Where the money leaks, and the five-step sequence that turns paid ads from a monthly write-off into a channel that pays.

Paid media rarely fails because the platforms don’t work; it fails because the account was built wrong before the first rand went out.

We asked Metis founder Chantelle Bowyer, who’s spent almost 16 years auditing SA paid media accounts, how founders should build an account that actually performs.

Before you pick a platform, work out which job you’re doing. Capturing demand means being found by people already searching, which lives on search; generating demand means convincing people who aren’t looking yet, which lives on social and video. Chase the existing demand first: it converts faster and costs less.

Here’s how to know if you should run search ads or social ads first.

With the channel settled, get the structure right. Bidding on your own company name is cheap and converts well, but mixed in with everything else it flatters your numbers and hides what the rest of your spend is doing. Separate them, and you can finally see which half is working.

Here’s how to set up brand vs non-brand Google campaigns.

Clean structure still produces rubbish if the platform doesn’t know what a good lead looks like. The fix is feeding your real sales outcomes back into Google and Meta, so the algorithm optimises for buyers instead of form-fills. Until you do, you’re paying the platform to find you more of the wrong people.

Here’s how to stop paying for junk leads on Google Ads.

You don’t need an agency to find most of the waste. Half an hour with your search terms, your conversion tracking and your campaign structure will surface the obvious leaks. Do it regularly, and small problems stop compounding into a quarter of wasted spend.

Here’s how to audit your own paid media account in 30 minutes.

Only once the basics are running does an agency make sense. Below roughly R15k a month, there isn’t enough data for anyone to optimise, and the fee eats spend that should be going to ads. Hire when your budget is at the floor, your tracking works, and you can name what success looks like.

Here’s how to know if you’re ready to hire an ad agency.

Work the five in order and paid media stops being a monthly gamble: the right channel, a structure that tells the truth, a platform trained on real buyers, and a habit of catching waste before it compounds.

These five steps are drawn from Paid Ads 101, Chantelle’s full masterclass inside the Founder Collab. The full session goes deep on the waste she finds in SA accounts and the structural fixes that turn it around:

You’ll also get access to 40+ other masterclasses from SA founders and operators on sales, fundraising, UX, automations and more inside The Founder Collab.

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