You know the drill with paid media…
New channels pop up, algorithms change, budgets tighten, and yet the expectation remains the same: deliver more pipeline, at a lower cost, faster than ever.
But here’s the thing — after years in the game, many advertisers fall into familiar patterns, relying on what worked yesterday while ignoring what’s needed to scale tomorrow.
That’s the real challenge: scaling paid media sustainably without losing control.
Recently, I sat through a masterclass with Silvio Perez, Founder at AdConversion that gave me a fresh lens on demand generation, especially for those of us who think we’ve seen it all. The conversation wasn’t about “hacks” or trendy tactics; it was about building systems and processes that make scaling predictable, measurable, and — dare I say it — enjoyable.
Here’s how to rethink demand generation for the next stage of your career.
Stop focusing only on tactics
Most paid media conversations gravitate toward tactics: bid strategies, platform updates, and A/B testing techniques. But those are the surface-level levers. If you want to unlock consistent performance, operations are where the real work happens.
Ask yourself:
- Do you have a single source of truth for ad performance across channels?
- Can you confidently explain how every dollar spent last quarter contributed to revenue?
- Is your team aligned on what “success” actually looks like?
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: without operational excellence, even the best strategies crumble.
Build a blended revenue dashboard
Forget obsessing over channel-specific metrics. Your CFO doesn’t care about your LinkedIn CTR or Google Ads quality score. What matters is this:
- How much did you spend across all channels?
- How much pipeline did it create?
- What’s your cost per SQL, opportunity, or closed deal — blended across paid, direct, and organic?
To scale effectively, you need to stop treating paid and organic as siloed efforts. A blended dashboard — built with data from your CRM, ad platforms, and analytics tools — isn’t a nice-to-have; it’s critical.
Why?
Because not every lead comes directly from your ad clicks. The majority of performance comes from how channels influence each other. If you’re not looking at the full picture, you’re making decisions with blind spots.
You need to build a blended revenue dashboard where you're able to see within the time frame that you're inspecting what was your direct performance. And equally important is organic. You need to pull in organic and direct but non-paid marketing-sourced contributions so you can see your blended performance.
INFO
Measure every part of the funnel
If you’re still managing paid media by focusing on individual campaigns or platforms, you’re missing the point. The best marketers think in funnel terms, not campaign terms.
Here’s the approach:
- Map Every Stage of Your Funnel: From the first impression to a SQL, map out every micro-conversion that happens.
- Measure Leading Indicators: For top-of-funnel campaigns, focus on metrics like engaged visits (e.g., 60-second session + 75% scroll depth) rather than SQLs. These early signals help you course-correct before it’s too late.
- Optimize for Lagging Indicators Too: Your CRM should be feeding offline data (e.g., SQLs, pipeline created) back to your ad platforms. This data closes the gap between short-term clicks and long-term revenue impact.
Why it works: Instead of looking at metrics in isolation (CTR, CPL, etc.), this framework lets you understand where prospects are dropping off and how to fix it.
You want to get very clear on your funnel and your conversion points, both the leading and lagging indicators. That way, when you launch your ad, you're able to get feedback really quickly. This gives you the framework now to understand what's the bottleneck, where's the drop-off, and how to optimize.
Creative testing is more than copy changes
We’ve all done it: tweak a headline, swap a CTA, and call it “creative testing.” But if that’s the extent of your experiments, you’re leaving money on the table.
Instead, think bigger.
- Test Entire Concepts: Before fine-tuning copy, test fundamentally different approaches — product demos, customer testimonials, memes, even AI-generated visuals.
- Respect Platform Context: A LinkedIn carousel designed for desktop won’t work as a story ad on Meta. Every platform has its own rules of engagement.
- Experiment Beyond “Safe” Options: Creative that stops the scroll often feels risky. Lean into discomfort — that’s where breakthroughs happen.
Once you’ve validated the concept, you can refine further. That’s when you test variations of copy, headlines, and calls-to-action. But concept comes first.
PRO TIP
Think like an investor. Execute like a scientist.
Great advertisers think like investors. Every campaign is a portfolio of bets, and your job is to allocate resources where the ROI is highest. The problem? Without rules and processes, human bias creeps in.
Here’s how to automate smarter decisions:
- Non-Performer Rules: Pause ads automatically if they spend 2-3x your target CPL without conversions.
- Ongoing Maintenance Rules: Even high performers have a shelf life. Set triggers to flag ads when costs creep up over time (e.g., a 1.5x increase in CPL).
- Budget Pacing Rules: Prevent overspending by capping campaigns at 90% of your monthly budget before reassessing.
- Critical Alerts: Set up alerts for issues like ad fatigue (e.g., frequency > 7) or low engagement (e.g., CTR < 0.5%) so you can act quickly.
You need to set rules for maintenance as well. Ads that were once high performers but start to creep up in cost need to be flagged and turned off. This way, you’re not holding on to underperformers for too long.
At the end of the day, there should be no emotion involved. It spent, it didn’t work — it dies. That’s how you scale.
The key? Automate the boring stuff, so you can focus on strategy and creative execution.
Data is non-negotiable
You can’t run effective campaigns if your data hygiene is a mess. This might seem like marketing 101, but even the most seasoned advertisers skip steps here.
Make sure you’ve nailed the basics:
- Persistent UTMs: Track UTMs across sessions to attribute conversions accurately.
- Hidden Fields: Capture UTM data and click IDs in your forms to connect ad spend with pipeline in your CRM.
- Offline Conversion Tracking: Feedback CRM data (e.g., SQLs, closed deals) to ad platforms like Google and Meta for smarter optimization.
Here’s a critical one: you need to persist browser cookies. When someone clicks your ad, you usually have a UTM in the URL. But the moment they go to another page, that UTM data disappears. By setting up persist browser cookies, you store the UTMs across sessions and ensure the right channel gets credit when someone converts.
This isn’t just hygiene—this is a money-making activity. If you don’t have clean data, you’re making decisions blind, and that’s how you waste your budget.
Set this up right, and you’ll never waste another dollar wondering why performance doesn’t match your ad manager reports.
It's time to think long-term
The truth is, B2B paid ads aren’t about quick wins. Success comes from creating systems that scale, not campaigns that pop.
When you adopt this mindset, everything changes. You stop chasing vanity metrics and start building programs that align with business goals. You create operational clarity so your team can focus on growth, not firefighting. And most importantly, you build a demand generation engine that delivers predictable pipeline — month after month, year after year.
The question isn’t whether paid media can scale. The question is whether your system is ready to handle it.
Watch the entire masterclass by Silvio Perez 👇🏻
