The MachineBehind YourAd Spend.

The Paid Advertising Agency That Reports in Revenue

Google and Meta ads managed to the only number that matters: revenue, not clicks. Search terms get reviewed every morning instead of once a month. Your budget cap, your ad account, your name on the billing statement.

Put spend to work See the case study

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No long-term contracts. You keep ownership of the ad accounts.

Five colleagues around a boardroom table, two of them talking across it with hands raised

Every format, one account

Running ads is easy.
Running the right ones isn’t.

There are eight ways to buy attention on Google and Meta. Each one does a different job, and most local budgets are quietly spent on the wrong one. Here is the whole set — what each is for, and where it earns its place.

A retail interior with product displays and warm lighting — GooglePerformance Max

A sunlit restaurant terrace set for service — GoogleDemand Gen

A video production still from a Machina client reel — GoogleYouTube

A construction crew working on a timber frame — GoogleDisplay

Rows of vines on a Central Coast hillside at golden hour — MetaFacebook & Instagram Feed

The Monterey coastline photographed from the bluffs — MetaStories & Reels

A clinician and patient in a bright consultation room — MetaCarousel

What actually happens

We buy attention on Google and Meta — the two places a Central Coast buyer is already deciding. Search catches the ones looking today. Social reaches the ones who will look next month. Both run against a cap you set, in an account you own, with every change written down.

The full set

One account. Every format that fits the job.

Eight placements across two platforms. Every one of these is a real unit we can build and run — shown here as a recreation, using an example business rather than a client account.

google.com/search?q=orthodontist+salinas

Search

A text ad against the exact phrase someone typed, charged only when they click.

What it’s for: Capture demand that already exists
Where it earns its place: The first dollar of almost every local budget belongs here. Someone typing "emergency plumber Salinas" has already decided — the only question is whose name is at the top.

Asset group — Performance Max

Logo

HeadlineShop the new season

Free delivery over $75

Central Coast pickup

Google assembles these into ads across Search, Maps, YouTube, Gmail and Display.

Recreation — example business, not a live campaign

Search, Maps, YouTube, Gmail, Display

Performance Max

One asset group — headlines, images, video, logo — that Google places across every surface it owns.

What it’s for: Extend reach once Search is capped
Where it earns its place: Its strength is coverage, and coverage needs conversion history to steer by. It comes alive after a Search campaign has been feeding it signal for a month or two.

Discover feed

Demand Gen

Image and video cards in the feeds people scroll on Google properties.

What it’s for: Create demand where none was searched
Where it earns its place: Built for the visual sell — hospitality, wine, retail, anything where seeing it is most of the argument. Pairs naturally with a Search campaign catching the searches it creates.

youtube.com/watch

Skip ad ▸

Your fifteen seconds before the video they came for

Recreation — example business, not a live campaign

In-stream and Shorts

YouTube

Skippable video before and inside the videos your market already watches.

What it’s for: Build recognition at low cost per view
Where it earns its place: The cheapest attention Google sells, and the format where a good thirty seconds does years of work. Worth it the moment you have footage worth running.

A partner site — display placement

Still thinking about that remodel?

Get a quote

Recreation — example business, not a live campaign

Two million partner sites

Display

Banner units across the web, priced per thousand impressions rather than per click.

What it’s for: Stay in front of people who already visited
Where it earns its place: At its best pointed at your own visitors — the people who came, looked, and left without calling. As a retargeting surface it is one of the highest-return line items in the account.

Instagram — feed

paraiso_vineyardsSponsored

Book a tasting

paraiso_vineyards Twenty minutes from Salinas. Open Thursday to Sunday.

Recreation — example business, not a live campaign

The main scroll

Facebook & Instagram Feed

A single image or video post placed into the feed of an audience you define.

What it’s for: Reach the right people before they search
Where it earns its place: Where Meta earns its keep for local business. You can target a fifteen-mile radius around Hollister and the format rewards a genuinely good photograph over a clever one.

Stories & Reels

Nine-by-sixteen video and image between the stories people are already watching.

What it’s for: Reach the audience that never leaves vertical
Where it earns its place: Where the under-forty Central Coast audience actually is. It wants motion and a face; a cropped landscape banner will not do the job the format is capable of.

Facebook — carousel

Valley Family HealthSponsored · Hollister, CA

Same-day appointments

Book

Two Central Coast locations

Find us

Most insurance accepted

Check

Recreation — example business, not a live campaign

Feed, swipeable

Carousel

Two to ten cards in one unit, each with its own image and link.

What it’s for: Show a range in a single placement
Where it earns its place: The format for anyone whose answer to "what do you do" is a list — services, locations, treatments, a menu. Each card reports separately, so it doubles as a read on what people actually want.

