Paid Media & Budgeting

Ad Creative Testing

Use when the user wants to test ad creative - headlines, images, videos, hooks or offers - on Meta, LinkedIn, Google, TikTok or any paid channel, or wants to know whether a creative "winner" is real. Also use when the user mentions creative testing, ad testing, split test, A/B test an ad, which ad won, creative fatigue, hooks, or "should I scale this ad". Sizes the test before it runs so it can answer the question, then reads it out honestly - on the metric that pays, with uneven delivery, early stopping and multiple variants accounted for.

Marketing Budget Planning

Use when the user wants to set or sanity-check a total marketing budget — how much to spend overall, as a percentage of revenue, by company stage and business model — and split it across brand, demand gen, content, and tooling. Also use when the user mentions marketing budget, % of revenue on marketing, how much should we spend on marketing, or budget allocation across functions. Produces a budget from AAJ's stage bands (labelled as AAJ's own estimates), published reference points (Gartner, SaaS Capital) and a function-level split.

Paid Media Budget Allocation

Use when the user wants to plan, split, or optimize a paid advertising budget across channels (Google, Microsoft, LinkedIn, Meta, TikTok, YouTube, Amazon, Capterra/G2, and more) to hit a CAC target or a customer goal. Also use when the user mentions ad budget allocation, channel mix, media plan, paid spend split, CAC target, marginal CAC, diminishing returns, or "how should I split my ad spend." Produces a defensible per-channel allocation with projected customers, blended CAC, LTV:CAC, payback, and pacing.

Paid Search Account Audit

Use when the user wants to audit a Google Ads or Microsoft Ads search account - their own, a client's, or one inherited from an agency - and find where the spend is wasted and where it is starved. Also use when the user mentions Google Ads audit, PPC audit, paid search review, search terms report, negative keywords, wasted ad spend, impression share lost to budget, "is our agency doing a good job", or "why is our CPA so high". Reads the account against its own target and its own numbers - never a published benchmark - in a fixed order: tracking, waste, starved winners, landing pages, with fixes ranked by the spend they touch.