Digital marketing consultant · Australia, growth-focused operators
A digital marketing consultant who works fixed-scope, not retainer.
Most consultants sell hours and decks. We sell rebuilds with a written number, a defined end-date, and a documented handover. Same depth of work; cleaner economics for the operator. The work covers attribution, paid acquisition strategy, conversion rate optimisation, and the framework that connects them.
30 min · No pitch · Senior operator on the call
Engagement intake, currently open
$3.6B
Revenue influenced across paid acquisition since 2016
8 to 18%
Typical attributable revenue recovered, year one
12 wk
Standard engagement length
Context
Why operators hire a digital marketing consultant rather than another agency.
Most growth-focused operators have already worked with an agency or two. The pattern is consistent: the agency does what they were hired to do (run accounts, ship creative, manage spend) but the strategic question (where the next dollar of spend should actually go) sits with the owner. The owner does not have time to sit inside the data, and the agency is not paid to.
A consultant fills that gap. Fixed-scope, defined deliverables, written decisions. The output is not 'more campaigns' but a measurement layer the team can trust, a spend allocation rule that reflects margin, and a documented playbook the in-house team operates after the engagement ends.
We sell the consultancy as a fixed engagement (Tracking Audit, Attribution Fix, or the full PROFIT framework) rather than retainer time. The number is written before we start; the engagement ends when the playbook is delivered.
Deliverables
What a consulting engagement actually delivers.
01
Diagnostic across acquisition, measurement, conversion, and retention. Read-only, no changes in week one. Output is a written report with a prioritised work list.
02
Server-side measurement rebuild on your domain (when the diagnostic flags it as the leak): Meta CAPI, Google Ads enhanced conversions, GA4 reconciled to CRM.
03
Strategic spend allocation tied to contribution margin, not platform-attributed ROAS. The framework covers all six pillars: pull, record, optimise, funnel, increase, turn.
04
Working sessions weekly with the owner and the operating team. Decisions written up; changes implemented before the next session.
05
Day-to-day media run by our senior operators against the rebuilt measurement. After the engagement closes, the in-house team gets a documented playbook and operates the system. The handover is the deliverable, not a permanent retainer.
06
Six months of post-engagement quarterly reviews at no extra cost.
Side by side
How a consultant differs from a digital marketing agency.
Most digital marketing agencies
- Sell ongoing account management hours
- Ship deliverables on a monthly retainer
- Optimise the metric that justifies the retainer
- Send monthly decks summarising the dashboard
- Hard to leave; long onboarding for the next agency
Profit Geeks
- Sell measurement + media + margin under one engagement
- Ship a written playbook with a hard end-date
- Optimise for the dollar that lands in the bank
- Working sessions with the owner, not decks
- Designed to be operated by the in-house team afterwards
Who this is for
- Australian operator, scaling on paid acquisition, $20K+ monthly paid acquisition spend
- Existing in-house team or agency to execute day-to-day; no managed-service expectations
- Owner or operator who wants the work explained, not delivered behind a curtain
- Want the engagement to end with a handover, not extend indefinitely
Who it isn't
- Want media management without rebuilt measurement underneath
- Need a fix in two weeks for a launch (this is not that kind of work)
- Sub-$2M revenue trying to fix attribution before the offer works
- Want a long-term retainer with no defined end-date
Proof, in numbers
What working with a consultant looks like in numbers.
Aggregated across our last 18 engagements. Specific outcomes are documented in the case studies; the figures here are typical-result ranges, not guarantees.
3.1 → 7.4
Meta Event Match Quality, one documented engagement
23% → <5%
Typical platform-vs-CRM revenue gap, before and after
12 weeks
Standard PROFIT framework engagement length
Six months
Quarterly post-engagement reviews included at no extra cost
What you actually buy
One piece of work. Twelve weeks. It starts with a free call.
Which of these sounds like your week?
- Meta says one number, Google says another, the CRM says a third, and the bank says something else again.
- The leads come in and most of them are rubbish.
- Traffic is fine. Not enough of them buy.
- You cannot spend more without losing margin.
- Something is wrong and you cannot say what.
All five are the same job. We do not sell five products for them. We sell one rebuild, and the free call is where we work out which part of it you need first.
00 · Free
Run your own numbers
Six calculators and an attribution reference. Work out your break-even ROAS, your CAC payback, and whether the spend is structurally profitable, before you talk to anyone. The calculators need no signup.
