WS-09 · Paid Media · Operating Manual
Binet & Field's 60/40 long-short doctrine + IPA Effectiveness Code's measurement rigour + Common Thread Collective's full-funnel paid framework + WordStream account-structure discipline. $432K of annual paid-media budget (60% of the $720K WS-06 envelope) deployed across Google Ads, Meta, YouTube/CTV, and LinkedIn — with 120 creative variants, 60+ tested headlines, offline conversion import, and the measurement system that turns paid spend from a leaky bucket into a compounding acquisition machine.
Binet & Field's IPA dataset (n=998 case studies, 1996–2020) established the most-replicated finding in marketing effectiveness research: brands that allocate 60% of media to brand-building and 40% to activation outperform brands that invert the ratio by a factor of 1.6× on profit growth over three years. The reason is mechanical: short-term activation harvests existing demand; long-term brand-building creates the demand that activation harvests. Invert the ratio and you are picking the bucket up faster than it fills. The home-services category average is 85/15 short/long — which is why most competitors are running CPL inflation at 17% per year (WordStream 2025 SEQ benchmark) while top-of-funnel demand stays flat.
Common Thread Collective's "Acquisition + Retention + Promotion" full-funnel paid framework adds the operational discipline: every dollar of paid spend has a named funnel stage, a named audience, a named creative archetype, a named LP, and a named conversion event. "Brand awareness" is not a campaign objective. "Top-of-funnel video views by SEQ homeowners aged 35–65 to seed the 14-touchpoint journey at touchpoint T1" is. Specificity at the campaign brief level is the difference between paid media that compounds and paid media that evaporates.
This document does not invent strategy. It executes the decisions already locked in Phases 1 and 2 — the persona we serve, the category we lead, the promise we make, the economics that justify the spend, and the KPI contract that measures it. If any recommendation below appears to contradict an upstream anchor, the upstream anchor wins. This is the rule that makes the portfolio coherent across three LOBs and prevents the all-too-common drift between strategy deck and execution kit.
The Established SEQ Homeowner. 42–58, owner-occupier or 2–4-property investor, $1.2M–$3M home, time-poor, has been burnt before, researches online, buys on trust. Every line below is written to them, not to a generic audience.
View WS-04 JTBD →The category YMT designs and leads. Enemy: the transactional trades market. Lexicon: stewardship · custodian · sleep at night · built like our own home. Every page, ad, email below reinforces this category frame.
View WS-01 Category →The portfolio brand promise. Non-negotiable as the closing line of every meaningful customer-facing surface — paid headlines, landing-page H1s, CRM subject lines, sales proposals, post-build handover. One brand. Three LOBs. One promise.
View WS-02 Brand →Cross-LOB 10-year customer LTV is ~30× first-job revenue. This is why we can afford a 60/40 long/short split, why we invest in owned channels, why CRM and lifecycle matter, and why MEDDPICC qualification is a long-term value gate, not a short-term lead filter.
View WS-05 Bowtie →The single shared funnel language. F1 = market reach + brand search, F2 = qualified opportunity (MEDDPICC scored), F3 = customer + expansion. MMM as the truth-check. Every KPI cited below maps to an F-stage or to a MEDDPICC criterion.
View WS-11 KPI Contract →The $720K total annual media envelope from WS-06 has been pre-split: $432K paid + $288K across owned/earned/content/production. The $432K paid allocation breaks down by channel and funnel stage as below. The 60/40 long/short split is verified in the right-most column.
