We Take Real Ad Accounts Apart And Print What They Say
Quarterly intelligence on paid acquisition, written from real ad accounts. We take them apart, report what the numbers did, and print the source beside every one of them. Not tips. Measurements.
Four things, and nothing else.
Most industry reports are a survey of opinions with a logo on the front. This one only contains things that were measured, and it says who measured them.
The account read
What the last quarter actually did inside the accounts we can see. Spend, cost, and where the money moved.
The ad library sweep
What the biggest advertisers changed this quarter, and what the change tells you they learned.
Benchmarks that moved
Cost per acquisition, cost per lead, creative lifespan. Directional, sourced, and never flattering.
The compliance watch
What the platforms and the regulator started enforcing. That is not admin. It is your account.
The State of Paid Acquisition
Everyone selling marketing talks about the size of the market they sell into. Almost nobody checks how many businesses in it can actually afford to advertise. We did, using public census and industry data, and the answer reframes who your competition really is.
$180,000 a year on Meta is 2.3× the entire average small business advertising budget.
Across every channel, not just paid social. So a business running $15,000 a month on one platform is not spending like a small business at all — it is spending like something several times larger.
Why it matters: if you are at that level, the operators you think you are competing with mostly are not in the auction with you. And if you are not there yet, the honest question is not which agency to hire. It is whether the economics support that spend at all.
Source: Intuit Small Business Advertising Trends, 2025
Take a category apart and the average business inside it turns over less than $400,000.
Health is the worked example here, because its segment data is public and unusually complete. Every category we have been able to check the same way has come back the same shape. Segment averages, from the most recent industry data available:
Work backwards from a normal marketing budget — ten to fifteen per cent of revenue, with sixty to seventy per cent of that going to the primary channel — and the practical revenue floor for $15,000 a month on Meta is somewhere around $1.7M to $2M.
Why it matters: the qualifying filter was never the category. It is $2M and up, and that removes the large majority of every segment in every category we have looked at.
Sources: Mindbody Beauty & Wellness Revenue Benchmarks 2024 · IBISWorld Australia · ICF Global Coaching Study 2025
Revenue density varies by a factor of seven between segments of one category.
Segment to segment, the share of businesses clearing $1M in revenue ranges from roughly one in fourteen at the thin end to more than half at the dense end. They sit under one category heading. They are not remotely the same market.
Why it matters: most operators are competing hardest in one of the thinnest segments they could have picked, because that is the segment they came from. The densest one is barely contested — and it is usually the most heavily regulated, which is exactly why it stays that way.
Source: US Census Bureau, 2022 Economic Census — establishment counts by revenue band
The full issue breaks the segment table out in full, with the counts, the confidence band, and what we think each one means for anyone trying to buy customers in it.
What we are working on next.
Published when the analysis is done rather than on a calendar. A quarter with nothing genuinely new in it gets skipped, and we will say so.
The creative lifespan problem
How long a concept actually lasts before cost climbs — measured across the accounts we can see, not quoted from a US e-commerce blog.
What the regulator is actually enforcing
Twelve months of ad rejections and the pattern sitting underneath them, with health claims as the strictest case. The compliance surface, mapped.
Where the revenue actually sits
Segment by segment, across categories. Most operators are competing hardest in the thinnest part of their market and do not know it.
Every number in here came out of an account we had our hands in.
Most reports like this are a survey of opinions, or a vendor’s own funnel dressed up as research. This one is written from forty-six ad accounts we work inside, taken apart line by line, with the source printed next to every number. Where we could not source something, it is not in here. That is the only reason the numbers are worth your time.
Want to know what your own numbers say?
The Teardown tells you what other accounts are doing. A Revenue Audit tells you what yours is doing, in thirty minutes, with your numbers on screen.
Apply for a Revenue AuditNo deck and no pitch. We will tell you transparently if it isn’t a fit.