01 · Free · 30 minutes
The profit audit call
A senior operator looks at your real spend, revenue and attribution gap on a call. You leave with a written fix list you keep, whether or not we ever work together. No deck, no follow-up sales sequence. We reply within one business day with three times to choose from.
02 · Optional · Two weeks
The two-week diagnostic
Read-only. We change nothing in your accounts. Every tag, event and consent rule mapped and written up: 20 to 35 pages, every issue rated P0 to P3 with an engineering-day estimate, and a 90-minute walk-through on day twelve. Yours to hand to us, your own team, or your existing agency. About a third of clients run this first, then decide.
03 · The engagement · Twelve weeks
The twelve-week rebuild
Twelve weekly 90-minute working sessions with you and your operating team, plus the build work those sessions identify. Measurement rebuilt server-side so the reports reconcile to the bank. The funnel worked where the leak actually is. Scaling rules tied to contribution margin, not platform ROAS. At week twelve your team gets a written playbook and operates it without us, with a quarterly check-in for six months included.
What it costs
Four things set the number
- The size of your stack
- How many ad platforms are live
- The state of your CRM integration
- How many service lines and locations you run
Two things do not
- Your industry
- How much you spend on ads
Revenue only matters because a bigger business is usually a bigger scope. We do not price off a percentage of it. We charge for the work, not for what you look like you can afford.
How it is billedFixed scope, quoted in a written proposal after the call, paid in instalments across the engagement. No hourly billing, no retainer, nothing that renews on its own.
Included at no extra costThe written playbook at handover, and a quarterly check-in for six months after the engagement closes.
Where to go next
The rest of the work, by service and by city.
Most engagements pull from more than one of these. If you're not sure where you fit, the free profit audit is the right starting point. We'll tell you on the call.
Related services
Other locations
Sydney
Melbourne
Brisbane
Perth
Adelaide
National
Proof, with the working shown
We'd rather show you the maths than the buzzwords.
“Profit Geeks rebuilt our whole sales engine, and not just the ad accounts. They went after the systems sitting behind them too. Sales are up 140% and we've pushed past $25M. Honestly the bit I didn't see coming was the operation running leaner than it did back when we were half the size.”
“We were quietly bleeding about a thousand dollars a week and had no idea why. They found the leaks, sorted out the measurement and the offer, and now we'll do more than $10K in a single day. Same product. Completely different business.”
“We went from scraping together two installs a week to running four crews and fifteen-plus jobs a week, north of $10M turnover. The clever bit was they tied the scaling to what we could actually deliver, so growth never broke the operation. Booked jobs, not vanity leads.”
“After iOS, our Meta numbers stopped matching the bank, and we'd basically been writing the gap off as “just tracking.” Profit Geeks rebuilt our measurement server-side and reconciled it straight back to the P&L. Turned out about $1.42M of ad spend in year one had been working all along. They're the first team that showed me the maths instead of a dashboard.”
“We didn’t spend a dollar more on ads. What they did was fix how we counted a booked job versus a platform “conversion,” cut the wasted spend, and by week twelve our blended ROAS had more than tripled. Revenue went from $4.8M to $9.1M. Same senior bloke on every call too. No juniors, no relay race.”
Reasonable questions
What you're probably thinking.
01
We've been burned by an agency before.
Most of our intake has. The difference is structural. A senior operator runs your account, not a junior hidden behind a dashboard, and you leave the first call with written findings you own even if we never work together. No relay race, no account manager translating between you and the people doing the work.
02
How do I know it'll actually work for my business?
You don't yet, and neither do we until we've seen your numbers. That's why the first step is a diagnostic, not a contract. We've documented this in DTC and home services (the case studies show the full working) and run the same playbook in professional services. If the maths isn't there for you, we'll tell you on the call.
03
What if there's nothing worth fixing?
Then you've spent thirty minutes and walked away with a second opinion that cost you nothing. We'd rather say no than take on an engagement we can't earn, so we turn away intake that isn't a fit. There's no pitch and no follow-up sales sequence.
04
What does it cost, and what am I signing up for?
One fixed-scope engagement fee, billed in instalments. No per-channel markup, no retainer fluff. The same senior operators handle measurement, media and margin, and scaling is tied to your contribution margin, so spend only climbs when the numbers say it's working. The call is where we scope what that looks like for you.
