Digital marketing, one channel at a time.
Ads, social, content, email and the tracking underneath them. Each does a different job, each fails in a different way, and none of them is worth switching on until you can tell whether it worked.
Scoped and quoted before anything starts, and no guaranteed returns from anyone
- Paid, social, content, email
- Tracking before spending
- Accounts in your name
- Organic search has its own page
Two pages, two jobs. This one is everything except organic search.
Local search is its own discipline and it already has a page here. Splitting them is not tidiness: two pages written for the same searches compete with each other and both end up lower than one of them would have been alone. So this page covers the channels you pay for, publish on and send from. Rankings, the Google Business Profile and reviews are next door, and there is a link to them below.
- Paid search. Google Ads, the keyword list, the negative list, and the page the click lands on
- Paid social. Meta ads, the audience, the creative and the offer
- Content. The pages and posts that answer what a customer asks before buying
- Email. The list, what gets sent after an enquiry, and what gets sent when there is news
- Brand and creative. The words, the images, and whether they match each other
- Analytics and conversion tracking. Knowing which of the above did anything
- Local rankings and the map pack
- Google Business Profile, categories, hours, photos and service area
- Reviews, asking for them and replying to them
- On-page work aimed at organic search
- Local links, mentions and citations
- The page an advert points at is the same page organic search sends people to, and it has to satisfy both
- Content written to answer a customer question gets used in ads, in email and in search results
- One tracking setup measures every channel, or none of the numbers can be compared with each other
- Reviews and reputation change what a paid click is worth, because the same person checks both
Five things get called marketing. They are not interchangeable.
Most of what goes wrong is a channel doing a job it cannot do. Paid buys attention now and stops the moment you stop paying. Content compounds and takes months. Email is the only one you own outright. Choosing the wrong one costs more than running the right one badly.
Paid search
Someone types what they want and you pay to be in front of them. It is the most direct channel there is and the most literal: the keywords, the negative keywords and the page the click lands on decide nearly all of it. Most of the money wasted on a small account goes to a missing negative list and a homepage being used as a landing page.
Paid social
Nobody on Meta was looking for you. That is the whole difference from search, and it is why the audience, the creative and the offer have to do the work a typed query does for free. It suits what people recognise on sight, and it suits a local audience specific enough to name.
Content and email
Content answers the questions a customer has before they buy, and it keeps answering them after it is published. Email is the only channel that is actually yours. A platform can change what it shows tomorrow and eventually will; a list you collected does not move. The two work together, because content is usually what makes someone hand over an address.
Brand and creative
What the ads and the pages look like and sound like. Not a logo exercise: the question is whether the advert, the landing page and the follow-up email read as the same business. A visitor who has to stop and check is a visitor you paid for and then lost.
Analytics and conversion tracking
The one that goes in first, before anything is switched on. Tracking that records a call, a form or a booking and ties it back to the click that caused it is what turns every other channel from an opinion into a number. Install it after the spending starts and the first month is unreadable, which is the month you most need to read.
Nothing gets switched on first. The measuring does.
The order matters more than the channel. It runs roughly like this, and the first two steps are the ones that get skipped.
Start with what already happens. How enquiries arrive today, which of them turn into work, and what one is worth when it does. A business that cannot say whether the jobs it booked last month came from a call, a form or somebody walking in cannot judge an advert either, because there is nothing for the advert to be better than.
Then the tracking. Analytics on the site, conversions defined as the things that are genuinely worth money rather than every page view, and the phone and the form both recorded. This is the unglamorous part and it is the part that gets dropped, usually because somebody wants ads live by Friday. The cost of dropping it is not knowing, for as long as the account keeps running.
Then one channel. Not four. One channel with a real budget behind it says something within a few weeks; four channels with a quarter of the budget each say nothing at all and cost exactly the same. Which one it should be depends on whether people are already searching for what you sell, and that is a question with a lookup rather than an opinion behind it.
Then the page the advert points at. It is usually the weakest link in the chain and it is almost never where the attention goes. A page that matches the advert, repeats its promise in the same words and asks for one action is worth more than any amount of bid tinkering.
Then leave it alone long enough for the numbers to mean something. Daily changes to a young campaign are noise being chased around. A week of data from a small account is not a signal, and treating it as one is the most reliable way to spend money on nothing.
