The priorities
What has to happen first, in order, with what each step is worth. Written so you can hand it on without me in the room.
Your marketing team is running tests. Nobody is reading the results.
When something is wrong with your body, you do not go to the technician. The technician runs the test, the doctor knows what the result means. Your paid media is getting technician work right now: somebody runs the campaigns, somebody sends the report, the dashboard looks fine, and the number the board is waiting for still is not moving. I read the results. In two weeks, out of your own accounts, I tell you what is actually causing the gap, what to fix first and what it is worth. In writing. You present it, it is your plan.
Not an agency. A fractional growth officer, embedded in your team and accountable to your P&L.
What you walk away with
Your leak map
Which of the five leaks are open in your accounts, how big each one is, and which ones you can leave alone for now.
Your top three moves
Three things you can have executed next week, concrete enough to paste into a brief.
8 yearsin performance marketing
100M+euro in ad spend managed
20+brands
11.6blended ROAS across that spend
15live accounts today
8 in 10clients arrive by referral
Who this is and is not for
Better now than after the invoice.
Yes
- You run marketing at a brand doing two to fifty million a year.
- Real money goes into paid media, not a leftover budget.
- You decide on numbers, not on who spoke loudest in the meeting.
- You want to present the plan yourself, with your name on it.
No
- Brands under real spend. There is nothing to read yet.
- Anyone who wants an agency to run the ads and never look at the numbers.
- Anyone who wants a nicer deck. I do not make decks, I make diagnoses.
You will recognise this pattern
Three moments in the same week, at almost every brand I open.
- Monday, the agency deck lands. Cost per lead is down, impressions are up, there is a slide about creative learnings. And revenue is flat. Nobody connects those two facts, because the deck is built so they never sit on the same page.
- Wednesday, finance asks what the four hundred thousand did. You have an answer: a slide with a ROAS on it. You know it is not really an answer, because the ROAS in the platform and the revenue in the bank stopped agreeing about a year ago.
- Friday, somebody says the sentence. Turn Meta off, Analytics barely shows revenue from it. Or: our ROAS has to stay above three. Or: the creative is fatigued. And the room nods, because it sounds like a decision. It is a guess.
Every fix you have tried lives inside the ad account. New audiences, new creative, a new agency that reports a lower cost per lead and bills the hours. Ask anyone in the building how your cost per lead, your blended return and your sales handoff have trended over the last six quarters, on one page, and you will get silence. So here is the thing nobody in your building will say: you are not behind because you are bad at marketing. You have a visibility problem, not a marketing problem. The setup is wrong, and the people running it are never going to be the ones to tell you, because saying the structure is wrong sounds a lot like saying fire us.
What changes
Once the real leak is found, and in a minute I will tell you where I look, three things change inside a month.
The board meeting
You walk in with the cause on page one, the fix list on page two and the forecast on page three. And it is your document.
The agency brief
You stop asking for new creative and start telling them exactly what to fix, in what order, and what it is worth.
The return, on the same spend
Most of the brands I work with do not need more budget. They need the budget they already have to stop leaking.
Who does this
Pieter Van der Auwera, through Ad Astra in Antwerp. Eight years in performance marketing, with more than a hundred million euro of ad spend across more than twenty brands, at a blended ROAS of eleven point six. Telecom, subscription apps, ecommerce, B2B software, luxury. Four and a half years continuously on the same Meta account, which almost nobody in this industry can say. And in most of those companies I am the one in the room, presenting the plan to the whole C level team. Same pattern every time: not a bad CMO, a CMO with no visibility.
The Growth Diagnostic Sprint
Two weeks, five leaks, one written diagnosis. Most agencies start spending on day one: new campaign, new creative, new audience. I spend those two weeks finding the leak first, because if you fix the wrong thing you have spent the money and the quarter and you are back in the same meeting. These are the five places I look.
1. Measurement
The tracking is broken is almost never the tracking. It is what the tracking is pointed at. I put platform ROAS, analytics revenue and bank revenue on one page and find out which one is lying to you.
2. Structure
How many campaigns, ad sets and ads the account carries against its budget. Most accounts your size are fragmented, and a fragmented account never gets enough signal to work.
3. Creative
Since Andromeda the creative does the targeting, not the audience settings. So the creative is fatigued usually means one ad is being asked to reach five different people.
4. The split
Demand generation on Meta, demand capture on Google, and the ratio between them. Most brands pay Google for searches they already own and starve the channel that creates the searches. That is what makes turn Meta off so expensive.
5. The handoff
Where marketing ends and sales begins. Leads reaching sales too early, too late, or never. For a lot of brands your size this is the biggest leak, and it never shows up in a media report because it is not a media problem.
