardest is the one people borrow into most.
Audiences stacked until nobody is left
Three interests, two behaviours, an age band and a radius, all layered together. The audience gets too small to learn from, delivery stalls, and the cost per result goes up rather than down.
Leads that arrive and then sit
A lead form is answered in seconds and followed up in days. On social you are interrupting someone rather than answering them, so the enquiry cools faster than a search lead does.
Reported in likes, paid for in dollars
Reach, impressions, engagement rate. None of them tell you whether the phone rang. If a report does not end in a number of jobs or orders and what each one cost, it is not a report.
SoudCoh · all channels
250+
Active client engagements
Google, Meta, LinkedIn, TikTok and organic, run by one team
National cultural institution
A$634K
Of media kept working
From a A$750K annual budget, at a 15.5% agency fee
Where campaigns run
5
Countries
Australia, the UK, the UAE, Saudi Arabia and New Zealand
Figures trace to live engagements and are dated in the case study or engagement record they come from. Public-sector and cultural clients are identified by sector and jurisdiction only. None of it is a forecast for your account.
Four platforms.
Four different rooms.
Each one has a page of its own — what it is good at, what it costs you when it is the wrong choice, and exactly how we build it. Most clients start with one, not four.
- Facebook adsThe workhorse of paid socialThe broadest reach and the most mature ad platform of the four. Lead forms, conversion campaigns, catalogue and retargeting, with server-side tracking behind all of it.Best for: Service businesses and online stores wanting volume at a known cost per result
- Instagram adsThe same account, a visual roomReels, Stories, Feed and Explore run through the same Meta account as Facebook, but the creative that works here is different enough to deserve its own brief.Best for: Anything you can show rather than explain — trades, retail, hospitality, health and beauty
- LinkedIn adsWhere the decision-maker isJob title, seniority, function, company size and named-account targeting. The only platform where you can put a message in front of a procurement lead by role.Best for: B2B, enterprise, government and professional services with long buying cycles
- TikTok adsAttention before intentFull-screen vertical video that has to earn its first second. Spark Ads let you run a real post — yours or a creator's — as the ad, which is why it rarely looks like one.Best for: Consumer brands and service businesses reaching people who are not searching yet
Three questions decide which of the four you run.
Who it puts you in front of, what the creative has to do to work there, and what number you are allowed to judge it on. Read across a row rather than down a column.
Facebook
Who it reachesThe widest audience of the four, with the deepest targeting and — more usefully — the deepest exclusion tools, so prospecting and follow-up stay apart.
What the creative must doStop a scroll and make one specific promise. Static images still beat video here more often than people expect, and lead forms remove the landing page from the equation entirely.
What you judge it onCost per booked job or order, read weekly. Enough volume passes through it that a week is usually long enough to mean something.
Instagram
Who it reachesThe same Meta audience, in a room where people came to look rather than read. Planned in the same account as Facebook, so the two are bought once, not twice.
What the creative must doShow the work instead of describing it. Vertical, first frame doing the job, words on the screen because most of it is watched on mute.
What you judge it onCost per result, plus how long a creative lasts before frequency starts lifting it. Creative lifespan matters more here than anywhere else.
LinkedIn
Who it reachesPeople by job title, seniority, function, company size and named account. It is the only one of the four where that data is the product rather than an inference.
What the creative must doOpen on the problem, in the language of the person who signs the order, and land somewhere a procurement lead can forward internally without explaining it.
What you judge it onQualified conversations and pipeline, over months. Judging it on cost per lead against Facebook will always make it look expensive, because it is buying a different thing.
TikTok
Who it reachesPeople who are not looking for you at all, at the lowest cost of reaching a person of the four. Demand is created here, not caught.
What the creative must doEarn the first second. Shot rather than designed. Spark Ads run a real post — yours or a creator's — as the ad, which is why it rarely looks like one.
What you judge it onCost per result, and how many genuinely new concepts a month the account can absorb. An account that cannot make new creative cannot hold this platform.
The row you cannot afford is the one you pick because it is fashionable. A budget spread across all four buys four sets of learning data, none of them large enough to learn from — which is why most clients start with one.
Ten things happen on a paid social account. Here they are, in order.
This is the part most agency pages keep vague, and it is the only part that decides whether the money works. So it is written down.
Agree the number before we spend anything
What a customer is worth to you, what you can afford to pay for one, and what counts as a result. Everything after this is measured against that number rather than against last month's engagement rate.
