Paid acquisition, run like an in-house team.

Mid-market DTC paid media agencies charge between 10% and 20% of ad spend as a management fee, with monthly retainers starting around $4K to $6K on the low end and $25K-plus at the enterprise tier. Performance-only deals exist but they are rare at brands past product-market fit because most of the work is creative and tracking, not bid optimization. We publish scope and ad-spend floors by engagement shape (audit, Meta-plus-Google management, multi-channel full-funnel, tracking-stack project) and send a scoped quote within 48 hours of an intro call. Scope moves the price, not the conversation.

Under $15K per month in ad spend, most agencies burn their fee against diminishing returns and you are better off with a senior freelancer or an in-house hire. Our Meta + Google management floor is $15K per month in ad spend. Multi-channel full-funnel opens at $50K per month. Below that spend, we recommend the paid-acquisition audit or a single-channel consulting engagement rather than a full retainer. The math does not work below the floor; we turn down briefs that would charge for process without shipping outcomes.

Three-layer stack as a floor. Server-side tracking via GTM Server-Side collects first-party signals your server sees even when browser pixels are blocked. Platform-side APIs (Meta CAPI, Google Enhanced Conversions, TikTok Events API) deduplicate against the browser pixel and fill modelled conversions. Blended measurement (Northbeam, Triple Whale, or Polar) sits above all platform pixels and gives a single ROAS truth across channels. Together the three layers recover 80 to 92% of conversions platform pixels alone used to report.

Yes, they solve different problems. Meta CAPI is the server-to-server channel into Meta specifically; it deduplicates against the browser pixel and recovers iOS and ad-blocker signal loss inside Meta. GTM Server-Side is your collector, hosted on your own subdomain, that fires events cleanly to Meta CAPI, Google Enhanced Conversions, TikTok Events API, Pinterest Conversion API, and anywhere else at once. Running CAPI without GTM SS means you are pushing events one platform at a time; running GTM SS without CAPI means Meta still gets less-than-ideal data. Together they form the first-party spine.

Twelve concepts per month with three to four variations per concept is the volume floor for a Shopify brand past $1M a year in revenue. That is 36 to 48 assets per month. Concepts come from a monthly creative brief; variations come from hook-swap, aspect-ratio swap, voiceover swap, and CTA swap. We publish the cadence on every retainer: every Monday a concept backlog review, every Thursday a performance-based scaling decision, every new winning concept a hook-swap pass within seven days. Volume below this is why most accounts stall at ROAS 1.5 or below.

Under $1M a year in revenue, usually not. Platform pixels plus GA4 plus Shopify reports are enough to run the business, and a Northbeam subscription between $900 and $3,000 a month is heavy overhead relative to spend. Past $1M a year in revenue or past $50K a month in ad spend, blended measurement starts paying for itself within the first two weeks because channel-level ROAS decisions begin diverging from the real business impact. At $5M+ a year in revenue, blended measurement becomes non-negotiable.

Agency wins when the brand needs execution velocity faster than hiring can deliver and when the team lacks a senior Meta buyer with four or more years of recent performance experience. In-house wins when the brand has deep category IP that takes 12 months to transfer, runs spend north of $500K per month, and can recruit a senior buyer plus a creative lead for that spend level. Between $50K and $500K a month in ad spend, most Shopify brands benefit from an agency plus a part-time in-house creative hire rather than either one alone.

Yes, if it is set up correctly. Advantage+ Shopping runs on Meta's machine learning and needs three things: at least 50 purchase events per seven-day learning window, a creative library of at least 8 to 12 concepts to rotate, and exclusions for existing customers if the goal is new-customer ROAS. Under those conditions, Advantage+ consistently outperforms manual campaigns for DTC. Without them, it burns spend on poorly matched audiences and poor creative. Our Advantage+ guardrails cap concept refresh at 21 days, cap daily spend swings at 20%, and always split new-customer and remarketing into separate campaigns.

When the brand has organic TikTok traction (not necessarily virality, just consistent engagement) and products that ship fast and look good on camera. TikTok Shop ads monetize organic content by turning creator posts into Spark ads and running them against first-order audiences. The creative bar is high and different from Meta; what wins on Meta does not win on TikTok without a re-edit. Budget floor to justify the setup is $10K per month; below that, the learning curve eats the spend.

A two-week, pre-engagement written report across four areas. First, account structure on Meta, Google, and TikTok: campaign architecture, audience signals, bid strategies, creative rotation health. Second, the tracking stack gap analysis: Meta CAPI, Shopify Customer Events, GTM Server-Side, Consent Mode v2, Event Match Quality. Third, creative performance teardown: winners, losers, hook analysis, concept coverage. Fourth, a 90-day priority roadmap with the three moves we would make in the first 30 days. Deliverable is a 40-page PDF plus a 90-minute walkthrough. Yours whether you engage further or not.

You do. Always. We work inside your Meta Business Manager, your Google Ads account, your TikTok Ads Manager, your GTM, your Shopify, your Klaviyo. Creative files, ad scripts, Figma designs, Loom walkthroughs, Notion playbooks, and dashboards are yours to keep on day one and on exit. We do not hold ad accounts or pixel learnings hostage to force continuity. If we are the right partner, you will renew because the work is good, not because the accounts are locked.