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Meta Ads & TikTok Ads · DTC brands spending $5k–50k/month

Every platform claims the same sale. Only one of them can be right.

We run paid social for direct-to-consumer brands and report on blended MER and contribution margin — the numbers your accountant already recognises. If our work doesn't reach your bank account, it didn't happen.

Request an account audit Run your own numbers
Current load
Accounts under management
30
Monthly ad spend managed
$150,000
Buyers on the team
5
Minimum ad spend
$5,000 / mo
Markets
US · UK · EU
MERCURY PLUS LTD England & Wales no. 17391914 Verify ↗ Meta Ads · TikTok Ads Warsaw · London
The attribution gap

Add up what every platform says it earned you. The total is bigger than your business.

Meta counts a sale. TikTok counts the same sale. So does Google, and so does your email tool. Each one reports a healthy return, every channel looks like it deserves more budget, and the money never turns up in the P&L.

There is only one honest denominator: total revenue over total spend. Put your numbers in and see how far apart the two stories are. This runs entirely in your browser — nothing is sent to us.

Definitions

  • Blended MER — total store revenue ÷ total ad spend. The whole business, not one channel.
  • Break-even MER — 1 ÷ gross margin. Below it you are buying revenue at a loss.
  • Platform claim — reported ad revenue as a share of what the store actually made.

Four inputs is enough to find the gap; it isn't enough to fix it. On an audit call we add the new-versus-returning split, post-purchase survey responses as a second attribution source, and cost per new customer — which is the number that decides whether you can afford to scale.

Gap calculator Runs in your browser
$
×
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%
Blended MERWhat your business actually returns per $1 of ad spend —
Break-even MERSet by your gross margin, not by the platform —
Contribution after ad spendGross profit minus what you paid the platforms —
Platforms claimShare of your total revenue the ad accounts take credit for —

Enter your numbers above.

Why accounts stall

Three failures, and none of them are the ones agencies pitch against.

Measurement

Budget follows credit, not causation

Platforms optimise for outcomes they can claim. A seven-day-click, one-day-view window makes retargeting look extraordinary, because it is counting people who had already decided. Prospecting looks broken by comparison.

So budget drifts toward the audience that was going to buy anyway. Reported ROAS climbs while new-customer volume flatlines. The account looks like it is improving right up to the month revenue stops growing.

Creative

Creative decay gets misdiagnosed as audience fatigue

When CPA rises, most accounts respond by rebuilding audiences and restructuring campaigns. Under Advantage+ and Smart Performance that is largely theatre — the targeting was never the lever.

The variable that still moves is the first three seconds. An account starved of new hooks plateaus no matter how the campaigns are arranged, and no amount of restructuring produces a new idea.

Scale

The wall at roughly $10k a month

Below it, one or two winning ads can carry an entire account. Above it they cannot, because the audience that responded to them has been reached. What worked stops working faster than most brands expect.

Getting through needs a production system rather than a lucky ad. Most brands hit this wall, blame the platform, and cut budget at precisely the wrong moment.

First 90 days

Measurement first. Creative second. Budget last.

The order matters. Scaling an account you cannot measure only makes the mistake more expensive.

Week 1

Audit and measurement

We rebuild your reporting before touching a campaign: blended MER, contribution margin, cost per new customer, and a post-purchase survey so attribution has a second source that platforms cannot inflate. You keep this whether or not we go further together.

You receive
  • Written account audit
  • Reporting sheet you own
  • Post-purchase survey, live
Week 2

Structural reset

Consolidate what is fragmented, retire what cannot be measured, set budget floors so tests are given enough signal to resolve. This almost always means fewer campaigns than you are running now.

You receive
  • Rebuilt account structure
  • Testing budget floors
  • Naming and tracking convention
Weeks 3–6

Creative engine

Hook-first testing at a fixed weekly volume. Concepts are judged on hold rate and cost per incremental purchase, never on engagement. Winners get iterated into variants rather than replaced, so a working idea is used until it is genuinely exhausted.

You receive
  • Weekly concept batch
  • Hook and hold-rate teardown
  • Iteration map for winners
Week 7 onward

Scale on margin

Budget increases are tied to contribution margin holding, not to platform ROAS looking good. When margin compresses we slow down and say so in that week's report, rather than at the end of the quarter.

You receive
  • Weekly written report
  • Monthly review call
  • One named buyer on the account

We publish results the way your finance team reads them.

Our contracts don't let us name clients, and a screenshot of an ads manager proves nothing anyway — anyone can pick a favourable window.