Fix the measurement first
Pixel and server-side tracking on every platform we are running, conversions defined per action rather than lumped together, and values attached. If it cannot be measured properly it does not get bought.
Pick the platforms on evidence, not habit
Sometimes that is one platform done properly rather than four done thinly. A trade in a regional town and a B2B software company do not belong on the same channel mix, and we will say so on the first call.
Build the audiences from your own data
Customer lists, website visitors, video viewers and past enquirers first, then lookalikes built from the converters rather than from everyone. Interests come last, and stay broad enough for delivery to learn.
Write and shoot for the platform, not for the brand deck
Vertical for Reels and TikTok, first frame doing the work, captions burned in because most of it is watched on mute. A LinkedIn ad opens on the problem; a TikTok ad opens on the hook.
Structure the account so it can learn
Enough budget per ad set to leave the learning phase, few enough ad sets that they are not bidding against each other, and clean exclusions so retargeting and prospecting stay separate.
Test creative on purpose, not by accident
New concepts against the current winner, one variable at a time, with enough spend behind each to mean something. Creative is the main lever on paid social, and it is the one most accounts never pull.
Refresh before the fatigue shows up in the invoice
Frequency and cost per result are read weekly, and creative is replaced on a schedule rather than after the numbers have already gone. Waiting for the drop is a month of budget spent finding out.
Route the leads so they get answered
Lead form submissions pushed straight into your CRM or inbox the moment they land, with the source attached. A five-minute callback and a next-day callback are different businesses.
Report in jobs and orders, then move the budget
A fixed cadence covering what was spent, what it produced, what changed and why. Budget follows whatever is producing customers this month, across platforms rather than inside one.
The first ninety days, honestly.
- Week 0
The audit and the first call
Thirty to forty-five minutes on what you sell, who buys it and what a customer is worth. Then we open whatever ad accounts exist, read the last ninety days, and write down every leak we find.
- Week 1
Tracking before creative
Pixels, server-side tracking, conversion definitions and CRM routing go in first. Building creative on top of broken measurement is how agencies end up arguing about numbers in month three.
- Weeks 1–2
The build
Audiences, campaign structure, creative concepts, copy and landing pages. A second person checks all of it. Nothing is live and nothing has spent.
- Day one
You press go
Campaigns are created paused so you can read the whole build first. You activate when you are ready, not when we are.
- Weeks 2–6
Learning, then reading
Ad sets need volume before their numbers mean anything. We hold structure steady long enough to get it, then start cutting the creative and audiences that are not carrying their share.
- From there
Rhythm
A creative refresh cycle, weekly optimisation, reporting on a fixed cadence whether the news is good or bad, and a proper conversation each quarter about where the next block of budget should go.
Campaigns are created paused, every time. You read the build before a dollar moves — that is a rule we hold ourselves to, not a favour.
What good paid social actually looks like.
Seven things that either happen on an account or do not. Each one comes with the question to ask — of us, or of whoever is running it now.
The number is agreed before any money moves
What a customer is worth to you, what you can afford to pay for one, and what counts as a result. Written down, and used to judge every later decision instead of last month's engagement rate.
Ask thisAsk what your target cost per booked job is. If nobody can say it out loud, nothing is being managed against it.
Server-side tracking goes in before the first ad runs
Meta's Conversions API, LinkedIn's conversions API and TikTok's Events API, each paired with the browser pixel and sharing a reference so one sale is never counted as two.
Ask thisAsk to watch a real test enquiry arrive in the ad platform by both roads, browser and server, before launch.
Campaigns are created paused
Audiences, exclusions, budgets, creative, copy and landing pages are all readable before a dollar moves. You activate when you are ready, not when we are.
Ask thisAsk to press go yourself. An agency that cannot hand you that button has already spent your money.
Prospecting and retargeting are never reported together
Warm audiences convert cheaply, so a blended cost per lead can look healthy while the prospecting half quietly fails. The two are separated in the account and in the report.
Ask thisAsk for last month's cost per result for cold audiences only. A single blended number is the answer to a different question.
Creative is replaced on a schedule, not after the drop
Frequency and cost per result are read weekly, and new concepts are tested against the current winner one variable at a time, with enough spend behind each to mean something.
Ask thisAsk when the running creative was made and what it is currently being tested against. Two answers, not one.
Leads are routed in seconds, with the source attached
Lead-form submissions push straight into your CRM or inbox the moment they land. On social you interrupted someone rather than answered them, so the enquiry cools faster than a search lead does.
