Buying attention, usefully

Paid acquisition is the area where the most confident numbers circulate and the fewest are sourced. A benchmark gets quoted, the original study turns out to have measured something else, and a budget is set on it anyway.

Most of these articles start by going back to the source. Several of them end by showing that the source does not say what everyone repeats.

Where to start, depending on your situation

• You are choosing between channels. Meta Ads or Google Ads for B2B turns on one fact. LinkedIn Ads vs Google Ads and how to split the budget between them take the question further. If the real choice is paid against organic, what the experiments found is the place to start.
• You are setting a budget. Calculating a small business advertising budget and what Facebook ads actually cost give you arithmetic instead of a percentage pulled from a survey.
• Your metrics disagree with each other. Cost per lead: the number nobody defines the denominator for, three different numbers wearing the name CPC, what CPM actually measures and which metric to run on explain why two tools can both be right and still disagree.
• Your creative stopped working. Creative fatigue metrics, how many creatives to test (one platform published a number, then removed it) and how long a video ad should be, where two platforms refuse to answer.
• You are about to hire, or to change, an agency. How to choose a B2B acquisition agency, auditing your ad account before you switch, how long before you can judge one and in-house or outsourced media buying.
• You want to know where the money physically goes. Media buying explained, where programmatic money actually goes, and the impressions nobody can measure.

One rule holds across all of it: a channel is not good or bad, it is appropriate or not to a buying cycle, an average deal size and a volume. Everything here is written to make that judgement yours rather than a vendor's. Our full approach is on the B2B paid acquisition page.