Your ads may not be the problem. Your funnel is.

Sounds strange? Let me show you what it means — on a live project, with numbers straight from the account.

And halfway through this page, you'll estimate how much your own funnel is losing. Free — and without a "now hop on a call with our manager."

But first, one question.

Are you spending $10,000+ a month on paid traffic?

Then this page is about you.

And you'll recognize at least one of these.

CAC keeps climbing — and nobody can clearly explain why.

ROAS keeps sliding, quarter after quarter.

You tried raising the budget — it only got worse: more money out, same number of customers in.

The campaigns look fine. The reports arrive on time. And the metric you answer for hasn't moved.

Recognize yourself in even one of those?

Then keep reading — this was written about your ad account.

Now let's be honest: "reports on time" was never what you wanted.

You wanted to hit the gas again — raise the budget and watch revenue grow, not CAC. Open the dashboard in the morning without that knot in your stomach. And find out, once and for all, where the funnel actually breaks — instead of running the tenth round of "new creative tests."

Chances are, you've already tried to fix this. More than once.

You switched agencies. The new one promised to "lower CAC and scale" — just as confidently as the last one.

You paid a retainer. Every month. Reports, calls, slide decks. Plenty of activity. No results.

Maybe you even hired someone to "fix the ads" — and they changed your button colors and sent an invoice.

So why — after all that money and all those "experts" — has nothing worked?

The short answer: because every one of them prescribed treatment without a diagnosis.

Let me show you what that means. And why none of this is your fault.

Remember this line — it's the most important one on this page: diagnosis first, money later.

Michael has spent 10 years in performance marketing — running ad accounts for companies investing anywhere from $10,000 to $20M a month in paid acquisition. Behind the team: 250 active clients and 500+ ad accounts torn down. But one story explains our approach better than any credentials.

The story of a project where we could see everything — every dollar, from click to subscription. I'll tell it straight. Including the parts people usually hide.

Every third sale came out of nowhere

We were sitting on the data of Duck.Design — a design subscription service — unable to answer the budget owner's simplest question.

Which campaigns bring in paying customers?

Funnel tracking accuracy: 64%. Every third sale couldn't be tied to a source.

Ads were running. Leads were coming in. Reports looked respectable.

And decisions about hundreds of thousands of dollars were being made, essentially, blind.

Let me explain.

The ad account looked fine. The metric didn't move

On paper, Duck.Design had everything in order.

A working product. A budget. A steady flow of leads. A CPL any agency would happily put in its monthly report.

And growth had stalled.

The familiar carousel was already spinning.

"It's the ads — let's launch new creatives."

"It's the audiences — let's broaden targeting."

"It's the bids — let's optimize."

All by the book. All perfectly logical.

Sound familiar?

That's exactly where most companies spending $10k+ are standing right now.

Ads are one link out of six. The leak wasn't there

When we laid out the whole chain, it became clear: the problem was never the ads.

Campaigns were delivering cheap leads — but nobody knew which of them actually bought the subscription.

Different segments were landing on identical pages, reading identical words.

People didn't understand how a design subscription differs from an agency or a freelancer. The page never told them.

And a third of the sales data never made it back into marketing.

That's why nothing done to the ads ever worked: they were fixing the wrong link.

Let's put that in dollars.

Say your budget is $25,000 a month. And somewhere in the chain, TBC: share from database, placeholder 20% is leaking.

That was last month. And the month before.

And it will be next month — until the leak is found.

Not "someday." Right now, while you're reading this, people are clicking your ads — and some of those clicks are falling into a hole you've already paid for.

You'll estimate your own number in a minute. First — how this hole actually gets found.

We stopped treating without a diagnosis

So we flipped the order of work.

We stopped going into the ad account first.

We started with a diagnosis of the entire chain: where is the most money being lost — ads, offer, landing page, tracking, qualification, or sales?

Found the main constraint. Fixed it. Moved to the next one.

Not "more activity everywhere." Find the bottleneck — and hit only that.

Sounds simple?

Look at what it did in numbers. They're below — and they're verifiable.

Nothing worked in isolation

First, we honestly went through everything that usually gets sold as "the solution."

We optimized campaigns — CPL dropped, subscriptions didn't budge: cheap leads weren't paying customers.

We refreshed creatives — clicks grew, revenue didn't.

It only started working when we went through the chain end to end. In the right order.

64% → 92%: we could finally see

The first shift happened before revenue even moved.

And for the first time, we could see.

Which campaigns bring paying customers. Which bring pretty leads that go nowhere. Where exactly people drop off after the click.

From there, it was just fixing — one bottleneck at a time.

What happened to the money — in a minute.

First, why you're in this same situation. And why it's not your fault.

The metric you pay for belongs to no one

Here's how the market works.

The agency owns the ads. The studio owns the landing page. The analyst owns tracking. Sales owns the leads.

Everyone does "their part." Everyone can report that their part is working.

For years you've been told: "you need better ad management" and "you need more traffic."

That's the big lie.

Not because ads don't matter. But because ads are one link out of six — and most of the time, the leak isn't there.

A retainer pays for activity. Not results

The real enemy is the retainer model.

Compare for yourself.

You keep paying — they keep reporting.

And it's not just you. Here's what owners are posting on forums right now:

Sound familiar?

Then you already understand why we structure our work differently: diagnosis first, money later.

What it did in dollars

Once the Duck.Design chain was fixed in the right order, results came fast.

The paid system scaled to $132,000/month in ad spend at $488,000/month in subscription revenue.

Not because of some "secret campaign setup."

Because of leaks — found and closed, one after another.

Now someone else's business and someone else's money

The fair question you're asking right now: "Anyone can do it for their own company. What about someone else's?"

Different businesses. Different funnels. One method: find the biggest revenue constraint — fix it — move to the next one.

And here's what we didn't expect ourselves.

Clients tell us the biggest value isn't even the numbers.

The biggest value is that for the first time in years they can see through their own funnel: which campaigns bring buyers, and which bring pretty leads that go nowhere.

That gives back control.

And it removes the fear that keeps companies from hitting the gas — even where they already could.

Now it's your turn to look.

But a tracking gap is only one of the possible leaks.

Where is your funnel leaking?

The Leak Report: how the diagnosis works

That's why we packaged our approach into a standalone product.

The Leak Report™ — a diagnostic for paid-funnel revenue leaks.

This is not a "free audit" that ends with a retainer pitch.

And it's not an agency offering to "run your ads." It's a diagnostic protocol: first we locate the leak in your data — and only propose fixing it once the finding is confirmed.

We couldn't find anyone on the market selling the diagnosis separately from the treatment. Everyone sells "treatment" upfront — months of it.

We do the opposite: diagnosis first, money later.

Here's how the protocol works.

Building this protocol took 7 years, 250+ projects and 500+ dissected ad accounts. Including the trial-and-error you just read about, on our own group's project.

You don't have to walk that road.

On their own, by trial and error, companies hunt for their leak for months — paying for every month of the search with burned budget.

The protocol takes 7–14 business days.

What's inside the diagnostic

Don't take our word for it.

What it costs

First — what's included.

If the diagnostic gave you just one thing — the exact answer to why your ads won't scale — would that be worth half an hour of your time?

And what if all it did was save you from the next $5,000/month retainer that won't work either?

And to be blunt: we don't take everyone.

If you don't have 2–3 months of data or active paid traffic — we'll tell you at the start of the call, not the end.

We only take on further work when the leak is confirmed by data. That's exactly why we can guarantee a metric on the sprint: we don't promise everyone — we choose the companies where we can see what to fix.