Fractional CMO Leadership
The senior marketing brain your company needs, at the fraction of the cost it can actually afford.
Paid Media
Paid Media & Performance Strategy
Your agency is optimizing the ad account. Nobody is optimizing the strategy the ad account serves.
The Problem This Solves
Ad platforms reward whoever feeds them the best creative and the clearest conversion signal. Most mid-market advertisers feed them mediocre creative and broken tracking, then blame the platform when the return collapses.
Typical EngagementDelivered inside a Core Marketing CMO retainer, or scoped as a standalone project.
See pricingPaid media strategy is the layer above account management: which channels deserve budget, what each channel is responsible for in the funnel, what creative thesis is being tested this quarter, and what a dollar is allowed to cost before it stops being spent.
What’s Included
Six things that actually change.
01
Channel and budget allocation
Spend distributed by marginal return and funnel role, not by habit or by agency preference.
02
Creative strategy and direction
A testing thesis per quarter — angles, hooks, formats — instead of random creative refreshes.
03
Conversion tracking integrity
Server-side tracking, enhanced conversions, and offline conversion imports done correctly.
04
Landing page and offer alignment
The page the click lands on, tested as rigorously as the ad that produced it.
05
Incrementality and MMM sanity checks
Holdout tests that reveal whether paid is creating demand or harvesting it.
06
Agency performance management
Scorecards, QBRs, and scope enforcement so your agency earns the retainer.
Engagement Shape
How it runs.
Phases overlap in practice, but this is the shape of the work and roughly when each part lands.
What You Should Expect
- Wasted spend identified and reallocated within the first month
- A creative testing system instead of one-off ad refreshes
- Tracking accurate enough to trust the optimization signal
- Agencies held to numbers they agreed to in advance
| Phase | Deliverable |
|---|---|
| Account audit | Structure, wasted spend, tracking accuracy, creative fatigue, and bidding review |
| Strategy | Channel roles, budget model, target CAC and ROAS by segment |
| Creative system | Testing framework, angle library, and production brief templates |
| Oversight | Weekly performance review and monthly reallocation decisions |
Answers
Questions about paid media
No, and you should be skeptical of any fractional CMO who says they do. Daily account management belongs to a specialist or agency. I set the strategy, direct the creative thesis, own the budget allocation, and hold whoever is in the account accountable to the targets.
Yes — it is one of the most common first engagements. The audit covers account structure, wasted spend, tracking integrity, creative process, and reporting honesty. It usually pays for itself immediately, whether the outcome is fixing the relationship or replacing it.
Google Search, Performance Max, Meta, LinkedIn, YouTube, programmatic display, and retail media where relevant. Channel selection is an outcome of the funnel strategy, not a starting preference.
Generally $30,000 per month and up in paid media. Below that, the strategic leverage is real but the absolute dollars recovered may not justify a senior retainer — a one-time Growth Audit is often the better fit.
Related
Works alongside
Interim CMO Leadership
Your CMO left. The executive search will take six months. Marketing cannot sit still for six months.
CMO Consulting
Sometimes you do not need a marketing leader. You need one hard question answered properly, once.
Next Step
Find out what your marketing is actually costing you.
Every engagement starts the same way: a straight conversation about your growth plateau, your current spend, and whether a fractional CMO is genuinely the right answer for you. If it isn’t, I’ll say so.
Free 30-minute call · No pitch deck · Direct answer either way