Frequently asked
What operators ask before booking the call.
What does a digital marketing consultant actually do?
A senior operator who diagnoses where your paid acquisition is leaking margin, rebuilds the measurement, and runs the day-to-day media against it through the engagement. Our consultants do run accounts day-to-day, but only inside engagements where we own the measurement and the offer architecture too. The in-house team learns the playbook over the engagement and operates it after the documented handover.
Are you the same as a digital marketing agency?
No. An agency is paid to execute (run accounts, manage spend, ship creative). A consultant is paid to figure out what should be executed and to architect the system that does it. Both can be useful; they solve different problems. We are the consultant.
Can you work alongside our existing agency?
Yes. Most clients have an existing media-buying agency or in-house team. We sit on a weekly call with them and translate strategic decisions into tactical work. Where there is friction (we expect agencies to show their work; some do not) we surface it early and let the client decide.
How is the engagement priced?
We don't publish a rate card. The work comes in a few shapes, a Tracking Audit, an Attribution Fix, Conversion Rate Optimisation, or the full PROFIT framework, and every one is fixed-scope, billed in two or three instalments depending on size, with no retainer drift. We scope it to your situation and your goals on the call, then send the actual fixed number in a written proposal afterwards.
What if we are not in Sydney or Melbourne?
We work nationally. Most engagements run on a weekly call cadence with shared documents in between. We will come on-site if it helps the work; travel is included for engagements that warrant it.
What size business do you take?
Annual revenue between $2M and $20M, currently spending at least $20K per month on paid acquisition. Below that, the engagement is too expensive for the lift; above that you typically need a different shape of help than we sell.
What is the difference between a digital marketing consultant, a freelancer, an agency, and a fractional CMO?
They are four different purchases. A freelancer sells you hands for one channel, usually by the hour or the day, working inside systems you already have, and is not responsible for whether the strategy is right. An agency sells ongoing execution capacity: media buying, creative, account management, billed monthly, with renewal as the commercial incentive. A consultant sells diagnosis and architecture for a fixed period, where the deliverable is decisions, a working system and documentation, and the engagement is meant to end. A fractional CMO sells a part-time seat on your leadership team: hiring, budget ownership, board reporting, ongoing and open-ended. Rough rule: if you know what to do and need it done, hire a freelancer or an agency. If you cannot tell where the money is going, hire a consultant.
What does a digital marketing consultant do in a typical week?
Most of it is not campaign babysitting, though the media does get run. A working week looks like pulling platform-reported conversions and CRM-recorded revenue for the same window and finding out why they disagree, reading how tags actually fire rather than what the dashboard summarises, checking spend allocation against gross margin per product line rather than blended ROAS, and moving the live budgets against whichever of those numbers turns out to be true. Then one session with the owner and the operating team where the decisions get made and written down. On our engagements that session is 90 minutes, weekly, recorded, with a written decisions log and a change list implemented before the next one. The senior operator who scoped the work is the one doing all of it, including the buying. The output of a week is a decision made and a change shipped, not a status update.
Should I hire a consultant or an agency?
One test. Without opening an ad platform, can you say what a new customer costs you and what they are worth over twelve months, using your own accounting or CRM records? If yes, you need execution capacity, and an agency or an in-house hire is the cheaper answer. If no, an agency will spend your budget against numbers nobody trusts, and in twelve months you will have the same question and a larger bill. The order matters: measurement and offer first, execution second. Most businesses that ask us this need both, in that sequence. A useful signal: if the last agency's reporting looked healthy while revenue stayed flat, that is a measurement problem, not a media problem.
What should I have ready before the first call with a consultant?
Five things, none of which need a marketer to prepare. Twelve months of paid acquisition spend broken down by platform. Revenue for the same twelve months taken from your accounting system or CRM, not from the ad platforms. Gross margin by product or service line, even approximately. A list of the systems in play: which ad accounts, which CRM, which consent banner, and who holds admin access. And one report you have quietly stopped believing. That last one does most of the work. Most of a first diagnosis is putting two numbers that ought to match side by side and asking why they do not. Our free 30-minute profit audit runs on exactly that, and you keep the written fix list either way.
How do I judge whether a digital marketing consultant is any good?
