Paid search, paid social and retargeting run from a single model, with conversion work on the pages they land on — so budget moves toward whatever is returning, rather than toward whoever reports most confidently.
| CHANNEL | MONTHLY SPEND | SHARE OF BUDGET | REVENUE |
|---|---|---|---|
| Paid search (PPC) | AED 150k |
43%
|
AED 700k |
| Paid social | AED 120k |
34%
|
AED 600k |
| Retargeting & remarketing | AED 80k |
23%
|
AED 500k |
| Blended | AED 350,000 |
100%
|
AED 1.8 Million |
"Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half."
Many businesses fail to set up proper attribution to see which channels bring in actual revenue.
Focusing on likes, impressions, or clicks instead of profit and customer lifetime value.
Reaching a massive audience where only a small fraction is actually interested in buying.
Review your data to see which platforms drive real sales and cut the ones that only show vanity metrics.
Use analytics tools to follow the customer journey from the first click to the final purchase.
Identify the small group of customers who bring in most of your profit and target people like them.
No channel gets a fixed allocation. Each has a job, a cost-per-acquisition target and a ceiling beyond which it stops being worth funding — and budget moves between them monthly.
Conversion rate optimisation sits outside that split. It takes no media budget and improves the return on all three at once, which is why it runs continuously rather than as a project.
4 pillars of growth
ROAS ignores what it costs you to fulfil the order. Two campaigns at 4× can contribute wildly different amounts once cost of goods, shipping and fees come out — so contribution margin is the number we actually optimise against.
This is a typical order broken down. Everything we do is aimed at the last bar.
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) isn't just your ad spend divided by sales. True performance marketing factors in software, agency overhead, and team salaries to reveal the real cost per acquired customer.
To find your CAC, use this basic equation:
Imagine a digital ecommerce brand running a monthly performance marketing campaign on Meta and Google Ads:
This means the business spends AED 183.50 to acquire every single new paying customer through its performance channels.
Performance marketing fails quietly when nobody looks at it between reporting cycles. Here is what actually happens, and how often.
Roughly half of what we try does nothing. Knowing which half is the entire point — an agency that only reports wins is an agency that isn't testing much. This is a real month from a live account.
| Test | Channel | Result | Effect |
|---|---|---|---|
| Value-based bidding on margin | Paid search | Won | −18% CPA |
| Customer footage vs studio creative | Paid social | Won | +31% CTR |
| Broad match alongside Performance Max | Paid search | Lost | Reverted |
| Short vs long landing page | CRO | Won | +14% CVR |
| 1% vs 3% lookalike audiences | Paid social | Flat | No change |
| Free delivery threshold at AED 150 | CRO | Won | +9% AOV |
| Dynamic vs static retargeting creative | Retargeting | Lost | Higher CPA |
The ones that come up on nearly every first call, answered honestly.
A channel agency optimises its own channel and reports well on it. That's rational — it's what they're measured on — but it means nobody owns the trade-off between channels. We manage the whole budget against one number, which sometimes means arguing for less spend somewhere we're being paid to run.
Cost of goods, average order value, shipping cost and return rate. That's usually the hardest part of onboarding, because the numbers often live in four places and disagree with each other. We'll help reconcile them, and we've done it enough times not to be precious about it.
Included. Splitting it out creates the wrong incentive — a media team paid only on media has no reason to argue that the real problem is your checkout. Testing runs on a weekly cycle alongside the campaigns, and wins get reported the same way.
Yes. On paid social creative is the targeting, so treating it as somebody else's job doesn't work. We produce static and short-form video in-house and test it on a weekly cycle.
We don't trust any single platform's own reporting, because every platform claims the same conversion. We reconcile against actual orders in your systems and run geo or holdout tests on the major channels quarterly to check what's genuinely incremental.
The minimum media budget depends on the results you are looking for, and the history of ROAS in the same industry. For example, if you want total sales to be minimum AED 50,000 with average order value of AED 250, you need 200 orders in total. And the historical data for the same industry suggests that cost per order in the industry is on average AED 50. The total marketing budget suggested will be AED 10,000.
Often, and sometimes that's the right answer. We can take the model and reporting layer and leave channel execution where it is. It's a harder engagement to run, but if your paid social agency is genuinely good there's no sense replacing them to prove a point.
Send us your numbers and we'll come back with the channel mix we'd recommend, the CAC ceiling each one has to hit, and what the contribution looks like at your current budget.
OR EMAIL info@alnoormedia.ae