So every result we publish carries the same four things. If a number can't survive that format, it doesn't go on this page.

Measurement basis

Which number moved, and how it was calculated. Blended MER and contribution margin, not platform-attributed ROAS.

Window

Exact start and end dates. No cherry-picked fortnight standing in for a quarter.

Starting position

Where the account was before we touched it, including what was already working.

What we changed

The specific decisions, so you can judge whether they would apply to your account.

Illustrative — not a client result A worked example, so you can see the method before you hire anyone
Starting point

A brand spending $12,000 a month with a reported 3.8× ROAS across Meta and TikTok, against $31,000 of store revenue at 62% gross margin. The ad accounts claim they produced $45,600 — 147% of everything the business sold. That is the gap, stated plainly.

Blended MER 2.58 Break-even 1.61 Contribution $7,220
What an audit finds

Most of the budget sits where credit is cheapest to claim — retargeting and catalogue placements aimed at people already on the site. Cost per new customer has never been measured, so nobody noticed it rising while blended ROAS improved.

Real questionWhat does a first-time buyer cost?
What changes

Retargeting is capped at what incremental testing justifies. The freed budget funds prospecting and a fixed weekly volume of new hooks. Reporting switches to contribution margin, so a week that looks worse on the platform dashboard but better in the bank is correctly read as progress.

Judged onCost per new customerHold rate at 3s
Where it lands

Spend rises to $18,000 against $52,000 revenue. Blended MER improves modestly — 2.58 to 2.89 — but because spend grew into profitable territory rather than defending a flattering ratio, contribution roughly doubles. Reported ROAS, notably, went down.

Blended MER 2.89 Contribution $14,240 Spend +50%

These figures are a worked example chosen to show how the method reasons, not the outcome of any client engagement. Published client results will appear in this section under the four-field standard above.

Engagement

Who this works for, and who it doesn't.

Minimum ad spend

$5,000/ month

Below this, the testing volume needed to find a winning creative costs more than the account can carry — you would be paying us to guess. Management fees are quoted per account after the audit, against scope and spend.

Platforms
Meta · TikTok
Markets
US · UK · EU
Account ownership
Yours
Reporting
Weekly, written
In scope
  • Meta and TikTok campaign management
  • Measurement build: MER, contribution margin, cost per new customer
  • Post-purchase survey as a second attribution source
  • Hook-first creative testing and iteration
  • Weekly written reporting and a monthly call
  • Briefing your existing creative team or freelancers
Not in scope
  • Organic content calendars and community management
  • Influencer sourcing and negotiation
  • Google, Amazon and email as primary channels
  • Video production from scratch — we test and brief, we don't film
  • Guaranteed ROAS figures. Nobody can honestly promise one
Before you ask

The questions that decide it.

Who owns the ad accounts and the data?

You do, always. We work inside your Business Manager and your ad accounts, under your own billing. Pixels, creative, audiences, historical performance data and the reporting sheet we build all stay with you.

If we stop working together you lose nothing but us. An agency that needs to hold your account hostage is telling you something about its confidence.

Can you guarantee a specific ROAS?

No. Anyone guaranteeing a return figure is either guessing or planning to optimise for a number that flatters the report without paying your bills — and as this page argues at length, those are easy to manufacture.

What we commit to is the measurement, the testing volume, and telling you early when something isn't working.

We already have a creative team. Does that conflict?

It helps. We brief your team or freelancers, test what they produce, and send back specific direction — which hooks held attention, where viewers dropped, what to make more of. Brands with their own creative capacity usually move faster, because the bottleneck in paid social is almost always volume of ideas.

What happens in week one?

We rebuild your measurement before changing any campaign: blended MER, contribution margin, cost per new customer, and a live post-purchase survey. You get a written audit and a reporting sheet you own outright.

It is deliberately the least reversible-looking week of the engagement and the most useful one, because everything afterwards depends on trusting the numbers.

Do you work with brands spending under $5,000 a month?

Not currently. Finding a winning creative takes a certain volume of tests, and below roughly $5,000 a month there isn't enough spend to resolve them — you would be paying for opinions instead of data. We would rather say that now than three months in.

Which markets and languages do you buy in?

United States, United Kingdom and the European Union. Ad copy and creative direction are produced in English; for EU markets we work with your localisation or brief native-language creators.

Account audit

Send us the numbers. We'll tell you if there's a gap.

We reply within one business day. If you're not a fit — wrong stage, wrong channel, spend too low — we say so in the first reply rather than booking a call to say it slowly.

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England & Wales no. 17391914
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