The First 90 Days Are Where Most Ad Budgets Go to Die
We have audited hundreds of ad accounts. The pattern is consistent: a company launches a paid advertising campaign, spends $5,000-$20,000 in the first 90 days, and generates a fraction of the results they expected. The campaign either gets killed ("paid ads do not work for us") or it limps along burning money on autopilot.
The problem is almost never that paid advertising does not work for the business. The problem is how the campaign was launched. Poor research, wrong structure, bad targeting, lazy landing pages, and no tracking. Fix those things before you launch, and you avoid the expensive learning period that kills most campaigns.
Here is the launch process we use for every client campaign. It takes longer to set up than most agencies bother with, and it produces dramatically better results in the first 90 days.
Step 1: Do the Math Before You Spend a Dollar
Before you write a single ad, you need to know four numbers:
What is a customer worth to you? Average customer lifetime value, or if that is hard to calculate, average first-year revenue per customer. For a home services company, that might be $3,000 per year. For a B2B services firm, it might be $50,000.
What can you afford to pay to acquire a customer? This is your target cost per acquisition (CPA). A common rule of thumb is that customer acquisition cost should be no more than 25-30% of first-year revenue. If a customer is worth $3,000 in year one, you can afford $750-$900 to acquire them.
What is a lead worth? If 20% of leads become customers and a customer is worth $3,000, then a lead is worth $600 (20% x $3,000). Your target cost per lead should be well below this number to account for margin.
What budget do you need to generate enough data? Each campaign needs sufficient volume to optimize. As a rough minimum, you need 30-50 conversions per month per campaign to give the algorithm enough data to optimize effectively. If your target cost per lead is $50, you need $1,500-$2,500 per month minimum per campaign.
If the math does not work — if you cannot afford enough budget to reach minimum data thresholds at an acceptable cost per lead — paid ads might not be the right channel right now. Better to know that before you spend the money. We cover the full framework in our guide to marketing budget allocation.
Step 2: Research That Actually Matters
Keyword Research (for Search Ads)
Not all keywords are created equal. The difference between "HVAC repair near me" and "HVAC repair tips" is the difference between someone who needs a technician today and someone who wants to fix it themselves. The first one is worth $50-$100 per click. The second one is worth nothing for a service company.
How we do keyword research:
- Start with seed keywords (the obvious terms your customers would search)
- Expand using Google's Keyword Planner, competitor research, and actual search query data
- Categorize by intent: commercial (ready to buy), informational (researching), navigational (looking for a specific company)
- Focus budget on commercial-intent keywords
- Build a comprehensive negative keyword list (terms you do not want to show up for)
Audience Research (for Social Ads)
For Meta and LinkedIn campaigns, the targeting is based on audiences, not keywords. The quality of your audience targeting determines everything.
What matters:
- Demographics and firmographics: Who is your actual customer? Age, income, job title, company size, industry. Use your existing customer data to build profiles, not guesses.
- Behavioral signals: What do your customers do online? What interests do they have? What pages do they visit? What groups are they in?
- Lookalike audiences: Upload your customer list to Meta or LinkedIn and let the platform find similar people. Lookalike audiences consistently outperform interest-based targeting for companies with 500+ customers in their database.
- Retargeting audiences: Website visitors, email subscribers, video viewers — people who already know you. These audiences have the lowest cost per conversion because the trust-building has already happened.
Step 3: Build the Right Account Structure
Campaign structure directly affects performance. A messy account with everything thrown into one campaign will underperform a well-organized one with clear segmentation.
Google Ads Structure
For a service business, the structure should be:
- Separate campaigns for each major service category. "AC Repair" and "AC Installation" should be separate campaigns because they target different intents, have different values, and need different budgets.
- Separate ad groups for keyword themes within each campaign. Within "AC Repair," you might have ad groups for "AC repair near me," "emergency AC repair," and "AC not cooling."
- Match type segmentation. Exact match, phrase match, and broad match keywords should not all be in the same ad group. They behave differently and need different bid strategies.
