Why We Don't Sell Digital Advertising
Why Our Web Design/Build Agency Doesn’t Offer Digital Advertising
Digital advertising is everywhere. On every platform, in every feed, and in most agency service menus. But you won’t find it in ours. We build websites and systems that compound value over time; we don’t buy impressions. Here’s why.
It’s Not a Reliable Business Line
- Ad markets swing with platform changes, auction volatility, tracking updates, and shrinking attribution windows.
- Budget-to-results consistency is rare. The same spend can produce wildly different outcomes month to month, and the levers you can control (creative, landing pages, offer) often can’t overcome what you can’t (platform policy, inventory, CPM inflation).
- Reliability matters to our clients and to us. We’d rather stand behind durable assets—site like performance, conversion architecture, and content systems than short-term arbitrage.
The Space Is Unserious—With Serious Gaps Between Science
- Digital ads promise precision, but the measurement stack is full of holes: fingerprinting bans, ITP / ETP, privacy regulations, and modeled conversions.
- “Optimization” often means p-hacking dashboards and chasing platform-provided metrics that don’t map to real business outcomes.
- Real causal inference requires holdouts, MMM, incrementality testing, and patient decision cycles—rare in practice and misaligned with most ad buying incentives.
The Margins Are Paper Thin
- Media takes the lion’s share. What remains is squeezed by creative production, testing, and management.
- Agencies often rely on opaque fees or platform kickbacks to make the unit economics work; we’re not interested in those models.
There’s Too Much Smoke and Mirrors
- Vanity metrics (CTR, impressions, view-through conversions) are easy to inflate and hard to tie to revenue.
- Case studies cherry-pick time windows and ignore incrementality. “Lift” claims often omit whether the spend moved the needle beyond what would have happened anyway.
- Platform algorithms are black boxes. If you can’t inspect or verify, you shouldn’t sell certainty.
It’s a Heavily Monopolized Space
- A few vendors set the rules, prices, and measurement frameworks. When you depend on them, you live at their mercy.
- Policy shifts, privacy changes, and UI tweaks can erase months of work overnight.
- Being “in business” with ad platforms creates conflicts: what’s good for the vendor is not always good for the client.
It’s Damaged Search
- Paid placement, ads that mimic organic results, and AI-overview clutter degrade user trust and discovery quality.
- The result: higher acquisition costs, lower signal-to-noise, and a race-to-the-bottom experience for both users and brands.
Our Clients Are Mostly B2B—And Ads Rarely Pencil Out
- B2B buying cycles are long and committee-driven. One ad click rarely equals pipeline.
- The channels that move B2B deals like trust, expertise, referrals, events, and partner ecosystems, don’t scale well through ad auctions.
- When we do see ads work in B2B, it’s usually highly targeted, high-intent capture (e.g., branded search) layered on top of strong brand fundamentals and not spray-and-pray campaigns.
Fraud Is a Real Cost
- Bot traffic, click farms, MFA (made-for-advertising) sites, and misattribution siphon spend.
- Even “brand safe” placements can end up in low-quality inventory via programmatic chains.
- Verifying truth in a fragmented supply path is hard; paying for garbage is easy.
Better Uses of Marketing Dollars (Especially for B2B)
We recommend investing in assets and activities with compounding ROI:
- Website performance and conversion architecture
- Content that earns trust and demand
- Events and communities
- Owned audience building
- Partnerships and ecosystems
- Organic search and digital PR
- Sales enablement
- Customer marketing
Speed, accessibility, clean IA, and frictionless forms. Message-market fit on key pages with strong proof (testimonials, case studies, benchmarks).
Authoritative case studies with outcomes, not fluff. Problem-solution architectures, industry playbooks, technical deep-dives, ROI calculators, comparison pages.
Industry trade shows, hosted roundtables, workshops, user groups. Capture content from events (talks, panels) and repurpose across channels.
Email newsletters with real insights, not promotions. Webinars and office hours to shorten sales cycles and collect objections.
Integrations, co-marketing, and marketplace listings. Analyst relations and category affiliations that lend credibility.
Topic clusters mapped to real intent, not keyword stuffing. Thoughtful digital PR to earn high-quality links and mentions.
Better decks, one-pagers, ROI calculators, and objection libraries. Live demos scripted around specific pains and outcomes.
Onboarding that accelerates time-to-value. Expansion plays: training, certification, and customer storytelling.
When Digital Ads Can Make Sense
We’re not dogmatic. There are narrow cases where ads are rational:
- High-intent capture on branded or competitor search when attribution is strong and landing pages convert.
- Account-based re-targeting to accelerate known deals already in pipeline.
- Limited, well-instrumented experiments with clear holdouts, pre-defined stop criteria, and honest incrementality measurement.
If a client needs that, we’ll refer to specialists who operate transparently and test scientifically, but we won’t run it in-house.
What We Do Instead
We design and build web systems that compound:
- Strategy: messaging, positioning, information architecture.
- Performance: speed, DX, analytics you can trust, privacy-first tracking.
- Conversion: experiments, UX improvements, proof architecture.
- Content ops: scalable publishing workflows, component libraries, governance.
- Measurement: event-level analytics, funnels, and reporting tied to revenue, not vanity metrics.
Our Promise
We focus on durable value rather than rented attention. If it isn’t measurable, compounding, and aligned with your sales reality, we won’t sell it. That’s why we don’t offer digital advertising and why our clients rely on us to build the foundation that makes every other channel work better.