What to run, for what

Every format has a job. Very few do two.

Read down a column to see what to run for a given goal. Read across a row to see what a format is built for. Most accounts that underperform are running a top-of-funnel format against a bottom-of-funnel expectation.

Ad formats against funnel stage. A primary mark means the format does its main work at that stage; a supporting mark means it contributes but is not the right lead choice.
Format	Awareness	Consideration	Leads	Sales
SearchGoogle		Supporting	Primary	Primary
Performance MaxGoogle	Supporting	Primary	Primary	Primary
Demand GenGoogle	Primary	Primary	Supporting
YouTubeGoogle	Primary	Supporting
DisplayGoogle	Supporting	Primary	Supporting	Supporting
Facebook & Instagram FeedMeta	Primary	Primary	Supporting	Supporting
Stories & ReelsMeta	Primary	Supporting	Supporting
CarouselMeta	Supporting	Primary	Primary	Supporting

Primary — the format’s main job
Supporting — real, but not the lead choice

How the money behaves

Three things every account does, whoever runs it.

None of these is a result we are claiming. They are the mechanics — the shapes any paid account settles into, and the reason a plan built around them beats one built around hope.

Chart 1

What attention costs, by how close it sits to a decision

SearchPerformance MaxCarouselDisplayFeedDemand GenStories & ReelsYouTubeJust browsingReady to buyCosts more

A search click costs the most because the person is already reaching for their phone. A YouTube view costs the least because they are not. Neither is better value — they buy different things.

Diagram of the relationship between intent and price. Not measured campaign data; axes are deliberately unnumbered.

Chart 2

Where each channel does its work

Awareness
Consideration
Leads
Sales

Search — Google
Social — Meta

Search owns the bottom of the funnel and barely touches the top. Social is the mirror image. Running one and not the other leaves half the journey uncovered.

Illustrative coverage, drawn to show shape rather than share. Not measured campaign data.

Chart 3

Why one channel alone stops paying

First dollarBudget spent

One channel, whole budget
Same budget, two channels

A single channel climbs until the affordable inventory runs out, then flattens — every extra dollar buys a worse impression. The same budget across two auctions keeps climbing.

Illustrative curve showing diminishing returns within a fixed auction. Not measured campaign data.

Your money, your account

Spend you can watch, in an account you keep.

The reason most people are wary of handing an agency their ad budget is that they have done it before and could not see where the money went. These are the four commitments that fix that, and they are in writing before anything goes live.

The account stays yours
Billing in your name, on your card, in an account you opened. We manage it through our agency manager account — the same way every real agency does it. If you ever leave, the account, the history and the conversion data leave with you.
A ceiling you set
A monthly cap agreed in writing before anything goes live, enforced at the campaign budget. Google bills daily against roughly 30.4 days a month, so the daily number and the monthly number always agree.
Every change written down
Bid changes, new keywords, negatives, budget moves, paused ads — logged with the date and the reason. You get the list every month, whether or not you read it.
Watched daily, not monthly
Search terms get read every morning, so money going to the wrong queries is stopped in days rather than at the next quarterly review. That cadence is the whole reason a small budget can work here.

Getting started

Four steps. You’re involved in two of them.

We look at the market first
Before anything is built we pull the real search volume and the real top-of-page bids for your category across Monterey, San Benito and Santa Cruz counties. Some markets are big enough to carry a serious budget; some are not, and it is better to know that in week one.
What you do
Tell us what you sell and where.
You link the account
If you already run ads, you send us your customer ID and accept a link request — about two minutes, no passwords, and nothing about your billing changes. If you have never run ads, we open the account in your name.
What you do
Click accept.
We fix the measurement before the spending
Conversion tracking is broken or double-counting in a surprising number of small accounts. We check it first, because a campaign you cannot measure is a campaign nobody can improve — and because it is the difference between reporting leads and reporting clicks.
What you do
Nothing.
It goes live, and then it gets read every day
Campaigns launch against the agreed cap. From there it is search terms every morning, negatives as they surface, budget pacing weekly, and a written change log monthly.
What you do
Answer the phone.

Put spend to work

We’ll size your market before either of us commits to anything.

The problem

Why most ad accounts leak money

The platforms are happy to spend your budget either way. Whether that spend becomes customers comes down to a few decisions the average account never makes.

Optimized for clicks, not customers

Campaigns tuned to CPC and click-through rate look busy and cost little per click — but cheap clicks from the wrong people are the most expensive traffic you can buy. Volume without intent drains budget and teaches smart bidding the wrong lesson about who to chase.