Ask thisSend a test enquiry at four o'clock on a Friday and time the callback. That is the number your customers experience.
The report ends in jobs and what each one cost
A fixed cadence, in the language you use about your own business, covering what was spent, what it produced, what changed and why — whether the news is good or bad.
Ask thisAsk to see a real client report before you sign anything. Reach and engagement rate on the last page is a tell.
Paid social lives or dies on the first two of the six stages.
Compound is how our team works on any account — six stages every change passes through. Social puts most of its weight at the front, before a single ad has run.
Mandate
You set the number before we spend the money.
Paid social will always find you cheap clicks. Agreeing what a customer is worth, and what you can afford to pay for one, is what stops a campaign being judged on the metric that happens to look best that month.
Meter
If it can't be measured, it doesn't get bought.
This stage carries more weight on social than anywhere else we work. Browser tracking alone loses conversions to privacy settings and blockers, so server-side tracking goes in before the first ad runs — not after the numbers stop adding up.
One brief per platform, not one brief reformatted four times.
We make the work — static, carousel, short-form vertical video and the copy with it. What changes between these four is not the size of the file. It is what the first second has to do.
Facebook
Feed at 1:1 and 4:5 · Stories and Reels at 9:16 · lead form or landing page
The ad carries the whole promise, because a lead form means there may be no landing page behind it. One offer, one audience, one reason to act now. Static images and carousels do a great deal of the work here.
Instagram
Reels, Stories and Explore at 9:16 · Feed at 4:5 · same Meta account as Facebook
Show the job. The first frame is the ad, and most of it is watched on mute, so the words go on the screen. A Facebook creative pasted in here is the most common thing we replace in week one.
LinkedIn
Single image, document and video · conversation and lead-gen forms
Written for the person who signs off, not the person who searches. Opens on the problem, states the constraint you solve, and lands on something that survives being forwarded to two other people.
TikTok
Full-screen vertical video at 9:16 · Spark Ads run a real organic post as the ad
Shot rather than designed, and made in volume rather than in polish. The first second decides whether the rest of the budget was worth spending, so the hook is written before anything else is.
Where your own footage or photography exists we will use it. On social, real material from the job site regularly outperforms polished production — and it is the one asset a competitor cannot copy.
That judgement is easier to check on somebody else's work than on ours. We take seven Australian campaigns apart on the same five questions each time — what the opening second of a Metro Trains or Kennards Hire film is actually doing — with the advertiser named in the heading and the agency credited wherever one is publicly known.
Six ways a managed account still goes wrong.
These are ours as much as anyone's — they are the mistakes available to a team that is paying attention. Each one has a specific guard, and the guard is the reason it does not happen twice.
The learning phase never ends
Budget split across too many ad sets means none of them gets enough results a week for delivery to leave learning. Every one of them stays expensive and none of them stabilises.
Prevented byFewer ad sets with more budget each. When something is not moving we consolidate rather than add, and we say no to the extra audience someone wants to test.
Edits during the learning window buy nothing
A meaningful edit to an ad set restarts its learning. An anxious week of daily tweaks can hold an account in a permanent learning phase and it will look like the platform is the problem.
Prevented byStructure is held steady through the first two to four weeks. Changes are queued and batched, and we tell you what is being held rather than going quiet.
Retargeting flatters the whole account
People who already know you convert cheaply. Blend them into one number and prospecting can fail for months behind a cost per lead that reads beautifully.
Prevented byCold and warm are separated in the build with hard exclusions, and reported separately. Budget decisions are made on the cold number.
Fatigue is read a month too late
Frequency climbs, cost per result follows, and a monthly average smooths the whole thing away until the invoice does not match the leads.
Prevented byFrequency and cost per result are read weekly, and the refresh cycle runs on a calendar rather than on a bad month.
The campaign optimises toward a proxy
Set a campaign to buy landing-page views or link clicks and it will buy cheap ones forever, very efficiently, without ever finding a customer.
Prevented byEvery campaign optimises toward an event on the agreed list, with a value attached. Nothing is bought against a proxy because the real event was harder to wire.
The same sale is counted twice
The pixel and the server-side connection both report the conversion without a shared reference, so one job arrives as two and the cost per job halves on paper.
Prevented byDeduplication is part of the build, and it is proved with a real test enquiry pushed end to end before launch rather than discovered in month three.
