Paid social that stops being a hobby.
Run Digital plans, builds and runs paid social for Utah businesses in ad accounts registered to your business, with the pixel, the audiences and the creative library staying yours. If the channel is not working for your offer, we would rather tell you than keep spending your budget to find out slowly.
Three things we will put in writing.
Every agency says they are different. These are the three we will be held to, on every engagement, from the first month.
The accountability factor
A standing meeting cadence, real project management, and deliverables with dates on them. You always know what is live, what is being tested and what got switched off.
You decide if we earn our seat at your table every month. There is no contract asking you not to.
A customized solution
Your audience, your margins and your creative decide the plan. A campaign structure that worked for a different business in a different market is not a strategy.
Ask for something specific and the answer is usually yes, built for you rather than pulled off a shelf.
Actual technicality
Not a sales rep, then a success manager, then an account manager relaying your question to someone who can answer it.
You talk to the people in the ads manager.
Paid social rarely fails on targeting.
When a paid social account stops working, the diagnosis is almost never the one people reach for. It is not usually the targeting and it is not usually the bidding. It is that the same audience has now seen the same three ads forty times, and the response was always going to fall off a cliff.
The second most common cause is measurement. The pixel fires on the wrong event, or on a thank-you page nobody reaches, and the account optimises confidently toward something that is not a customer.
Both are fixable, and neither is fixed by raising the budget. The arithmetic below shows you the first one in about ten seconds.
What a working account looks like
- Creative refreshed before the response drops, not after
- An audience big enough to absorb the budget
- Conversion events that mean a real customer
- Offers tested separately from the creative
- Landing pages built for the ad that sent the click
- Reporting that names revenue, not reach
What we usually find instead
- Three ads that have been live since launch
- A budget pushed into an audience too small to hold it
- The pixel optimising toward page views
- Creative and offer changed in the same week, so neither is learnable
- Every ad pointing at the home page
- A dashboard full of impressions and engagement
The division nobody does before raising the budget.
Three numbers from your own ads manager will tell you whether your account has a creative problem, an audience problem or neither. There is no benchmark in this and no assumed result.
How often does one person see you?
Take these three numbers straight out of your ads manager. Nothing is assumed and nothing is benchmarked. It is division, and it explains most of what goes wrong with paid social.
Your numbers.
The reading below the number is our judgement, not a published finding, and your market may behave differently. The arithmetic above is just arithmetic, and it is usually the thing nobody checked before the budget went up.
You can rent the work. Never rent the ad account.
Hiring an agency to run the ads is normal. That is not the problem. The problem is whose Business Manager the account sits in while they do it.
An ad account carries years of learning that is not visible and not portable if it is in someone else’s name. The pixel history, the custom audiences, the lookalikes, the creative library, the spend history that earns you trust with the platform. Start again in a new account and you start the learning phase again too.
We build in a Business Manager registered to your business and take agency access to it, never the other way round. Fire us on a Friday and the account keeps running, because nothing of yours was ever in our name.
In your name, from day one
- Your Business Manager, with you as owner
- The ad account and its full spend history
- The pixel and its conversion history
- Custom audiences and lookalikes
- Every piece of creative we produce, in source
- Conversion tracking in your own analytics
What you find out you were renting
- A sub-account inside the agency's Business Manager
- Spend history you cannot take with you
- A pixel that stays behind and takes its learning with it
- Audiences that vanish at handover
- Creative you only ever received as an exported file
- Tracking wired into their analytics property
Do you want to manage five marketers?
Paid social done properly is a media buyer, a creative producer, a copywriter, someone who can wire up tracking, and someone senior deciding what is worth testing this quarter. Hire that in-house and you are recruiting five specialists and carrying the payroll before a single ad goes live.
We built our careers inside in-house teams before we built this one. Brian has twenty years in agencies. Quinn came up in-house at large publishers. That is the team you are renting time on, without the hiring risk or the learning curve.
Building it in-house
Five hires- Recruiting, onboarding and managing every one of them
- Salaries, benefits, payroll tax and software seats
- Your time spent managing marketers instead of running the business
- The learning curve, paid for in wasted ad spend
- Creative output that stops when one person is on holiday
Run as your team
One monthly fee- Media buying, creative, copy and tracking covered from day one
- A flat package price, not a percentage of your ad spend
- Thirty years of combined experience on the account
- No contract, no notice period, no hiring risk
- Everything built stays in accounts you own
Two of the five seats you would otherwise be recruiting for.
A small state where the audience runs out fast.
Utah is a particular problem for paid social, and it is a maths problem. The addressable audience for a local service business here is small enough that you can saturate it in weeks. Every figure below is published and linked.
of Utah businesses are small businesses, 371,569 of them. Most are competing for attention from the same finite pool of people you are.
SBA Office of Advocacy, 2025population growth over the past decade against 6.2% nationally, second fastest of any state. New people who have never seen your ads is the one thing Utah keeps producing.
USAFacts, US Census dataof Utah employees work at a small business, about 690,069 people. In a market this concentrated, being remembered matters more than being seen once.
SBA Office of Advocacy, 2025businesses in one state. If your creative looks like everybody else's, the targeting will not save it.
SBA Office of Advocacy, 2025This is why the frequency arithmetic above matters more here than it would in a bigger market. A budget that would be modest in Phoenix can saturate a Wasatch Front audience in a month, and the account looks like it stopped working when what actually happened is that it ran out of people.