Everything dumped on the bottom funnel

Pouring the whole budget into high-intent "buy now" keywords works until that small audience runs out — then costs spike and scale stalls. With no awareness or retargeting layer feeding it, the pipeline has nothing warm left to convert.

Attribution nobody can trust

Since iOS privacy changes and Consent Mode, in-platform numbers overstate some channels and quietly hide others. When Google and Meta both claim the same sale, and neither ties to real revenue, you are optimizing on fiction and calling it data.

The system

Paid ads run to revenue

Three disciplines that turn a spend line into a growth channel. Each one makes the platform AI smarter — which is why the return climbs instead of decaying as you scale.

Bid to ROAS, not clicks

We set Target ROAS and Target CPA goals against your real margins and feed smart bidding clean conversion data, so the Google and Meta algorithms optimize toward profitable customers — not the cheapest clicks or the vanity of full impression share.

Full-funnel by design

Awareness, consideration, conversion, and retargeting run as one connected system. Cold prospecting fills the top, retargeting closes the warm, and each stage is budgeted to its own job — so scaling one layer never starves the next.

Tracking that survives privacy

Server-side tracking, enhanced conversions, the Meta Conversions API, and GA4 data-driven attribution — set up so your numbers still add up after cookies, Consent Mode, and iOS. You optimize on revenue you can actually verify against your CRM.

What's included

What a paid ads engagement includes

Six disciplines managed as one account strategy — not a search campaign here and a boosted post there.

Google Search & Shopping

High-intent Search, Shopping, and Performance Max campaigns that capture people already looking for what you sell — structured so the algorithm spends where your margin actually is.

Meta ads (Facebook & Instagram)

Advantage+ and manual campaigns across Facebook, Instagram, and Reels that create demand and retarget it — creative and audiences built to stop the scroll and earn the click, not just the impression.

Retargeting & audience building

Behavioral retargeting and custom-audience funnels that follow warm visitors across Google and Meta, plus lookalikes built from your best customers — so no qualified click ever gets bought twice or wasted.

Performance Max & smart bidding

PMax and Advantage+ Shopping managed the way they actually perform: clean asset groups, audience signals, feed hygiene, and bidding tuned to profit — not left on autopilot to spend blind.

Conversion tracking & attribution

Server-side tracking, enhanced conversions, the Conversions API, and GA4 events wired to your CRM — so every lead and sale ties back to the exact campaign, keyword, or audience that earned it.

Landing pages & creative testing

Continuous A/B testing on ad creative, offers, and post-click landing pages — because the fastest ROAS gains usually come after the click, where the conversion actually happens.

Results

What this looks like in practice

Four campaigns, four very different economics — the same discipline: every dollar measured against what it returned. Read the full stories.

B2B Software

SaaS Platform

$2.5M

ARR generated

Bottom-funnel Google Search paired with Meta prospecting and retargeting, all bid to trial-to-paid value — paid became a predictable pipeline engine that turned ad spend into recurring revenue.

Read the case study

Retail

E-commerce Brand

+180%

Sales growth

Advantage+ Shopping and behavioral retargeting recovered abandoned carts and scaled acquisition ROAS-positive — the growth that lifted sales without buying revenue at a loss.

Read the case study

Home Services

101 Exterminators

$6.8M

ARR

Paid search captured emergency, high-intent "exterminator near me" demand across four counties — a bottom-funnel channel running alongside the organic engine that took the company from $120K to $6.8M.

Read the case study

Out-of-Home

Safety Ads

Lives saved

Lifeguard towers rebuilt as out-of-home media on Ecuador's busiest beaches, where the panel fee paid the lifeguard standing on it — three days of Carnival returned 1,081 preventions and a Cannes Lions shortlist.

Read the case study

How we work

Four steps, in sequence

The order matters. Launch before the tracking is right and you will scale the wrong signal — confidently, and expensively.

Tracking & attribution audit

We verify every conversion action before a dollar moves: server-side tracking, enhanced conversions, the Meta Conversions API, and GA4 events checked end to end and reconciled against your CRM. If the data is wrong, nothing downstream can be right.

Account & funnel build

We structure campaigns across the funnel — prospecting, retargeting, and high-intent search — with clean naming, audience signals, and budgets mapped to each stage. Creative, offers, and landing pages built to start testing from day one.

Launch & optimize

We launch, let smart bidding gather data through the learning phase, then tune: search terms, negatives, audiences, creative, and bid targets. Losers get cut fast, winners get more budget — every change tied to cost per acquisition and ROAS.