Why one person finds in two weeks what has not been found in a year
I read the business, not the ad account
Contribution margin, the sales handoff, the search terms you already own. Things a media buyer never opens.
No team, a fleet
Agents connected read only into your ad accounts, your analytics and your revenue data pull every number on day one and check it against a standard: a ROAS floor, a cost per lead benchmark, a monthly cap. Not against last week. The judgment is mine, the pulling is theirs.
Fifteen accounts at once
Telecom, ecommerce, high ticket, B2B. I see the same leak in a different costume every week. An in-house team sees one account.
No juniors
You get me, in your accounts and in your boardroom, the same way the brands I have been with for four years get me.
I will be straight about proof
In my market I am not allowed to put client dashboards on a screen, and I would not want to work with anyone who does. So start with how I get clients: eight out of ten come through referral, one CMO telling another. That does not happen because of a pitch deck. It happens because the plan worked and they got the credit for it.
Then tenure. Four and a half years on one Meta account without a break. A hundred million euro of spend across twenty brands at eleven point six blended.
And then the accounts below. None of that is what your brand will get. Every account is different and I will never promise you a number before I have seen yours.
Four accounts, anonymised
Different categories, different platforms, the same way of reading the accounts. Each one with the leak that caused it.
A leasing company
Leak 2, structure. The whole building had accepted the cost per lead as the price of the market. We rebuilt the account and that price turned out not to be a market price at all. Same brand, same product, same market.
A motorhome brand, high ticket
Leak 4, the split. Units from forty six thousand to six hundred thousand euro. Cost per lead dropped sharply once demand generation and demand capture were pulled apart.
An ecommerce brand
Leaks 1, 2 and 3, in that order. Started with me at a monthly revenue that now arrives in a matter of days.
One account I can only describe
Five figures a month in revenue when I opened it. An order of magnitude higher eight months later, from the same five leaks as a starting point.
The exact figures behind these four are written and ready, and go in as soon as the clients involved confirm the anonymised wording in writing.
The call, minute by minute
Thirty minutes, and you know in advance where they go.
- Before
- You give read only access and I pull one real number out of your accounts. I do that before the call, not during it.
- 0 to 5
- That number on the screen, and what it means.
- 5 to 15
- Which of the five leaks I would open first at your brand, and why that one comes first.
- 15 to 25
- If it makes sense: the Sprint for your brand. What I would pull, what you would get, and when.
- 25 to 30
- Your questions. If it is not a fit, I say so here, with the exact reasons.
What happens next
- The call is free and it is a diagnostic, not a pitch. You leave with something specific about your paid media that you did not have walking in, and you are welcome to take it to your agency and run it yourself.
- The Growth Diagnostic Sprint runs two weeks and costs 3,500 euro. At the end there is a document: the cause, the fix list in order with what each step is worth, and the forecast.
- After that it is yours. No retainer, no lock in. Some brands take the document and fix it themselves. Some ask me to stay on as their growth officer, behind them. Either way you keep the seat and you keep the credit.
Frequently asked questions
Is this actually free? What is the catch?
No catch, but there is a self interest. I pull one real number out of your accounts beforehand and that costs me an hour. That hour is my qualification: in thirty minutes I see whether there is anything here to find, and you see whether you want me. If I find nothing, I say so and the conversation ends. If I do find something, you have that number either way, including if you take it to your own agency. That happens, and it is fine.
If I bring in an outside consultant, does that not tell the board I could not do it myself?
No. The board never meets me. You get the diagnosis, you get the fix list, you present the plan. I have done this with CMOs at a telecom operator, at a leasing group and at scale ups, and in every one of those rooms the plan had their name on it. I put the ball in front of the goal. You kick it.
We already have an agency.
Keep them. An agency runs the ads and bills the hours. The Sprint tells you what to ask them for and what to stop paying for. Most agencies get better the moment their client can read the numbers.
You want access to our ad accounts and our revenue data. Is that safe?
Read only. Nothing changes in your accounts unless you approve it, and nothing leaves them. No screenshots, no dashboards, no client names in my content, ever. I work under Belgian and EU rules and I have held the same accounts for years because of how I treat them.
You said agents. Is this just AI reading my account and guessing?
The agents pull the numbers and check them against a standard. That is the part a human does slowly and badly. The judgment, what is actually wrong and what to fix first, is mine. If a machine could do that part, your agency would have found the leak already.
Two weeks
The thing that costs a marketing leader the most is not a bad campaign. It is another quarter of thinking about it. Then another. Then standing in the same meeting next year, still arguing for last year's number, wondering why nothing changed. Your budget runs every month whether the leak is found or not.
Book a thirty minute diagnostic call