Meta ads
Pixel and conversions API wired correctly first, because optimising against broken data is how budgets disappear. Then creative, audiences, and a structure that can actually learn.
Twenty-five years of it, including plenty on my own brands where a bad week came out of my own pocket. That changes how carefully you read a number.
Most small business ad accounts are losing half their budget somewhere nobody has looked. Usually it is tracking, audience overlap, or a landing page that undoes the click.
Paid mediaPixel and conversions API wired correctly first, because optimising against broken data is how budgets disappear. Then creative, audiences, and a structure that can actually learn.
Search, Shopping and Performance Max, with the negative keyword work nobody enjoys doing. That unglamorous part is usually where the wasted spend is hiding.
Sending paid traffic to your homepage is the most common and most expensive mistake in small business advertising. Every campaign gets somewhere built to receive it.
SearchThey fail differently, they are read differently, and an agency running both the same way is usually wasting money on one of them.
Demand that already exists. Somebody is typing the problem right now, so the work is match types, negative keywords and making sure you are not paying for your own brand name or for the word "free". Most accounts we audit are spending a third of the budget on searches the owner would never have approved.
Demand that does not exist yet, which means the creative is the targeting. A cold pixel needs volume before it can optimise for a booking, so we launch on traffic or landing page views and switch to conversions once the events are actually arriving. Skipping that step is why most small accounts never leave the learning phase.
For most local businesses organic social is not a lead channel, it is the proof somebody checks after they have already found you. We will tell you that rather than sell you a posting calendar. What it is good for is feeding the ad account creative that has already been tested on real people.
Tracking comes before any of it. A pixel that fires on the wrong page, or a conversion counted twice, turns every decision after it into a guess. That is the first thing we check and it is usually broken.
SEO, the map pack and Google Business Profile are a different discipline on a different timescale, so they live on their own page: see local SEO. AI answers are a third thing again, and they are over here.
We are in Lake Park, which means Palm Beach Gardens is ten minutes and West Palm Beach is twenty. If you have been searching for a digital marketing agency near you and getting call centres, that proximity matters more than it sounds.
Close enough that we will sit in your office and look at the ad account on your screen rather than send a deck about it. Most of the accounts we have fixed were fixed in the first hour, in person, by someone clicking through the settings with the owner watching.
The most competitive market we work in, and the one where wasted spend is easiest to find. Bigger agencies here run small accounts on autopilot because a $3,000 month does not pay for a strategist. We are the size where it does.
About a third of the work is remote, with clients in Louisiana, Texas and Argentina. The ads do not care where we sit. See how remote work runs.
We operate our own e-commerce brand, so this is not advice assembled from case studies. It is the same work we do on our own revenue every week. The build side of it, themes and bundles and subscriptions, is over on Shopify development.
E-commerceProduct pages, cart, checkout and the mobile experience where most of the money is actually lost. Usually worth more than more traffic.
Bundles, subscriptions and merchandising that raise what each customer is worth, rather than chasing another expensive first order.
Flows that recover carts, win back lapsed buyers and sell to people who already trust you. The cheapest revenue in the business.
Give me access for thirty minutes and I will tell you where the waste is, whether or not you hire me.