Scale & reallocate

Once the return is stable, we scale what works and reallocate against marginal ROAS — shifting budget between Google and Meta to where the next dollar earns most, instead of splitting spend by habit or platform loyalty.

How we compare

A Machina engagement vs. a typical ads agency

Most of these gaps show up in your ROAS report — or the absence of one — within the first two billing cycles.

Typical ads agency	Machina
Reports clicks, CPC, and impressions	Reports revenue, ROAS, and cost per acquisition tied to your CRM
Whole budget on bottom-funnel keywords	Full funnel — prospecting, retargeting, and high-intent search working together
Trusts in-platform numbers at face value	Server-side tracking and enhanced conversions that survive iOS and Consent Mode
Performance Max left on full autopilot	PMax and Advantage+ managed with asset groups, signals, and feed hygiene
Google and Meta run by separate freelancers	One strategy across both, reallocated to marginal ROAS
Same three ads running for months	Continuous creative, offer, and landing-page testing
Locks you into a 12-month contract and owns your account	Month-to-month — and you keep ownership of the ad accounts

Pair with

Paid ads work best alongside these

Paid buys attention now. These services lower what that attention costs and make more of it convert — plus the industries we run it for.

SEO

Owning the ad and the organic result for a query doubles your SERP real estate — and rankings lower your blended cost per acquisition as they build.

Web Development

The click is only half the battle. Fast, focused landing pages built to convert are where paid budgets stop leaking and ROAS actually climbs.

Email Marketing

Paid gets the lead; email keeps it. Capturing and nurturing traffic you already paid for turns one-time clicks into repeat revenue.

Legal Services

Paid campaigns for law firms — high-intent case-type keywords and pages built to book consultations.

Fintech

Paid acquisition for fintech — compliant creative and funnels tuned to lower CAC on regulated products.

Keep reading

Go deeper

The owned audience: why email and SMS lists beat rented reach

Turn paid clicks into a list you own, so acquisition compounds instead of resetting each month.

How to rank in Google AI Overviews in 2026

Why paid and organic both need an AI-search strategy as answer engines reshape the top of the results page.

AI automation for small business: what actually works in 2026

Respond to paid leads in seconds so the clicks you paid for never go cold in a follow-up queue.

Service area

Paid Advertising services by city

Each city page is built for that specific market — not a generic template with the city name swapped in.

Salinas Monterey Santa Cruz San Jose Hollister Palo Alto Carmel Santa Clara Sunnyvale Watsonville Gilroy Capitola Morgan Hill Mountain View Los Gatos

Local specialists

Paid Advertising, written for one city at a time

Every page below is written for a specific city’s economy — not a template with a place name swapped in.

Turn ad spend into a growth channel

Book a paid ads consultation. We will review your accounts and tracking, find where budget is leaking, and show you exactly what we would change to grow ROAS. No obligation.

Get a paid ads plan Read the case study

No long-term contracts Free account & tracking review You keep ownership of the ad accounts

The MachineBehind YourAd Spend.

The Paid Advertising Agency That Reports in Revenue

Running ads is easy.Running the right ones isn’t.

One account. Every format that fits the job.

Search

Performance Max

Demand Gen

YouTube

Display

Facebook & Instagram Feed

Stories & Reels

Carousel

Every format has a job. Very few do two.

Three things every account does, whoever runs it.

What attention costs, by how close it sits to a decision

Where each channel does its work

Why one channel alone stops paying

Spend you can watch, in an account you keep.

The account stays yours

A ceiling you set

Every change written down

Watched daily, not monthly

Four steps. You’re involved in two of them.

We look at the market first

You link the account

We fix the measurement before the spending

It goes live, and then it gets read every day

Why most ad accounts leak money

Optimized for clicks, not customers

Everything dumped on the bottom funnel

Attribution nobody can trust

Paid ads run to revenue

Bid to ROAS, not clicks

Full-funnel by design

Tracking that survives privacy

What a paid ads engagement includes

Google Search & Shopping

Meta ads (Facebook & Instagram)

Retargeting & audience building

Performance Max & smart bidding

Conversion tracking & attribution

Landing pages & creative testing

What this looks like in practice

Four steps, in sequence

Tracking & attribution audit

Account & funnel build

Launch & optimize

Scale & reallocate

A Machina engagement vs. a typical ads agency

Paid ads work best alongside these

SEO

Web Development

Email Marketing

Legal Services

Fintech

Go deeper

The owned audience: why email and SMS lists beat rented reach

How to rank in Google AI Overviews in 2026

AI automation for small business: what actually works in 2026

Paid Advertising services by city

Paid Advertising, written for one city at a time

Turn ad spend into a growth channel

Running ads is easy.
Running the right ones isn’t.