Step 1: What Does A Performance Baseline Audit Reveal About Your Ad Spend?
You cannot improve what you do not measure. The Baseline Audit answers a simple question: where is your money actually going, and what is it actually producing?
This step examines your current performance across four dimensions: ROAS by channel, CAC by customer segment, creative performance patterns, and landing page conversion rates.
Most founders skip this step because they think they already know their numbers. They are usually wrong. We have audited 100+ campaigns where companies thought they had a 3:1 ROAS on Google Ads but actually had a 1.8:1 ROAS when you factored in all associated costs, including landing page optimization, email sequences, and customer support for low-intent users. The audit reveals these hidden costs and untapped opportunities.
What You Get From The Baseline Audit
The deliverable is a Performance Audit Report that shows ROAS, CAC, and creative performance by channel and segment. You will also get a Baseline Metrics Dashboard that becomes the foundation for measuring progress. This dashboard includes profit-adjusted ROAS, which is revenue contribution margin per ad dollar spent, not just topline ROAS.
Timeline is Week 1 to 2, though most audits complete within 10 days if your data infrastructure is solid.
By the end of this step, you will know exactly which channels are profitable, which are break-even, and which are losing money. You will see which customer segments have the best unit economics. You will understand which creative formats and messaging angles drive the highest quality customers. This clarity is your permission to stop guessing and start systematizing.
Step 2: How Does Channel Architecture Align Ads With The Buyer Journey?
Channel architecture is not just budget allocation. It is assigning each channel a specific role in your buyer journey. Google Ads does not work the same way in awareness as it does in consideration. Facebook does not drive the same behavior across different customer segments. Most teams run ads on whatever platform is available, not on what the buyer journey actually needs.
The Three Components Of Channel Architecture
Channel Architecture means mapping three things. First, your buyer journey stages, which are awareness, consideration, and decision. Second, which channels actually perform at each stage for your business. Third, what percentage of budget should flow through each channel to build a healthy funnel.
You will end up with a Channel Strategy Map that shows exactly which platforms own which stages and a Budget Allocation Model that distributes your quarterly ad spend accordingly.
The Outcome
Each channel has a clear mandate. Google Search owns consideration and decision. YouTube owns awareness. LinkedIn owns trust-building for B2B. Retargeting owns conversion lift. This clarity prevents budget waste on channels that should not be responsible for top-of-funnel awareness. It also prevents underfunding channels that should be driving conversions.
Timeline is Week 2 to 3 because most of this work is strategic conversation and light data analysis.
Channel Architecture also prevents the common trap of over-relying on a single channel. If Google Ads represents 70 percent of your acquisition, you have platform risk. If YouTube represents 5 percent, you are missing awareness opportunities. The framework balances your channel mix so you are building resilience while maintaining profitability.
Step 3: What Makes A Creative System Produce Winning Ads Predictably?
Most teams produce ads reactively. A designer creates a banner. It gets tested. It either wins or loses. If it loses, they are back to square one. This is creative roulette, not a system. The Creative System step builds a repeatable process that generates winning ads predictably, not by luck.
The Three Components Of A Creative System
A true creative system has three components. First, a Creative Testing Framework that specifies which elements you are testing, such as headlines, images, value props, and audiences, and how many variations you are running simultaneously. Second, an Ad Library that archives every winning creative and every losing creative, with performance data attached. Third, Winning Pattern Analysis that extracts the principles behind why certain ads work, including specific headlines, image styles, copy angles, and calls-to-action.
What You Gain
The outcome is a predictable creative pipeline. Instead of guessing what your next ad should say, you are informed by data about what messaging actually resonates with your audience. You know that product demo videos outperform testimonial videos. You know that save 20 hours per week converts better than increase productivity. You know that customers in enterprise segment respond to different visuals than SMB customers.
Timeline is Week 3 to 6 because this step involves running multiple testing cycles and analyzing patterns.
By the end of this step, you will have a library of winning patterns that can inform design, messaging, and audience targeting. You will also know which creative elements are audience-specific and which work across all segments. This data becomes your foundation for consistent A/B testing that actually informs strategy, not just feeds the algorithm.
Step 4: How Does Bid Intelligence Optimize For Profit Instead Of Clicks?
Platforms optimize for their own metrics: clicks on Google, impressions on Facebook, and conversions on whatever channel you are on. What they do not optimize for is your profit margin. Bid Intelligence reverses this by implementing bidding strategies that are profit-aware, not platform-aware.
What Profit-Optimized Bidding Means
Profit-optimized bidding means understanding that a conversion at a 20 percent margin is worth less than a conversion at 40 percent margin. It means bidding differently for customers in high-LTV segments versus low-LTV segments. It means adjusting bids based on time of day, device type, and audience characteristics that correlate with profitable conversions.