Eight disciplines of paid social advertising.
This is the list you would be hiring five people to cover.
Meta ads account, pixel and Conversions API
A Business Manager in your name, a correctly configured pixel and conversion events that mean a customer rather than a page view.
Ad creative production
Static, video and UGC-style ads made to be tested, in enough volume that refreshing does not mean starting from nothing.
Facebook and Instagram offer testing
The offer moves the numbers more than the targeting does. We test it separately so you learn which one actually changed the result.
Audience targeting and lookalike audiences
Cold, warm and retargeting sized against your budget, so you are not pushing a month of spend into an audience that cannot absorb a week of it.
Landing pages
The page the click lands on, built for that specific ad. The cheapest conversion work in paid social happens after the click.
Remarketing that is not creepy
Sequenced follow-up to people who already engaged, capped so it reminds rather than harasses.
Creative refresh cadence
New work shipped before the response drops, on a schedule, rather than as an emergency when the cost per result doubles.
Reporting on ROAS and revenue
What the channel produced and what it cost. No impression-share victory laps and no engagement-rate theatre.
The kind of work that stops a scroll.
Creative is the variable with the most leverage in paid social, and it is the one most accounts run out of first.
The sixty second cut, the way most people actually watch it.
Things we give away.
We would rather be useful before you hire us than persuasive. Take any of these whether or not we ever work together.
Ad account audit
We look at your structure, your pixel, your frequency and your creative, and write down what is costing you. Yours to keep or to hand to another agency.
FreeTap to review cards and stands
Physical NFC cards and counter stands that send customers straight to your review page. We print them and send them to you.
FreeCreative brief templates
The briefs we work from, so your team can produce testable ads without paying anyone to write the brief.
FreeWebsite migrations
Stuck on a platform you do not own? We will move the site for free. Getting you onto your own infrastructure is the point.
The first ninety days.
Paid social rewards a boring, consistent process far more than it rewards cleverness. This is the sequence.
Audit and accounts
We read the account, the pixel, the frequency and the creative history, then tell you what is broken. If the Business Manager is not in your name, fixing that is step one.
Everything moves into your nameFix the measurement
Conversion events that mean a customer, wired into your own analytics. Optimising toward the wrong event wastes more budget than bad targeting ever will.
In your accountsBuild a creative bank
Enough tested concepts that refreshing is a scheduled task rather than a panic. Offer and creative tested separately so you learn which one moved.
Size the audience to the budget
Spend matched to how many people can actually absorb it, so the account is not burning the same audience out by week three.
Report against revenue
What the channel produced, what it cost, and what we are changing about the parts that did not work.
The findings get written down. You keep them either way.
Thirty-five clients. Four years. One roof.
Those are counts, not projections. We have not put a return on ad spend on this page, because the honest answer is that your offer decides most of it and we have not seen your offer yet. The arithmetic above uses your numbers instead of ours.
If you want to see specific client results, ask on the call and we will pull real reporting rather than a designed graphic.
Salt Lake, Utah County, and the rest of the Wasatch Front.
We run paid social for businesses in Salt Lake City, Provo, Orem, Lehi, Ogden, West Jordan, St. George and across the state. Utah audiences are small, tightly networked and quick to recognise an ad they have seen before, which changes both the creative cadence and how much budget a campaign can absorb.
If the honest answer is that paid social is the wrong channel for your offer, we will say that on the call rather than after a quarter of spend.
Paid social creates demand. Something has to catch it.
Social is the channel that reaches people before they were looking. What happens after the click decides whether that was worth anything.
Organic social
Builds the proof that makes every other channel cheaper to convert.
Email and SMS
The cheapest channel you own outright, and the one most often left running on autopilot.
Marketing automation
Does the follow up that gets skipped when the week gets busy.
Paid social questions we get every week.
You do. The Business Manager is registered to your business and we take agency access to it. That means the pixel history, the audiences and the spend history stay with you. If an agency wants to run your ads inside their Business Manager, ask what happens to the pixel when you leave.
A flat monthly package rather than a percentage, with current pricing on the packages page. A percentage fee quietly rewards an agency for spending more of your money, which is not an incentive you want on the other side of the table.
Enough to get a readable result, and not so much that you saturate your audience in three weeks. Use the calculator above with your own audience size. In most Utah markets the ceiling arrives sooner than people expect.
Usually four to six weeks to get a clean read, assuming the tracking is right on day one. Anything faster is noise. If it is not working by then we will tell you what we think is wrong rather than quietly rotating the creative.
Yes, and in enough volume to actually test. Creative is the variable with the most leverage in paid social, and an account that cannot refresh is an account with a countdown on it. You keep everything we produce, in source.
Meta, TikTok, LinkedIn and YouTube, chosen by where your customers actually are rather than by which one is fashionable. For most Utah service businesses that is a shorter list than the pitch deck usually implies.
Then we will say so on the call. Some offers do not survive an interruption channel, and selling you a campaign anyway would just be an expensive way for both of us to find out.
There is no contract, so you leave whenever you want and take the account, the pixel and the creative with you. We would rather tell you in month three than keep billing you.
Start with the free ad account audit.
We will look at your structure, your pixel, your frequency and your creative, write down what we find, and tell you whether paid social is worth your budget right now. You keep the audit either way. Prices are published, so you can see what this costs before you speak to anyone.