Paid Search & Social
Google, Microsoft, Meta, LinkedIn, TikTok — picked for your customer, not for our retainer. Branded-bid waste cut. Conversion tracking that survives iOS 17 and the next cookie deprecation. One Looker view, every Monday.
The conventional wisdom is that paid media is a commodity service now. The conventional wisdom is half right. The bid optimization is a commodity — every honest agency on the planet uses the same Google smart bidding settings. What is not a commodity is the offer, the creative, the conversion tracking, and the willingness to tell a client that their branded-bid spend is a tax they have been paying for three years. We have been doing exactly that work for Utah businesses since 2019.
PPC in 2026 is the most honest line on the marketing budget — every dollar has a name on it — and also the easiest one for a national agency to quietly turn into rent. The dirty secret of the industry is that bid optimization is solved. The algorithms run themselves. What separates a profitable account from a managed-service-by-rookie account is everything else: account architecture, conversion tracking, creative production, and the discipline to turn off spend that is buying clicks you would have gotten free.
The single biggest line of waste we find in the audits we run on Utah businesses is branded-search bidding where organic already holds #1 and there is no competitor encroachment to defend against. In 2025 we cut ~$340k of that spend across the cohort and shifted the budget into the campaigns where the marginal dollar actually moves revenue. That is the kind of work that does not show up on a "campaign optimization" line item — but it is the difference between a profitable account and a flat one.
Channels have proliferated since 2022. LinkedIn is now a real B2B channel — not a deck topic. TikTok works for DTC categories most of our peers still dismiss. Reddit ads are the underpriced opportunity of the year, especially for SaaS and considered-purchase B2C. We run 5 platforms as standard and add Reddit or Pinterest when the audience math justifies it. Devin Marsh runs the account; Marisol Quiñones runs the creative pipeline that feeds it; Ezra Lindquist owns the conversion tracking and the offline-attribution plumbing.
The honest answer about creative: it is the bottleneck. The platforms have eaten the bid-management craft and are now eating the audience-targeting craft too. What remains is offer plus asset quality. Accounts that ship fresh creative every two weeks compound; accounts running the same hero image since the campaign launched do not. We bake the creative refresh cadence into every retainer — at Growth, six new ad units per month; at Command, a quarterly studio day with Marisol's team.
~$340k
The single largest line of recoverable spend in nearly every PPC account we audit. Brand bidding makes sense as a defensive move against competitor encroachment — and as a tax otherwise. We trim it, document the SERP threat we are defending against, and shift the dollars to campaigns where the marginal dollar moves revenue.
Source: USH portfolio aggregate, 2025 annual
5 channels
B2B clients running LinkedIn ads with the conversational ad format and post-iOS tracking properly wired are seeing CPL inside Google Ads ranges for the first time. TikTok works for DTC categories most Utah agencies still dismiss. Reddit is underpriced for SaaS and considered-purchase B2C. We pick the mix by audience math, not by what we already run.
Source: USH PPC cohort, Q1 2026
+47 %
Measured as blended return-on-ad-spend, trailing 12 months vs. the 12 months preceding engagement. The largest single contributor is the conversion-tracking rebuild — accounts that arrive with broken offline attribution and iOS-leaky pixel setups usually leave Q1 with revenue figures that finally agree across HubSpot, GA4, and Google Ads.
Source: USH portfolio aggregate, Q2 2025 → Q1 2026
A full account audit across every active channel — Google, Microsoft, Meta, LinkedIn, TikTok — plus a branded-search defense audit that documents the SERP threat on each defended term and recommends which to keep and which to retire. Ships in week one. Most clients recover 15–30% of monthly spend without losing volume.
Campaigns restructured around how buyers actually decide — by intent stage, by offer, by margin band — not by the legacy keyword-grouping logic the last agency left behind. Smart bidding signals fed properly, audience signals layered, performance-max guardrails set so the algorithm does not eat your brand impressions.
A standing creative cadence — six new ad units per month at Growth, twelve at Command — produced in Marisol's team and shipped without you needing to be in the chain. Image, motion, and conversational LinkedIn copy variants. The pipeline is what keeps fatigue off the account.
