Meet Gorav: 8+ Years and $15M+ in Ad Spend Behind Every Campaign We Run

I've been running paid media for more than eight years, and in that time I've managed over $15M in ad spend across Meta, Google, and the marketplace ad platforms. The single biggest lesson from all of it is that campaigns don't fail because of bad targeting. They fail because nobody built the system underneath them.

Most brands come to us with the same story: ads worked for a while, then costs crept up and returns quietly slipped. Nine times out of ten, nothing broke — the account simply ran out of fresh creative, and the algorithm started paying more to show tired ads to the same audiences.

So the first thing I look at isn't the targeting. It's funnel architecture: what a cold audience actually sees first, what happens between that first impression and the checkout page, and where people are dropping out. If that structure is wrong, no amount of bid tuning will save the account.

The second thing is a creative testing system. Not one-off tests, but a repeatable pipeline — a steady flow of new angles, hooks, and formats, tested against a control, with clear rules for when a winner scales and when a loser gets cut. Brands that run this consistently rarely have a 'the ads stopped working' month.

Third is measurement you can actually trust. Platform-reported ROAS and what your bank account says are two different numbers, and the gap between them has only widened since the privacy changes. We build reporting around blended returns and contribution margin, so scaling decisions are made on real economics rather than an attribution model's best guess.

Managing that much spend also teaches you restraint. The instinct when something works is to double the budget overnight — and that's exactly how a stable account gets destabilised. Scaling is a series of controlled increases, with enough time between them for the data to tell you whether performance held.

For our clients, this means paid media isn't a set of campaigns handed over and left running. It's an ongoing operating system: funnel, creative pipeline, measurement, and a disciplined scaling cadence — reviewed continuously, with someone accountable for the numbers.

If your ad spend is growing faster than your returns, the fix usually isn't a new audience or a new platform. It's the system around the ads. That's the part we build.