Meta Ads Agency · Since 2017 · For companies of 10 to 200 people

Tracked from the ad to the sale, or it is not performance marketing.

I run your Facebook and Instagram campaigns myself, from tracking to reporting, and I report nothing I cannot trace to a qualified lead or a sale. No junior takes over your account after onboarding. Ad account, pixel and audiences stay in your own Business Manager.

Book a Discovery Call → How I work

Up to 45 minutes. We qualify fit and I tell you the fastest next step, even if it is not me.

Founder-led delivery

I treat paid social like an engineering problem, not a creative brainstorming session.

Clients since 2017

Point of contact on every account, no junior

Results claimed without tracking to the sale

01 Fit check

If you are deciding who should run your Meta ads, you are in the right place.

Most companies at this point are choosing between three options: an agency, a freelancer or an in-house hire. I am a fourth. The discovery call, though, asks a different question: what your marketing actually needs right now. That is often less than a job posting asks for, and almost always different from what an agency offers.

You are a fit if

You have been running the ads yourself, in the evenings after the actual business, and you want to hand them to someone you would trust with the budget.
You had an agency or a freelancer and at the end could not say which ad brought which revenue.
You have posted a performance-marketing role because marketing is supposed to grow now. Those postings are usually overloaded, because the strategy is not settled yet and everything lands on the new hire ad hoc. So the chance that this person is overwhelmed and burns out is, unfortunately, all but guaranteed. In the discovery call we work out which part of it brings revenue.
You lead marketing, the performance numbers land on your desk, and nobody in the building can judge whether the campaigns bring revenue.

Not for you if

You want the cheapest leads without knowing whether they can be closed at all.
You do not want tracking to the sale. Without access to your CRM and a sales team that marks leads as qualified or lost, I cannot connect an ad to a sale, and then I will not claim it either.
You sell web3, crypto, or fintech.
You want a report that looks good. I deliver one that is right.

Book a Discovery Call →

In 45 minutes we find out what your marketing actually needs, and which form fits it.

02 The core problem

Ad budget goes out, performance numbers come back, and nobody in the building can say exactly which ad the sales came from.

I call it performance theater: activity and platform numbers reported as if they were results, so that a retainer, a salary or a budget can be justified without anyone having traced a euro to a sale. This problem has four faces, and you probably know at least one of them.

Friday evening, the PDF

You open the monthly report already braced for it to not add up. It does not add up. Under the chart it says next month will be better. It almost never is.

Activity as results

A thousand changes, a fresh batch of creatives, "we restructured the account". All of it is execution. None of it strengthens a performance lever that affects your sales.

The senior in the pitch, the junior on your account

The person you signed with disappears after onboarding. From then on a junior runs your budget, alongside fourteen other accounts.

"Give it a few more weeks"

Meta genuinely needs about six weeks of conversion data. The difference is what happens in those weeks: either tests are run, documented and tracked for their effect on sales, or everyone waits for the algorithm to supposedly finish optimising.

Why the theater survives

The gap between the dashboard and the sale is convenient for everyone. The agency can blame the sales team, the sales team can blame the leads, the platform can be blamed for its attribution. Whoever builds the tracking that closes the gap takes the scapegoat away from all of them. That is why it so rarely gets built.

You did not, however, choose badly. You chose from three versions of the same theater, an agency, a freelancer or an in-house hire, and all three can play it. All three can also refuse it. I refuse it, and what that looks like in practice is the next section.

How I work →

03 What "tracked from the ad to the sale" means

You do not have to be able to run media buying yourself to understand how it is done honestly.

Five things, in this order. You can check every one of them without ever having seen the inside of an ad account.

i Tracking first. Before I claim any performance, the conversion tracking is built to the qualified lead or to the sale. No tracking, no claim. And I keep pressing on this, even when it is inconvenient in month one.
ii Measured, not tried. I test a wide range of ad concepts, how many depends on your budget and your capacity, and measure each against the additional sales it produced. In the test log you see which message, which format and which customer segment worked and which did not. Once a month I name the current bottleneck, on the call or in a short video.
iii Inspectable. A daily report with the KPIs explained and a monthly video show the work as it happens. Whoever owns marketing can pass that upward without having to translate it.
iv Yours. Ad account, pixel and audiences live in your Business Manager. If you fire me tomorrow, you hand the access to the next person and nothing stops.
v A senior who stays. On Meta, that is me. There is no account manager whose job is the relationship. There is one name, and that name explains its own decisions.

What I do not promise: a result in the first month, and any number I cannot trace to the sale. That is not caution. It is the difference between performance marketing and performance theater.

Read about campaign management →

04 Three ways to work together

Three ways to work together. Which one fits, we settle in the discovery call.

Paid Social Ad Lab: campaign management

I take over your Meta account: tracking, testing, reporting, in three tiers depending on what you supply and what I am supposed to. Three-month minimum, because we need about six weeks of data from Meta before we optimise instead of guessing. Monthly after that.

Further channels, YouTube Ads and Google Search, can be added on request, run by a named senior under me.

Read about campaign management →

No Guesswork Growth Protocol: positioning and digital sales strategy

Before the first euro runs, we check the message against your real customers: interviews, a buyer persona in their own words, a messaging matrix, a digital sales strategy. Twelve weeks, fixed scope. For your first marketing hires, or for a company where nobody yet knows which message actually sells. I offer it to everyone. It is not a prerequisite.

Read about positioning →

The handover is planned from the start

In the end, your own employee should be able to run the account, with the tracking, the playbook and the test history built up until then. Am I expensive? Yes. I also want you to be able to get rid of me, and still be glad you paid me. How the handover works is on the campaign management page.

Read about the handover →

05 How I earn trust

Trust should not require belief. It should require evidence.

