Ecommerce
DTC ecommerce brand: revenue grown from $500K to $4.8M over six years of managed paid acquisition, with the measurement built and verified by the same person running the spend.
Independent digital marketing consultant for paid media and the analytics behind it.
You do not need a full-service agency. You need one senior person who runs the ads and owns the measurement, so the spend decisions and the numbers behind them never disagree. That is the whole job, and I am the person who does it. Paid media specialist, with the analytics work to back it up.
Revenue grown from $500K to $4.8M over one six-year engagement.
Ecommerce brand, media and measurement under one owner
Most clients come to me one of two ways. Some hired an agency that promised a number and delivered a deck: paid media was one of six line items, the person running the campaigns never saw the tracking, and when the results looked off nobody owned the question. Others ran it themselves for years, and it outgrew them: the platforms change monthly, automation now makes the decisions it used to let you make, and keeping up became a second job. Neither group needs a department. They need someone who does this and only this, at a cost that makes sense without a full-time hire.
Start with a measurement audit
A fixed-scope audit of your paid media and the tracking under it, $2,500, no retainer required. Which conversions are real, which are double-counted, which are missing, and what the numbers say to do next. Most engagements start here. It is useful on its own even if we never go further, and it is how you find out whether the numbers you are already paying for can be trusted.
Paid media for ecommerce brands
Google Ads and Meta for DTC and ecommerce brands, often on Shopify, with the analytics built in. Profitable scale, not vanity scale: ROAS you can defend, blended CAC you can plan against, a channel mix argued from data, and tracking verified by the same person making the spend calls.
A senior media lead, part-time
Digital spend tends to grow quietly. It starts as a line item, and a few years later it is one of the biggest drivers of sales in the business, still managed the way it was when it was small. That is the point where it needs professional ownership: strategy, channel mix, budget accountability, and someone who can audit the work your vendors or in-house team are doing, not just receive the reports. I fill that seat, without the full-time hire.
What that work has produced
Service business
Service business: customer acquisition cost lowered by 24% over 6 months.
What the first 30 days actually look like
Week 1: Measurement audit.
Before touching a campaign, I trace every conversion event from click to revenue record. Which conversions are double-counted, which are missing, which are attributed to the wrong channel. You get a written findings document that separates the numbers you can trust today from the ones that need a rebuild. Most accounts have both.
Weeks 2–3: Fix the foundation, stop the obvious waste.
Conversion tracking gets rebuilt and verified against actual transactions or leads, not assumed correct because the platform says so. In parallel, I review the existing account structure and cut the spend that's plainly not working. No major restructuring yet: changing campaigns before the measurement is trustworthy just makes the data harder to read.
Week 4: Baseline and plan.
You get a baseline report that ties spend to revenue with definitions we've agreed on: what counts as a conversion, how ROAS and CAC are calculated, what the numbers looked like before I changed anything. Then a 90-day media plan argued from that baseline, not from a template.
The tradeoff, named: the first month is heavier on measurement than media. That's deliberate. Scaling spend on top of broken tracking doesn't get you growth faster. It gets you noise faster, and decisions you'll have to unwind.
I have spent 20+ years on the operating side of this work, across paid media and analytics, mostly for ecommerce brands and consumer service businesses. Not advising from the sidelines: building the tracking, running the spend, and answering for the results.
What I am best at is matching the plan to the business. The newest platform or the tactic everyone is talking about is not automatically right for you, and most of the waste I find started as someone else's good idea. That is why every engagement begins with an audit: establish what you have to work with, agree on where you want to be, and map the digital marketing plan that gets there. Then run it.
Mark in Charlotte is a deliberately small, independent practice. The person you hire is the person doing the work.
If you want paid media run by someone who will tell you what not to spend on, let us talk.
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