Meta and Google Ads for startups

Google Search captures demand that already exists: someone typed what they want into a search box, and the job is to be the best answer to that specific query. Meta creates and shapes demand: nobody is scrolling their feed looking for you, so the creative has to earn the attention first. They are not competing channels, they are different stages of the same journey.

Split them across two agencies, or across an agency and a freelancer, and both will optimise their own last click. Meta lifts branded search volume that Google then claims; Google captures intent that Meta built. Each report looks fine on its own and the pair of them do not add up to what the business saw. Running them together is not a packaging convenience, it is the only way the attribution question has a sensible answer.

Not more spend. The first thing is a measurement layer that agrees with reality: conversion tracking that fires once per real outcome, a definition of what counts as a conversion that does not change silently underneath you, and a way to reconcile what the platform claims against what the business booked or shipped.

That is unglamorous and it is where most of the recoverable performance is. One of our own case studies is a campaign sitting at 3.4x its cost target that turned out to be a tracking bug, not a campaign failure. Nobody would have found it by making the ads better.

Riibon Intelligence watches every campaign daily, holds a baseline for each metric so an anomaly is measured against that account's own history rather than a rule of thumb, verifies platform claims against outcomes recorded elsewhere, and remembers every decision and what happened after it.

What it does not do is spend money. It does not raise a budget, launch a campaign, or change a bid strategy on its own. It surfaces what it found, with the evidence attached, and a person decides. An agency that lets the model act unsupervised is selling you the risk, not the leverage.

Scale is from £2,500 a month, for venture-backed startups and established brands, with the full system running across every channel that fits from the first month. The fee rises £250 a month only in a month where your profit grew by more than the step, so a flat month costs what the previous one did.

Fees exclude advertising spend, which you pay the platforms directly. There is no percentage of spend, which is the incentive structure that quietly rewards an agency for spending more of your money, and no setup fee.