Every budget move needs a signature

The one thing

Every other marketing mistake can be edited. A page can be rolled back, a post can be taken down. A budget change that runs over a weekend has already been spent. That is why paid media is the one channel where speed of execution matters less than clarity of approval.

Split the work in two. Recommendation is analysis: what is working, what is not, where the money should move and why. Execution is the change in the ad account. Anyone, human or software, can do the first quickly. The second needs a named person who signs off.

In paid

Write your spend rules down. What can change without asking? For most teams the honest answer is nothing that touches budget, targeting, creative or launching a campaign. Everything else is a proposal with a reason attached, reviewed on a fixed day each week.

Check who owns the ad accounts. If they sit under an agency's business manager or manager account, your history and audiences leave when the agency does. Move ownership to your company and grant access from there.

In search

Paid and organic bid on the same attention. Pull your search terms report and compare it against the queries where you already rank well. Where you hold a strong organic position on a non-brand term, test whether the paid click is adding anything before you keep funding it. Where you rank poorly, paid is covering a gap that content should close over time.

The search terms report is also the cheapest keyword research you own. The queries people typed before they clicked, and especially the ones that converted, are the questions your organic pages should answer next.

In pipeline

Cost per lead is the number ad platforms make easy to see, and it is the least useful one. Send pipeline stages back to the ad platform with offline conversion imports, so the platform optimises toward leads that become opportunities rather than form fills.

If that is not set up yet, at minimum tag every lead with its campaign in the CRM and review spend against qualified pipeline once a month.

When the two views disagree, trust the CRM. A campaign that looks efficient in the ad platform and produces nothing sales will work is the first candidate for a budget cut, and the easiest one to defend in the room.

From the crew

Orion, the paid media agent, runs a weekly performance rollup. You get a performance readout, a budget-shift proposal, asset gaps, and warnings on anything that would fail validation at publish.

Each proposal comes with its reasoning, so the weekly review is a decision rather than a dig through dashboards. You approve it, change it or send it back.

Orion works on the recommendation side of the line. Budget, targeting, creative and campaign launches all require explicit approval from a person, and a budget move stays a recommendation unless the ad account permissions and approval gates are in place.

• Meet Orion
• The Ads team