Performance marketing at SerpHike covers paid search, paid social and shopping campaigns, bought and optimised against a stated revenue or lead target. Typical engagements start at $500-$1,500/month in ad spend plus a management fee, and show first results within 2-4 weeks. FlowerAura's 2.6X seasonal conversion lift and Bakingo's 4.1X festive order volume both ran through this channel.
How SerpHike runs performance marketing properly
What channels does performance marketing cover?
- Google Search and Shopping ads, tied to purchase-intent keywords
- Meta (Facebook/Instagram) paid social, prospecting and retargeting
- Programmatic display for retargeting warm site visitors
Evidence: performance marketing results from real clients
What does a typical budget look like?
| Tier | Monthly Ad Spend | Typical Fit |
|---|---|---|
| Starter | $500 - $1,500 | Single-market D2C, local services |
| Growth | $1,500 - $5,000 | Multi-city ecommerce, SaaS trials |
| Scale | $5,000+ | National brands, festive/peak campaigns |
Paid media on its own is a leaky bucket
Paid media works best when it is not run in isolation. If the landing page is slow, the checkout adds surprise costs or the SEO team is targeting the same terms, spend is wasted. We run paid alongside SEO, content and CRO in one team, so budget moves to whatever is converting and the pages are fixed before spend is scaled.
What has changed in paid
- Automation: Google's Performance Max and Meta's Advantage+ decide more of the targeting, so conversion data and creative quality matter more than manual bidding
- Signal loss: Apple's App Tracking Transparency weakened tracking, with Meta estimating a $10 billion revenue impact in 2022 (CNBC, Feb 2022). Server-side tracking and offline conversion imports are now essential
- Retail media: Amazon's ad revenue reached around $68 billion in 2025 (Marketing Dive, 2026), and marketplaces now belong in many plans
- AI search: Pew found users clicked traditional results less when Google showed an AI summary (Pew Research Center, July 2025), which changes the value of some search terms
How we run it
- Tracking audit and fix before any budget increase
- Account structure built around margin and intent, not just product categories
- Creative testing every two to four weeks on social
- Landing pages matched to each campaign, see landing page optimisation
- Monthly reporting on revenue, contribution margin after ad spend and cost per acquisition
Small conversion gains are worth more than cheaper clicks. A 0.1 second mobile speed improvement lifted retail conversion by 8.4% in the Deloitte and Google study (Deloitte and Google, Milliseconds Make Millions).
Typical engagement
Management fees are scoped to channels and spend; typical engagements start at $500 to $1,500 a month in ad spend plus a management fee. See Google Ads versus Meta Ads and why campaigns fail in the first 30 days.