GA4, Google Ads enhanced conversions, server-side Meta CAPI, LinkedIn conversion API, and the offline-conversion uploads that survive iOS and the next cookie deprecation. The plumbing that makes the dashboard numbers agree with the HubSpot deal pipeline. Ezra owns the engineering; Devin owns the strategy.
Spend, CPL, CPA, ROAS, pipeline contribution by channel — pulled into the same Looker Studio dashboard your SEO and AEO metrics live in. Sent every Monday. Read in five minutes. No vanity charts, no "impressions" row, no platform-by-platform tab dance.
Every quarter the creative pipeline gets a studio day with Marisol's team and the channel mix gets re-evaluated against the prior quarter's performance. We add channels when the audience math justifies it and retire the ones that did not earn their keep. The plan is a living document, not a 12-month commitment to a chart.
“Six months in, we're ranking #1 for the terms that pay our bills. Worth ten of what we used to spend on Yelp ads.”
“We stopped buying ads against our own name in November, and the phone kept ringing. That was the moment I knew the work was real.”
“The dashboard alone is worth the retainer. We can finally tell our board where every dollar — and every citation — went.”
8ENGINES, ONE DASHBOARD
PPC is available standalone at Foundation, paired with one additional discipline at Growth, and run as a full multi-channel program with embedded creative production at Command. Media spend is billed separately and goes direct to the platforms — never marked up.
Single channel — usually Google Ads. Audit, rebuild, weekly cadence.
$2,400/month
Starting · 3-month min
Two to three channels + creative pipeline + conversion tracking rebuild. Where most clients land.
$6,800/month
Most popular
Full multi-channel program — five channels, embedded studio, quarterly reviews. Theo on the account.
$14,500/month
For ambitious mandates
The questions Devin and Theo answer most weeks. If yours is different, the call is twenty minutes and the answer is honest.
No. Percentage-of-spend pricing creates an incentive to spend more — not to spend better. Our retainer is flat. Media spend is billed separately and goes direct to Google, Meta, LinkedIn, etc. — no markup, no opaque rebates, no media-buying margin. You see exactly what the platform invoices and exactly what we invoice. They are not the same line.
Yes — but we have stopped putting the badge in the footer because it has stopped meaning anything. Premier Partner status now reflects spend volume more than craft. What matters is the work: account architecture, conversion tracking, creative cadence. Ask the Premier Partner agency you are talking to how often they refuse a client's request to increase branded-bid spend. The answer tells you more than the badge does.
Yes — at Growth and Command, and when the audience math says it makes sense. Devin Marsh currently runs active LinkedIn programs for four Utah B2B SaaS clients and TikTok for two DTC brands. Reddit is the underpriced channel of 2026 for SaaS and considered-purchase B2C. We do not run channels we do not believe in for the sake of looking full-service.
We onboard in two weeks. Week one is access provisioning, audit, and the branded-bid review. Week two is the first round of account-architecture work and the conversion-tracking rebuild scope. By week three we are shipping. If you are mid-contract with your current agency we will plan the start date around the notice period — no need to double-pay for a quarter.
Always. We manage through your MCC or yours linked to ours — your call. The account is yours. The campaigns are yours. The conversion data is yours. If we part ways you walk out with everything; we walk out with nothing. Same policy for Meta Business Manager, LinkedIn Campaign Manager, and every other platform. We will never put our agency name on the account ownership row.
You get one Looker Studio dashboard with 5 platforms in it, sent every Monday. The top of the dashboard answers the only three questions a CMO actually asks: what did we spend, what did it return, where is the marginal dollar best deployed next. There is no impressions row above the fold. There is no platform-by-platform tab. There is no "we are A/B testing creative" status update with no test cell defined.
No, and no one honestly can. ROAS depends on offer, season, category competition, your CRM hygiene, and a dozen other inputs we do not own. What we can show you is the audit, the track record, and the conversion-tracking rebuild plan — the system that gets accounts to the +47% blended ROAS lift our cohort runs. Weight the system, not a number on a deck.
Devin runs a 20-minute review of your paid accounts — branded-bid waste, conversion-tracking posture, creative fatigue, and channel mix — and tells you straight whether a retainer makes sense for you. The call is twenty minutes and the answer is honest.
Prefer email? hello@utahseospecialists.com
Free of charge. No pitch. Utah hours, Monday to Thursday, Mountain time.