| Channel | Annual $ | % of paid | Primary stage | Long / Short |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Google Search — brand | $32,000 | 7.4% | Decision (T11–T13) | Long (defensive) |
| Google Search — non-brand | $108,000 | 25.0% | Consideration / Decision (T8–T13) | Short |
| Google Performance Max | $36,000 | 8.3% | Consideration / Decision | Short |
| YouTube TrueView (in-stream + in-feed) | $72,000 | 16.7% | Awareness / Education (T1–T6) | Long |
| Connected-TV (YouTube CTV + Foxtel iQ) | $28,000 | 6.5% | Awareness (T1–T2) | Long |
| Meta — brand-video reach | $58,000 | 13.4% | Awareness / Education (T1–T7) | Long |
| Meta — performance + retargeting | $48,000 | 11.1% | Consideration / Decision (T8–T13) | Short |
| Display + native retargeting (GDN + Outbrain) | $22,000 | 5.1% | Consideration retargeting (T9–T11) | Short |
| LinkedIn (UR investor segment) | $16,000 | 3.7% | UR Awareness/Education (T1–T7) | Long |
| Test budget (CTV, Reddit, Spotify, Threads) | $12,000 | 2.8% | Test pipeline (CH-09) | Long |
| TOTAL paid | $432,000 | 100% | Full funnel | $262K / $170K = 60.6% / 39.4% |
| LOB | Sales mix | Paid share | Annual paid | Rationale |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Termite Damage Repair | 55% | 52% | $224,640 | Reactive demand — paid search heavy. Highest harvest. Brand-build amplifies referral. |
| Pools & Outdoor | 30% | 32% | $138,240 | Aspirational — over-indexes on video / social. Demand-creation premium justified. |
| Unit Renovations | 15% | 16% | $69,120 | Investor segment — LinkedIn-heavy. B2B-adjacent buying behaviour. Specialist creative. |
WordStream's 2025 benchmark established a 4.3× CPL gap between top- and bottom-quartile home-services accounts. Roughly half of that gap is creative variance, half is account structure. The structure below is engineered for granular bid control, clean attribution, and creative refresh independence — under one MCC (manager account) with three sub-accounts.
Naming pattern: LOB · funnel-stage · channel · campaign-purpose · YYYY-Q. Example: TDR · DECISION · Search · NonBrand-HighIntent · 2026-Q3. The naming convention enables clean reporting roll-ups, multi-LOB comparison, and quarter-on-quarter cohort analysis — and prevents the all-too-common "what does ‘Campaign 12’ actually do?" problem.
Meta's algorithm rewards consolidated ad sets feeding a learning phase with sufficient conversion volume (50+ optimisation events per ad set per week per Meta's 2024 documentation). The structure below balances that operational reality against the segmentation required for clean LOB attribution. Three Business Manager units (one per LOB), shared Pixel + CAPI, shared catalogue + custom audiences.
YouTube and CTV together are the primary brand-build layer in the paid mix — $100K combined annual spend across YouTube TrueView ($72K) and CTV ($28K). Karen Nelson-Field's attention research consistently shows YouTube and broadcast-equivalent CTV outperform every other video surface on quality-attention-per-dollar; the YMT brand investment is positioned to harvest that effect.
LinkedIn is allocated $16K/yr exclusively to the Unit Renovations LOB, targeting SEQ property investors. The UR buyer is professionally-employed, often dual-income, often working in finance / professional services / executive roles — a profile that over-indexes on LinkedIn and under-indexes on broad-reach social. LinkedIn is not used for TDR or POE because the cost-per-impression is 3–5× Meta with no audience-quality offset for those LOBs.
UR is the only LOB where the buyer's professional identity correlates strongly with purchase behaviour — investor segment is well-targeted on LinkedIn's job-title + company signals. TDR is reactive (the buyer doesn't think of themselves as "a termite-repair buyer" until the problem appears). POE is aspirational/family-led, not professional-identity-led. Channels are matched to buyer psychology (WS-03), not to channel availability.
Common Thread Collective's full-funnel doctrine: production volume is the single biggest unmet need at most growth-stage brands. The matrix below specifies exactly what gets produced. Three LOBs × four funnel stages × five angles × two priority formats = the 120 cells that get scheduled into the YDT production calendar. Each cell maps to a campaign in the account structure above; nothing produced sits in a folder unused.
Stages (4): Awareness · Education · Consideration · Decision ·Angles (5): Identity ("homeowner like you") · Pain ("the problem") · Proof ("the case study") · Process ("the how") · Authority ("the credentials") ·Priority formats (2): Hero video (vertical 9:16 + square 1:1) · Static creative (single image + carousel) ·LOBs (3): TDR · POE · UR
Total cells = 3 × 4 × 5 × 2 = 120. Each cell carries: a written brief (200-word creative direction), a target campaign placement, a measurement framing (which funnel-stage KPI it serves), and a production budget. The full matrix is maintained in the YDT creative ops sheet; the sample below shows the 20-cell TDR slice as canonical illustration.