Then decide honestly, including the decision to stop. Some channels do not work for some businesses, and the useful result of a first run is often finding out that the money belongs somewhere else entirely. That is a real answer and it is far cheaper to reach in one month than in twelve.
Every account is opened in your name.
Ad accounts, analytics properties and the tracking that ties them together are created under the business, with the business as owner. When an engagement ends the history stays behind with you. That is not the industry norm, which is exactly why it is written down here rather than assumed.
- The ad accounts Google Ads and Meta, owned by the business. Every campaign, every keyword and every charge the platform made, visible to you.
- Analytics Your own property, your own login. Conversions defined in the open, so you can check what is being counted as a lead.
- The change log A written note of what was changed and when, so a jump in the numbers can be matched to a cause instead of guessed at.
What we will not tell you. And what replaces it.
Four claims get made about marketing constantly. Not one of them can be kept, by us or by anybody else, and a page that made them would contradict every other page on this site.
- A return multiple. Nobody can say what an advert will earn before it has run, and a figure quoted in advance is a sales tactic wearing a number
- A lead count. Spending does not manufacture demand, and a target invented to sound good is the first thing quietly dropped later
- A cost per lead. It falls out of an auction nobody here controls, against competitors who change their bids without telling anyone
- A date when it starts working. Paid can produce a click on day one and take months to produce a pattern worth acting on, and the two are not averaged
- Tracking in place before any money is spent
- Every account in the business name, owned by the business
- The platform numbers as they came out, not a summary with the bad weeks removed
- A written record of what was changed and when it changed
- If the website cannot take an enquiry or a booking properly, paid traffic makes the leak bigger and charges you for it
- If nobody in the area is searching for it, paid search has nothing to buy, and saying so is cheaper than selling around it
- If the business is already at capacity, more enquiries is a worse problem than it sounds and the money belongs elsewhere
- If there is no way to tell a good month from a bad one yet, that gets fixed first. It is not a delay, it is the only thing that makes the rest legible
- Somebody who can answer a question about the business within a day or so, because the ad copy is only as accurate as the answers behind it
- The real offer, including what it costs and what it does not include. An advert that oversells is a refund with extra steps
- Enquiries answered quickly. Paid traffic is perishable and a lead left overnight is usually gone
- Patience with the first few weeks, which are for learning rather than for earning
Rankings are next door.
Local search, the Google Business Profile, reviews, the weights that actually move the map pack and the four things nobody can honestly promise about any of it are all on the Port Alberni SEO page. That separation is deliberate. Two pages chasing one set of searches split the signal between them, and the reader gets a worse answer as well.
Before you spend anything
The six questions that come up every time, answered the same way here as on the phone.
What does this cost?
There is no published price for this work yet, so this page quotes none. Two separate numbers are involved and they get confused constantly: what the platform charges for the advertising itself, which is paid by the business and goes straight to Google or Meta, and the fee for running it. Both are scoped and quoted in writing before anything is switched on.
How much do I need to spend on ads?
There is a floor, and it is set by the auction rather than by us. Below a certain daily spend a campaign collects too few clicks to tell you anything, so the money buys no information as well as no customers. What that floor is depends on what a click costs in your industry and your area, and that can be looked up before you commit to anything.
How long before it works?
Clicks arrive the day a campaign turns on. A pattern worth acting on takes weeks of steady spend, and content and email are slower again. Anyone giving you a date is guessing, and anyone giving you a date and a number is selling.
Can you guarantee a return on ad spend?
No. The auction moves, the competition moves and the season moves, and none of the three is controlled from here. What can be promised is tracking honest enough that you can stop early when it is not working, which is worth more than a promise nobody can keep.
Is this the same as SEO?
No, and they are deliberately on separate pages. SEO is about the search results you do not pay for: rankings, the Google Business Profile, reviews. This page is the rest of it, which is the results you do pay for plus social, content, email, creative and the measurement underneath all of it.
Do I need the website sorted first?
Usually, yes. An advert sends someone to a page, and a page that loads slowly, reads badly on a phone or cannot take an enquiry loses the visitor you just paid for. Paid traffic does not fix a leak, it makes the leak more expensive. The website plan is a separate service and it does carry a published price.
Start with what you already spend.
Tell us where enquiries come from now and what has been tried before. You get back which channel is worth a first run and which one is not, before anybody talks about a budget.
info@valleyedgeconsulting.io · 778-488-8618