The first of those is easier to avoid with something to measure against. Commercial cleaning carries the widest spread in our whole book, and the scenario page puts the cheap end and the expensive end side by side across the accounts we publish, because the gap is the lesson rather than the average. The failure at the other end is quieter: advertising is the easy part of scaling and attending the work is not, so it is worth checking how many jobs a month your crew can physically complete before you ask four platforms to find you more.
Four clients. Four real numbers.
Three of these are Google Ads accounts and the tiles say so. We have put them here rather than dressed them up as social results, because the point is the measurement: paid social is held to the same standard, in the same units.
- End-of-lease cleaning · Melbourne · Google Ads138jobs booked in 41 daysA$20.43 cost per job · 21.20% conversion rate · A$2,819.92 ad spendPink Flamingo
- Carpet cleaning · Perth · Google Ads53jobs in the first 15 daysA$24.92 cost per job · brand-new account, no conversion history at launchCleanetic
- Security and CCTV · New South Wales · Google Ads39qualified leads in 15 daysCommercial and residential split · same-day lead alerts to the teamNexData
- Media buying · AustraliaA$634Kof media kept workingFrom a A$750K annual budget, at a 15.5% agency fee against a typical 18–22%National cultural institution
Four platforms and one budget, which makes the split the decision rather than the platform, so it is worth settling how to divide one budget across the four before the first campaign goes live.
Two of the write-ups behind those tiles are worth reading for the shape of the demand rather than the result. The made-to-measure blinds account is the cheap-looking category: high volume, nothing outrageous per click, and most of it worthless until the cost per order came down 62.63%. Monza Detailing's 122 enquiries in a 31-day period is the opposite problem — demand that lies dormant until something sets it off, from an account switched on with no history behind it at all.
Before you pick a platform
Most businesses need one of these, not four.
Which of these do you actually need?
Find your situation on the left; the answer is on the right. If two of them describe you, say so on the call and we will tell you which one to start with.
- You want more phone calls and quote requests, this month.
Facebook carries this best of the four. Lead forms remove the landing page from the equation, the audience tools are the most mature, and there is enough volume to learn from quickly.
Facebook ads- Your work photographs well and your customers are under forty-five.
Instagram. Reels and Stories reward showing the job rather than describing it, and the same Meta account runs both platforms so the two are planned together, not bought twice.
Instagram ads- You sell to businesses, councils or enterprise procurement.
LinkedIn. It is the only platform where you can target by job title, seniority, function and named company, which is what a long approval chain actually requires.
LinkedIn ads- Nobody is searching for what you sell yet.
TikTok. It is built to create demand rather than catch it, and the cost of reaching people is usually lower than the other three — which makes it a sensible place to test a message before you spend on it elsewhere.
TikTok ads- You run an online store and want orders, not enquiries.
Meta first — catalogue campaigns and dynamic retargeting on Facebook and Instagram, with TikTok behind it for prospecting once the tracking is clean. E-commerce is very much in scope, and it is a different build from lead generation.
Facebook ads- People already search for what you sell.
Start with Google Ads and add social once the search demand is covered. Catching demand that already exists is nearly always cheaper than creating it, and the two work better together than either does alone.
Google Ads
Paid social is one part of what we build.
These are the pieces that sit closest to it. The one nobody should skip is tracking — on social it decides whether the platform is optimising toward your customers or toward a guess.
- Google AdsThe other half of paid. Search catches the demand social creates, and most accounts we run use both.
- Tracking and analyticsHow a click becomes a measured conversion. Nothing on this page means anything without it, and on social it matters more than anywhere else.
- Lead generationThe whole thing — paid, organic and the conversion assets in between — when one channel is not the question.
- Improve lead qualitySocial produces volume. This is how the volume gets filtered, scored and routed so your team is not calling tyre-kickers.
- Website designWhere the traffic lands. A social ad promises something in one line and the page has to answer it in the first screen.
- Seven Australian campaigns, taken apartMetro Trains, Tourism Australia, Kennards Hire and four others, read on the same five questions each time, with the original linked and the agency credited wherever one is publicly known.
- Which channel works in your tradeTen industries, each with the channel order we would actually recommend and the reason the others come second.
- Paid accounts with the numbers attachedSpend, conversions and cost per job on real accounts across every platform on this page.
Paid social, answered.
Cost, timing, contracts, who owns the ad accounts, reporting, and what happens when a platform is not working.
The first call is free and there is no deck.