| Stage ↓ · Angle → | Identity | Pain | Proof | Process | Authority |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Awareness | "Sarah lives 3 streets from you" | "What 47% of SEQ pre-1995 homes hide" | Brisbane couple's 1985 Queenslander story | "How a licensed inspector walks the property" | "1,800 properties · 14 years · QBCC licence" |
| Education | "The SEQ buyer's pre-purchase checklist" | "Why your building inspection misses termites" | 4 case studies · $8K to $80K repair range | The 4-question repair-vs-replace framework | Gerry on AS 3660.1 compliance (3 min) |
| Consideration | Investor profile · Mark's $34K rectification | "What insurance does NOT cover" | 12-property portfolio rectification case | The 11-step engagement model (animated) | Licensed pest inspector credentials on-screen |
| Decision | "From phone call to quote in 48 hours" | "Don't lose the deposit — book the inspection" | Video testimonial · pre-purchase save | "What happens after you click 'book'" | $20M liability + $5M PI insurance proof |
Same 20-cell structure repeats for POE and UR. Total production output = 120 hero variants per year, plus 240+ cut-downs (15s / 30s / 60s / 90s for video; image / carousel / story for static). YDT creative ops maintains the calendar; production is sequenced 8 weeks ahead so the campaign always has fresh creative before fatigue triggers (per Rule 5 in §0).
Eugene Schwartz's Breakthrough Advertising doctrine — the headline carries 80% of the work. WordStream's 2025 benchmark: top-quartile home-services accounts rotate 8–12 headline variants per active ad group; bottom-quartile rotate 1–2. Below is the launch headline lab — 20+ per LOB across five Schwartz "stages of awareness" — that goes into rotation Q3 2026, with the top 6 promoted to evergreen and the bottom 14 retired into the test archive by Q1 2027.
Common Thread Collective's audience-temperature model: cold audiences need brand-build creative (Awareness/Education stages); warm audiences need consideration creative (Consideration stage); hot audiences need direct-response creative (Decision stage). The same creative shown to the wrong temperature underperforms by 60–80% on conversion rate. Below is the audience inventory deployed across both Google Ads and Meta.
SEQ geo, age 35–65, owner-occupier filter (Meta) / in-market homeowner (Google). Used for: top-of-funnel video (Awareness stage). Creative: identity + pain angles.
SEQ geo, age 35–65, interest "property investment" (Meta) / in-market "investment property" (Google) / job title (LinkedIn for UR). Used for: UR + TDR investor variant.
People actively researching real-estate transactions. RE.com.au visitor lookalike on Meta; in-market "real estate purchase" on Google. Used for: TDR pre-purchase + UR investor.
1% lookalike on Meta (built off hashed customer list); customer-match on Google. Single most efficient cold audience for TDR. Used for: lead-gen + brand video.
Excluded: converted leads, employee IPs. Segmented by LOB pageview (TDR / POE / UR sections). Used for: retargeting + consideration creative.
Engaged with at least one YouTube or Meta hero video to 50%. Strong signal of brand attention. Used for: consideration stage retargeting.
Owned email list (target 8,000 by end of 2026). Custom audience on Meta via list upload; customer-match on Google. Used for: high-engagement consideration nurture.
People who interacted with Google Business Profile (call, direction, message, website-click) past 30 days. Available on Google Ads as a remarketing list.
Submitted a quote-request but has not signed contract yet. Highest-priority retargeting audience. Used for: decision-stage social proof + urgency.
Received a quote, has not yet returned signed contract. Used for: testimonial + Gerry-personal-message creative. Tight frequency cap (2 per week).
Reached the booking page but did not complete. Used for: 7-day retargeting cycle, then suppressed.
Past TDR customer with no POE/UR history (and vice versa). The cross-LOB engine from WS-05. Used for: 2-stage soft re-introduction to the adjacent LOB.
Every campaign has explicit exclusion lists to prevent (a) wasted spend, (b) negative creative-context experiences (e.g. retargeting "book your termite inspection" to someone who already signed a contract last week looks incompetent). The canonical exclusion lists:
Smart-bidding-with-guardrails doctrine. Google Ads and Meta both perform best when given meaningful budget + meaningful conversion volume + clear conversion-value signal — and worst when starved of any of the three. The bid + pacing protocol below operationalises that principle without ceding all control to the algorithm.
For home services, the lead is not the conversion. The signed contract 14–28 days later is. Without offline conversion import, paid platforms optimise toward leads that don't close — and CAC inflates without the team noticing. The architecture below closes the loop end-to-end.