Meta/LinkedIn Structure
- Separate campaigns for different objectives. Lead generation and awareness campaigns have fundamentally different optimization signals. Do not mix them.
- Separate ad sets for different audiences. Lookalike audiences, retargeting audiences, and interest-based audiences should have their own ad sets so you can allocate budget based on performance.
- 3-5 ad variations per ad set minimum. The platform needs creative options to optimize. Running a single ad creative per ad set is leaving performance on the table.
Step 4: Write Ads That Convert (Not Just Get Clicks)
There is a difference between an ad that gets clicks and an ad that gets conversions. A clickbait headline will generate traffic. A clear, specific headline will generate the right traffic.
Principles:
Lead with the benefit, not the feature. "AC Repair — Same Day Service, Fixed Price" beats "Professional HVAC Services." The first tells the searcher what they get. The second is generic.
Include specific numbers. "87% of Jobs Completed Same Day" or "Serving Charlotte for 15 Years" — specifics build credibility in ways that vague claims do not.
Match the ad to the search intent. If someone searches "emergency AC repair," the ad headline should include "Emergency AC Repair." Not "HVAC Solutions" or "Home Comfort Services." Mirror the language the searcher used.
Test everything. Write 3-5 headline variations and 2-3 description variations. Let the platform test combinations and surface the winners. Do not fall in love with your favorite ad — let the data decide.
Step 5: Landing Pages Are Not Optional
This is where most campaigns fail. You spend money to get the click, then send the person to your homepage and hope they figure out where to go. That is like paying for a taxi to bring a customer to your store and then locking the front door.
Every major campaign should have a dedicated landing page that:
- Matches the ad message. If the ad says "Free AC Inspection," the landing page headline should say "Free AC Inspection."
- Has one clear call to action. Call this number. Fill out this form. Schedule this appointment. One action, prominently displayed.
- Loads fast. Under 3 seconds on mobile. Period.
- Includes social proof. Reviews, logos, trust badges — something that builds credibility.
- Has minimal navigation. No full website navigation bar. Reduce the options to the action you want them to take.
Step 6: Set Up Tracking Before You Launch
You cannot optimize what you do not measure. Before a single dollar is spent, these must be in place:
- Conversion tracking on every conversion action (form submissions, phone calls, chat initiations)
- Call tracking with dynamic number insertion so you can attribute calls to specific campaigns and keywords
- CRM integration so leads from ads flow directly into your sales pipeline
- Google Analytics 4 properly configured with conversion events matching your ad platform
Test your tracking before you launch. Submit your own form. Call your own tracking number. Make sure every conversion shows up correctly in every platform.
Step 7: The First 30 Days — Monitor and Adjust
The first 30 days of a new campaign require more attention than any other period. Daily monitoring, not weekly. Here is what to watch:
- Search query reports (Google Ads): What actual searches are triggering your ads? Add negatives for irrelevant terms daily in the first two weeks.
- Cost per click trends: Are CPCs within your expected range? If they are significantly higher, your quality scores may be low, which usually means your ads and landing pages do not match the keywords well.
- Conversion rate: Are people converting once they reach your landing page? If the click-through rate is good but conversion rate is low, the landing page is the problem.
- Lead quality: Are the leads real? Are they qualified? Check with your sales team weekly. Optimizing for lead volume is useless if the leads are junk.
The Difference Between a Campaign That Works and One That Wastes Money
It comes down to preparation. The campaign that works had thorough research, clean structure, compelling ads, dedicated landing pages, and proper tracking before the first dollar was spent. The campaign that wastes money skipped most of those steps and threw something together because someone was in a hurry to "start getting leads."
The irony is that the well-prepared campaign produces leads faster because it is not spending the first 90 days figuring out what works through expensive trial and error.
Fusion Marketing launches and manages paid advertising campaigns on Google, Meta, and LinkedIn. If you have tried paid ads before and the results were disappointing, or if you are launching your first campaign and want to do it right, call (704) 255-5147 or email contact@fusionmarketing.biz. We will audit your situation and tell you exactly what a properly structured campaign looks like for your business.