Talk to us about your adsTwo separate numbers. Your ad spend goes to the platform, and what it needs to be depends on how many results you want and how competitive your audience is — the smallest companies we work with invest a minimum of A$3,000 a month, and our largest clients run multiple eight figures a month across paid channels. Our management fee is separate and scales with the work. There is no one-size-fits-all answer, which is why the first call is free: you get a real number for your situation before you commit to anything.
Usually faster than people expect and slower than they hope. Lead forms can produce enquiries within a day or two of going live, but the first two to four weeks are a learning period where the platform is working out who to show your ads to and we are cutting the audiences and creative that are not carrying their share. Campaigns generally settle into their best rhythm around 60 to 90 days. Your industry, your creative and your budget all move that timeline.
No long-term lock-in. We would rather keep the work because it is producing than because a contract says you have to stay. What we do ask for is enough runway to be fair to the account — paid social judged on its first ten days is being judged during the part where the platform is still learning. The terms are put in front of you in plain English before anything is signed.
We own and run the ad accounts, because the build is proprietary methodology refined across 250+ engagements — audience architecture, creative testing frameworks, exclusion logic and conversion tracking. Your Facebook page, Instagram account and LinkedIn company page stay yours throughout, and you get full-visibility reporting on performance and spend at all times. On long-term marketing agreements, ownership and handover options are available to discuss.
We tell you, in the report, in plain English, and we change what we are doing. A campaign that is not producing gets rebuilt, repointed at a different audience, given different creative, or stopped. If the honest answer is that a platform is not right for your business, we would rather move the budget somewhere that is than keep billing you for it. What we will not do is let it run quietly and hope it comes good.
A fixed cadence, good news or bad. Each report covers what was spent, what it produced, what we changed and why, and what happens next — written in the language you use about your own business rather than platform jargon. You can also see live performance and spend for yourself at any time. If a number moved, you will find out from us before you find out from your bank statement.
It depends on who you sell to. If you sell services to consumers, Facebook and Instagram together are usually the right first move — one Meta account, two very different creative briefs. If you sell to businesses, councils or enterprise, LinkedIn is the only platform that lets you target by job title and named company. If nobody is searching for what you sell yet, TikTok is the cheapest place to find out whether the message lands. Most clients start with one platform done properly rather than four done thinly.
Yes, and it is a different build from lead generation. Product catalogue and Advantage+ shopping campaigns, dynamic retargeting for browsers and cart abandoners, prospecting creative built for the feed, and full pixel and server-side tracking so revenue lands back in the ad platform accurately. The discipline is identical to our service-business work — track it properly, test it constantly, move the budget to what pays — but the finish line is an order rather than a booked job.
We do, and it is part of the job rather than an extra. Static images, carousels, short-form vertical video and the copy that goes with them, written per platform rather than recycled across all four. Where your own footage or photography exists we will use it — on social, real material from the job site regularly outperforms polished production. We also run a refresh cycle so creative is replaced before fatigue shows up in the cost per result.
With both a browser pixel and a server-side connection running together — Meta's Conversions API, LinkedIn's conversions API, TikTok's Events API. The browser pixel loses a meaningful share of conversions to privacy settings, tracking prevention and ad blockers. The server-side connection sends the same events from your website's server instead, so the platform sees conversions it would otherwise miss and can optimise toward them. This goes in before the first ad runs, not after the numbers stop adding up.
That is how most of our accounts are built. Search catches people who already know what they want; social reaches them before they start looking, and follows up with everyone who did not enquire the first time. Running both under one team means the budget can move between them on evidence instead of being split by habit, and the same conversion definitions are used on both sides so the numbers are actually comparable.
Yes. Campaigns run in Australia, the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and New Zealand. Paid social travels better than search does, because the creative and the audience tools work the same way everywhere — what changes is the language, the compliance rules and what the local market considers normal, and all three are worth checking before a single ad goes live.
For a trade business deciding where to put the first thousand dollars, what is actually working on paid social right now is the honest short answer. If you are already spending and cannot tell what it returned, the tax line that quietly distorts every return figure is usually part of the reason. If you are buying more than one channel, how the channels feed each other is the argument for running them off one set of numbers.
Get the social audit
We read your ad accounts, price what is being wasted, check whether your conversions are actually being counted, and tell you which of the four platforms is worth your money first. Yours to keep either way.
No pitch deck. No upsell. A real conversation and a written list of leaks.