Unbounce 2024 benchmark across 44,000 home-services LPs: median conversion rate 3.4%; top quartile 9.1%; top decile 14.6%. The gap is almost entirely about message-match (the LP says what the ad promised), proof density (testimonials, credentials, case studies above the fold), and form length (3 fields converts 2× as well as 6 fields). The YMT LP playbook below gets every campaign to top-quartile within 90 days.
A new campaign without a campaign-specific LP performs ~40% worse than one with. The velocity protocol enables campaign-specific LPs without requiring a developer for every launch:
Three tiers of measurement, each at a different cadence and altitude. Tactical metrics (cost-per-lead, CTR) report daily for operational steering. Operational metrics (CAC, ROAS) report monthly for budget reallocation. Strategic metrics (iROAS, MMM contribution, share-of-search) report quarterly + annually for portfolio decisions. All three feed the WS-11 KPI Contract dashboard.
Karen Nelson-Field's attention research: ad effectiveness halves after ~8 weeks of unchanged creative in social feeds (n=8,500 ads measured 2020–2024). Frequency > 3.5 impressions per user per week is the operational fatigue threshold. The protocol below enforces refresh before fatigue degrades performance, not after.
Paid does not operate in isolation. The most common failure mode in home-services paid media is paid-team optimising in isolation while organic / GEO / CRM optimise toward different goals — and the customer experiences the resulting inconsistency. The handshakes below are contractual integration points between WS-09 (paid) and the adjacent workstreams.
What: Paid budget allocation respects the WS-06 60/40 long-short rule, the WS-06 12-channel mix matrix, and the WS-06 sunset rules.
How: Monthly verification report cross-references PM-02 actual allocation against CH-02 doctrine. Drift > 5pp triggers CMO review (per WS-06 doctrine Rule 1).
What: Brand-search defensive bidding (CAMP-01) protects branded queries while GEO/AEO is being built. As branded organic share grows, brand-search paid spend is reallocated to non-brand search.
How: Quarterly review of brand-search impression share + organic brand impressions. Once organic owns ≥ 75% of branded clicks, brand-search paid budget cut by 40%.
What: Paid retargeting is suppressed when CRM lifecycle owns the touchpoint. No "book your inspection" Meta ads to a customer currently inside the Post-Sale Onboarding flow.
How: Daily sync from CRM → exclusion lists on Meta + Google. Customer in any active flow (per WS-10 9-flow architecture) auto-excluded from acquisition retargeting.
What: Every paid creative passes the DBA-consistency check: brand assets appear in the first 3 seconds; colour/typography/voice match WS-02 spec; Fame × Uniqueness score improving quarter-on-quarter.
How: YDT creative-ops checklist applied at creative approval gate. Quarterly DBA audit (WS-07) includes a sample of paid creatives.
What: Every campaign maps to a bowtie stage. Funnel-stage volume from paid is reported against the WS-05 leak-and-velocity targets.
How: Monthly report includes leads-by-stage from paid sources. If paid is over-indexing on Decision-stage harvesting at the expense of Awareness-stage demand creation, the 60/40 verification will catch it.
What: All paid-media metrics feed the WS-11 KPI Contract dashboard.
How: Daily auto-feed from Google Ads + Meta + GA4 → dashboard. Variance to plan reported in the WS-11 traffic-light system.
16/16 PM-XX items. Allocation, Google + Meta + YouTube/CTV + LinkedIn account structures, 120-cell creative matrix, 60+ headline lab, audience architecture, bidding, tracking, LPs, measurement, refresh, handshakes, risks — all specified with executable detail.
Binet & Field 60/40 doctrine · IPA Effectiveness Code · WordStream paid-search benchmarks · Common Thread Collective full-funnel framework · Karen Nelson-Field attention research · Eugene Schwartz Breakthrough Advertising · Google + Meta best-practice — all cited and operationally applied.
Target 6,000–8,000 words. Each PM item carries operating rationale, deployment spec, measurement criteria, integration with WS-06 channel + WS-08 GEO + WS-10 CRM. Includes full account-structure code, 120-cell matrix, 60+ headlines, decision trees, refresh protocols.
YDT junior with this document + the creative matrix + the headline lab + the audience inventory + the bid decision tree can launch campaigns on day one. Every campaign brief is pre-written; every audience pre-defined; every bid logic pre-decided.