I show you what happens behind the scenes, and what you will hold in your hands at the end.

No black box. I show what I do and how.

You see the test log, the daily report and the monthly video from week one.
Every decision on the account has a reason, and the reason is written next to it.
Playbooks that make the system repeatable.

One name, not a team.

I run every account myself. Since 2017 that has been 64 clients, and on none of them has a junior run the campaigns.
I answer an email within one business day. Genuine emergencies have their own line.
You always know who is doing what, and why.

Case studies with the real numbers.

Four case studies from e-commerce, consulting and coaching, each with the metric that was actually measured there.
At bellicon that was cost per order, not ROAS, because the reports at the time contained no revenue. So no ROAS is shown there either.
Andrea Randt states her numbers herself, in her video. That is why you read her quote there, not my arithmetic.

See the case studies →

06 Case studies

Four client examples from e-commerce, coaching and consulting.

bellicon

E-commerce · Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France, the Netherlands

Cost per order

Seven years of Meta ads across five countries, every order traced back to the ad, at a time when the industry was still arguing about the price of a click.

Read the story →

Anne Jansson

Coaching · organic Instagram marketing for health coaches

407% ROAS

First quarter after the No Guesswork Growth Protocol, 2024. Cost per lead was raised on purpose from €3.59 to €20, because the cheap leads had not bought.

Read the story →

Andrea Randt

Business mentor · €4K to €15K coaching offers

7 years working together

"I get a report every week ... total transparency in the numbers." (her words, translated) Two seven-figure businesses, which in her own words is partly my doing.

Read the story →

Renée Schäfer

Executive coach · leaders in corporations and public companies

CHF 1.5M

A contract with a Swiss municipal utility, around 500 managers in scope, signed two months after completing the No Guesswork Growth Protocol.

Read the story →

All case studies →

See the full context, not just the headline.

07 Who does the work

You work with Robert Zach. Not an account team.

In 2016 I was the in-house marketer at bellicon, an e-commerce company. Facebook ads were new, I ran them, and they won new customers. The partner agency did not look at the numbers, it argued them away: the retargeting buyers would have bought anyway, and Google brand search delivered a far cheaper click. Without tracking to the order the argument could not be settled, so it carried on about the price of a click.

In 2017 I went independent, and bellicon became my first client. We then built exactly that tracking with other clients. Since then every account I run has had one rule: I do not report a revenue number that would not survive that argument. And yes, for a while I was part of the theater myself. How is on the About page.

More about Robert → Talk to him directly →

Robert

08 What this requires from you

Performance marketing only works if you want the tracking, even when the numbers are uncomfortable.

I can measure to the sale if I am allowed to see to the sale. In practice that means:

Access and data

Access to the ad account and the CRM on day one, and a sales team that follows a script and marks leads as qualified or lost, plus cooperation when technical measures need implementing.
Approvals for ads and assets within three business days. In return, approved ads are live within three business days.

Time and decisions

One strategy call a month and one update video a month. It does not take more of your time than that to see what is happening.
A three-month minimum on campaign management, for the two reasons above: we need the data from Meta, and you need predictability and stability.

What I do not do

I do not optimise for the price of a click. Platform numbers are interim readings to me, not results, and nobody who means it honestly will promise you a record month in month one.

Book a Discovery Call →

I tell you upfront what is missing, so you do not pay to learn it later.

09 FAQ

The questions you ask before you risk another quarter.

Short answers. If you want nuance, bring the messy details to the call.

Will you hand my account to a junior after onboarding?

No, I do not have one. On Meta I do the work myself; on further channels, a named senior under me. You know the name before you sign, and the name stays.

I cannot judge media buying. How do I know you are any good?

I explain the performance numbers without jargon. The daily report, the test log and the monthly video show what I did, why, and what it did to the sales. And there is one thing you can judge without any expertise: whether someone can explain their own decisions.

Why a three-month minimum?

Because we need roughly six weeks of conversion data from Meta before we optimise instead of guessing, and because I need some predictability myself to hold a high standard. The difference from "the algorithm needs a little more time" is what happens in those weeks: I use them to test, and I document in the test log what is being tested and to what end. You can read that on any day.

Who owns the ad account?

You do. Account, pixel and audiences sit in your Business Manager from day one. If you cancel, you hand over the access and the next person carries on the same day.

Do I have to do the No Guesswork Growth Protocol before you run ads?

No. Without the No Guesswork Growth Protocol you supply the positioning of the message and the creative, and I build the tracking, the testing and the creative strategy around them. The No Guesswork Growth Protocol makes the whole thing complete, because the ad messages have then been checked against real customers before you spend a cent of ad budget. I offer it to everyone; it is not a prerequisite. Once you know which digital sales strategy, which offer and which customer segment converts through Meta ads, I help you implement it and build the operational processes to scale it stably.

We actually wanted to hire an employee.

You still can. Until then the account runs with me, with tracking, test log and playbook, and whoever joins you later takes over a running system instead of an empty budget. I work through my own company, from the day the access is in place.

What do you not do?

Graphic design and video editing outside the Ad Lab bundle, social media management, organic content and SEO. For those I refer you to people who do them well.

Book a Discovery Call →

Ask the hard questions. You will get clear answers, without jargon.

10 Two paths forward

If you want to know whether this fits, the call is the fastest way to find out.

Up to 45 minutes. I ask you the questions no agency website answers: what your marketing actually needs, what is measured today, and what "success" would mean for you. You leave with a clearer brief, even if you then hire someone else.

Path 01

Book a fit call (up to 45 minutes)

If you're a fit, we talk about service options, deliverables and pricing.

Discovery Call →

Path 02

Read first

Campaign management in detail, or the No Guesswork Growth Protocol with its twelve weeks and seven deliverables.

Read about campaign management → Read about positioning →