We run Search, Shopping, and Performance Max for premium DTC brands, against incrementality, not just reported ROAS.
A second set of eyes on the channel that should be paying for itself, before you spend another dollar on paid social.
Branded search is hiding 30% of your CAC.
Reported paid ROAS includes traffic that would have come organically. The real acquisition number is uglier than the dashboard.
PMax is opaque on purpose.
Google buries placement, audience, and creative-level performance. We surface what the platform is hiding from you.
Smart Bidding outperforms your manual targets.
At your scale, the model has more signal than any analyst. We tune the targets, not override the bids.
Your account structure was built for a $5M brand.
Most accounts inherit structure from earlier stages. What worked at $5M actively constrains performance at $50M.
Shopping feed is your biggest unforced error.
Feed quality drives Shopping and PMax. Most premium brands underinvest here. Fixing it is often the single highest-ROI move.
Audience signals matter less than the platform claims.
Targeting is the wrong lever. Creative and feed quality drive more outcome than any audience overlay.
You're paying twice for the same customer.
Brand campaigns and PMax compete for customers who'd have found you anyway. You pay full CAC for traffic that was free.
The fastest-growing line item is the one you can't see inside.
Performance Max is now 40 to 60% of most Google budgets. Google doesn't show where the money goes. Most leadership teams approve it without knowing.
Your reported CAC is the wrong number to manage to.
Attribution windows, last-click, modeled conversions. The number on the dashboard is rarely the number that matters for cash flow.
Discounts are being baked into the algorithm.
Promo creative trains Google to find discount-seeking buyers. Margin erodes over quarters, not weeks. The damage is hard to see and hard to undo.
AI search is eating top of funnel.
Informational queries that brought cheap traffic are answered above the results now. Less from Google, more from places you can't bid.
Your operator is running twenty accounts.
Whether it's an agency or in-house, most paid media managers are in survival mode. Your account gets the same playbook as everyone else, whether it fits or not.
Plus the strategic advisory layer, CRO, analytics, tracking, ecommerce strategy, included by default.
Saying no to these is how we say yes to depth.
Three shifts reshaping how Google Ads works for premium DTC brands. What we're doing about each.
PMax opacity is getting worse.
Asset group and placement transparency keep narrowing. We build internal reporting that surfaces what Google won't show.
AI Overviews are eating top of funnel.
Generic informational queries are vanishing from regular search. We shift budget to mid- and lower-funnel where Google still owns the intent.
Brand-vs-acquisition tension in Performance Max.
PMax cannibalizes branded conversions and credits itself. We separate, exclude, and rebuild attribution to see real incremental performance.
Three shifts in how Google works in 2026, and why they matter for the P&L.
Real CAC is rising, even when the dashboard says it isn't.
Reported CAC stays flat while contribution margin shrinks. Eventually quarterly results stop matching the dashboard. Most boards find out late.
Google is becoming a black box.
More automation, less visibility. Operators who can't explain where your money went are increasingly common. That's a structural risk, not a personnel issue.
Discount addiction kills more premium brands than competition does.
The algorithm rewards what gets clicked. Discount creative gets clicked. The brand pays for years after the campaign ends.
The team thought their paid CAC was healthy. Reported ROAS was 3.8x. When we separated branded from non-branded search and ran a two-week geo holdout, the true incremental ROAS landed at 2.4x. Almost a third of reported performance was traffic that would have come organically.
The cost wasn't waste. It was misallocation. Once visible, $42K/month moved from over-attributed branded to actual prospecting. Same total budget. Different growth.
Reported ROAS looked healthy. Contribution margin was slipping. The dashboard wasn't lying, it just wasn't telling the whole story. A two-week structural test isolated the real acquisition number from the noise: a third of reported performance was traffic the brand was already going to get.
The fix wasn't more spend. It was less waste. $42K a month was redirected from buying customers who were coming anyway, into real prospecting. Margin recovered. Growth rate stayed the same. The team finally trusted what they were reporting upward.
Engagement starts at
$3–4k per month, per service.
Most clients bundle two or three services for $9–12k a month.
Brands above $75M GMV typically engage at $6–10k per service, $18–30k bundled.
Month-to-month. No annual contract.
Flat retainer. No percentage of ad spend. Our team is not paid more when you spend more.
"Most agencies make their best margin on your Black Friday. We don't. The rate is fixed at right-sizing and stays there through your peaks, until meaningful growth justifies a conversation."
Jacob Hagberg
Twenty years in premium DTC growth.
Built and led paid media and SEO programs for brands across denim, beauty, footwear, and lifestyle, much of it as white-label fulfillment for other agencies before going direct. Tag-team format on every account. The strategists who start on your work stay on it. Every one has 10+ years in their channel.
"The strategist on your kickoff is the same strategist on your account two years later. That's why we partner with clients for years, not quarters."
We'll show you what we see on your account in real time, walk through what is actually limiting growth, and you decide whether to keep talking.
Thirty minutes. We'll tell you whether you actually have a Google problem, or whether your money is leaking somewhere else.
Introduce yourself→