We turn down work regularly, and almost always for the same reason: the business is not yet ready for paid ads. Here is the checklist we run on the first call.
1. One customer is worth real money to you
Work out contribution per customer — revenue minus cost of goods, delivery, payment fees and returns. If that number is small, paid acquisition is very hard, because the auction does not care about your margins.
The contribution margin calculator gives you the ceiling on what you can pay for a customer. If that ceiling is below what a click costs in your category, stop here.
2. You can fund enough volume to learn from
Automated bidding needs a steady flow of conversions before it stabilises. Too little budget means permanent exploration, inflated costs and results you cannot read. Check your budget against your expected cost per conversion with the learning phase calculator before committing to anything.
3. Something happens after the click
A landing page that loads fast, says what you sell, and makes the next step obvious. Not a homepage. Not a brochure. We have audited accounts where the single highest-value change was on the page, not in the account — and no amount of bidding skill compensates for a page that does not convert.
4. Someone answers
For anything lead-based, this is the one that decides everything. Contact rates fall steeply with time. If leads sit until the next morning, you will pay for enquiries you never speak to, and you will blame the ads.
We have seen follow-up speed move results more than any change we could make inside an ad account. It costs nothing to fix and almost nobody fixes it.
5. You can tell us what happened to a lead
Without outcome data, optimisation is guesswork. The platforms will happily find you more of whatever you tell them to count, so if you only count form fills, that is what you will get. A CRM where somebody records qualified or not is enough to start.
6. You can give it ninety days
Weeks one and two are audit, tracking and setup, with volatile numbers. The first honest read is around week four. A fair judgement needs about ninety days, because that is how long it takes to find winning creative and build behind it. A business that needs results in three weeks should not start.
The two conditions for being ready for paid ads that get ignored most
Of the six, the two that businesses skip when they self-assess are follow-up speed and outcome data. Both are unglamorous, neither feels like marketing, and both decide more than the ad account does.
A useful test: pick five leads from last month at random and trace what happened to each one. How long until someone contacted them? How many attempts? What was the outcome, and is it recorded anywhere a machine could read? If you cannot answer that for five leads, you cannot answer it for five hundred, and no optimisation has anything to aim at.
If several of these are missing
Fix them first. It is cheaper, faster and less painful than discovering them through spend. Usually the order is: unit economics, then the page, then follow-up, then advertising.
If the numbers say yes, the next question is how long it takes — the realistic timeline for paid ads is set by conversion volume rather than effort. For a company that has just raised, spending a raise on acquisition has its own constraints.
If you want an outside read on where you actually are, the audit is free — and if the answer is "not yet", that is what it will say.
Questions people ask
How do I know if my business is ready for paid ads?
Six things have to be true: one customer is worth real money, you can fund enough volume for the platform to learn from, something useful happens after the click, somebody answers quickly, you can tell the agency what happened to each lead, and you can leave it alone for ninety days.
What if I can only meet some of them?
Fix the missing ones first, because advertising will find them for you at a cost. A weak landing page or a slow follow-up does not get better with more traffic — it just gets more expensive.
Is there a minimum budget?
There is a minimum number of conversions, which turns into a budget once you know your conversion rate and click cost. Below it the platform cannot learn and every reading is noise.
Can I start small and scale up?
Only if small is still above the learning threshold for one channel in one market. Starting below it is not a cautious version of advertising; it is paying for data you cannot read.