Most platforms do not let you do this natively, so you build it using a Bid Strategy Matrix that maps audience segment to maximum acceptable CAC, then use automated rules to adjust bids accordingly.
The Bid Strategy Matrix
The Bid Strategy Matrix shows your maximum acceptable CAC for each customer segment and buying stage, based on unit economics. If your enterprise segment has a 3-year LTV of $50,000 and your SMB segment has a 1-year LTV of $2,000, you will bid 10x more aggressively for enterprise.
The Automated Rules Framework translates this matrix into platform rules, such as Google Smart Bidding and Facebook custom conversions, that execute this strategy automatically.
Timeline is Week 6 to 8 because this requires setting up new conversion tracking and building automation.
The outcome is that you are no longer leaving money on the table by bidding equally across all customers. You are also not overspending on customers who will not be profitable. Bid Intelligence typically improves profit-adjusted ROAS by 15 to 25 percent in the first month because you are shifting spend toward high-margin conversions.
Step 5: When And How Should You Scale Ad Spend Without Killing ROAS?
This is where most campaigns fail. Teams find a profitable channel, then dump unlimited budget into it. ROAS drops. They panic. They either cut spend, which loses profitable growth, or keep spending, which bleeds margin. Both are wrong because they are not implementing a Scale Protocol.
What The Scale Protocol Delivers
The Scale Protocol is a systematic approach to increasing spend while maintaining efficiency thresholds. It answers three critical questions: How much can I increase spend per week without hitting diminishing returns? What metrics should I watch for signals of saturation? What is my recovery plan if efficiency drops below threshold?
The Scale Protocol deliverable is a Scaling Playbook that specifies your specific thresholds, escalation triggers, and weekly optimization cadence.
How To Scale Systematically
Most teams should scale by no more than 15 to 25 percent per week. Some high-velocity channels, like lower-funnel retargeting, can handle 30 to 40 percent. Some awareness channels should scale slower at 5 to 10 percent per week. The Scaling Playbook specifies your rate.
It also defines your efficiency thresholds: if ROAS drops below 2.5x, you pause scaling. If CAC increases 20 percent week-over-week, you investigate before scaling further. Threshold Alerts notify you automatically when these triggers hit, preventing slow-motion margin erosion.
The Weekly Optimization Cadence is equally important. You are not scaling and forgetting. Every week, you are reviewing new performance data, testing new creatives, rotating old ones, adjusting audiences, and making incremental adjustments. This prevents the situation where you scale for three months and then wonder why efficiency dropped.
Timeline is Week 8 to 12 because this requires establishing your baselines and running multiple scaling cycles to validate your thresholds.
By the end of this step, you have permission to scale. You know exactly how much you can increase spend without breaking profitability. You have early warning systems that tell you when things are going wrong. You have a weekly cadence that keeps efficiency from degrading during scaling.
Step 6: How Does Profit Optimization Move Beyond Vanity ROAS?
ROAS is broken. A 3:1 ROAS sounds great until you realize the conversion has a 30 percent gross margin and the other 70 percent of revenue is eaten by CAC, customer support, and payment processing. That is not a 3:1 return. That is a loss. Profit Optimization means moving beyond ROAS to contribution margin as your core metric.
What Contribution Margin Means
Contribution margin means revenue minus the direct costs attributable to that customer: COGS, payment processing, immediate customer support, and payment fraud. It does not include fixed overhead. This is the money available to cover your CAC, platform overhead, and profitability.
If your contribution margin is 45 percent and your CAC is 12 percent of revenue, then your profit margin on that customer is 33 percent. ROAS does not tell you this. Contribution margin does.
Understanding Unit Economics Across The Customer Lifecycle
Profit Optimization also means understanding unit economics across the entire customer lifecycle. A customer acquired at a $100 CAC who has a 1-year LTV of $300 is profitable in the long term. But if your cash runway is 18 months, that short-term cash burn might kill you.
The Profit Dashboard, LTV:CAC Analysis, and Unit Economics Model quantify these tradeoffs so you can make informed decisions about how aggressively to scale.
The LTV:CAC Analysis
The LTV:CAC Analysis answers the question: am I acquiring the right customers? If your LTV is $500 and CAC is $200, that is a 2.5:1 ratio, which is healthy. If your LTV is $500 and CAC is $400, you are over-spending on acquisition relative to lifetime value.
The Unit Economics Model shows what happens when you scale acquisition. Does CAC increase faster than LTV? Does churn increase? Does expansion revenue change?
Timeline is ongoing because profit optimization happens every quarter as your business changes.
By the end of this step, you have moved performance marketing from a cost center, where we spend on ads, to a profit center, where we acquire profitable customers and measure everything through that lens. This is the most powerful shift in the entire framework.
Growth Strategy and Planning