Ask four things on the first call. One: walk me through how you would reconcile my Meta conversion count against my CRM. A good answer mentions order or lead ID deduplication, event match quality, and how the consent banner classifies server-side calls. A weak answer talks vaguely about attribution windows. Two: what work would you turn down? A real practitioner names something specific. Three: who does the delivery, and will their name be on the proposal? Four: what do I own at the end, and could another supplier operate it? Then ask for a written scope before any money moves. Anyone who can diagnose the problem can also write down what fixing it involves.
What are the warning signs that a consultant will waste my money?
Pricing quoted as a percentage of ad spend. Refusal to put scope, deliverables and an end date in writing. Reporting built entirely on platform-attributed ROAS with nothing reconciled against the bank account. Methods described as proprietary but never explained. A pitch that opens with new campaigns before anyone has checked whether conversions are being counted correctly. A request for write access to your accounts in the first week, when read-only is enough to diagnose. A proposal with no named person on it. And the loudest one: a specific revenue figure promised before they have seen your data. Nobody can forecast your revenue from a discovery call, and the people who try are selling the forecast rather than the work.
Who actually does the work, the person on the sales call or a junior?
Ask this directly, and ask for names in the proposal. The standard agency model runs on the margin between what a senior costs and what a junior costs, so the person who wins the account is often not the person who touches it. Consulting is meant to be different, but plenty of consultancies have quietly adopted the same structure. Useful follow-ups: who will be in the weekly session, who writes the report, and what happens if that person leaves mid-engagement. On our engagements the person who scopes the work delivers it. That is why intake is capped. We cannot run more concurrent engagements than we have senior operators, so we do not pretend otherwise.
What will my team still have to do while a consultant is engaged?
More than most proposals admit, so plan for it. Access in week one: read-only to your GTM web and server containers, GA4, Meta Business Manager, Google Ads, your CRM, and your consent platform. This is usually the slowest part of any engagement and somebody internal has to chase it. A developer, yours or your agency's, for a defined number of engineering days when changes ship. We estimate those days in the diagnostic so you can book the time rather than discover it. One person who genuinely understands how deals are recorded in the CRM, because that is where most reconciliation gaps hide. Ninety minutes a week from the owner and operating team. And the decisions themselves: margin floors, which lines to scale, when to pull spend. We advise, you decide.
What happens at handover, and what do I keep?
Everything that can sit on your side does: your web and server GTM containers, your ad accounts, your CRM, and server-side measurement running on your own domain. You are not renting a setup you would have to be released from. At close you receive the written playbook: a documented procedure for each pillar with a named owner, the tag inventory and naming conventions, the change-management process, the reconciliation method written out so a CFO can audit it, and the decisions log from every session. Then a quarterly check-in for six months at no extra cost. If you later hire in-house or move to another supplier, they can read the playbook and take over without starting again. That is the point of writing it down.
What is the 3-3-3 rule in marketing?
It turns up in search results but it is not a framework with a settled definition. The label gets attached to at least three unrelated things: a creative-timing rule (three seconds to stop the scroll, three minutes of held attention, three days to follow up), a social posting cadence, and a follow-up rhythm for new leads. Different write-ups define it differently, so quoting it at an agency will not tell you much about them. The one idea underneath it that holds up is that the earliest moments carry disproportionate weight, which is an argument for measuring the first ad view, the first site visit and the first week of a customer's life separately rather than averaging them into one blended number. That is a measurement decision, not a rule of thumb.
How do I work out whether a consultant will pay for themselves?
Do the arithmetic before you buy anything. Take your monthly paid acquisition spend and multiply it by twelve. Then compare what the ad platforms reported for a recent period against what your accounting system or CRM recorded for the same period. If those disagree by a fifth, the whole annual figure was allocated against a signal that is a fifth wrong, not merely a fifth of it, because every budget decision in the year came off the same reports. At $20,000 a month that is $240,000 committed on numbers you cannot rely on. How much of it was actually misdirected is the thing nobody can tell you until the two sources reconcile, which is the point. Weigh the cost of finding out against the fee you have been quoted, then run it again for year two, because a measurement fix keeps working after the engagement ends and a retainer does not. If the two sources already agree closely, you probably do not need this work, and we will say so on the call.
What happens after you book
Three steps. No mystery.
Step 01 · Within 1 business day
30-minute audit call
A senior operator on the call. We look at your real numbers, spend, revenue, attribution gap, and tell you on the call whether the rebuild is worth doing for you and where it would start. No pitch deck.
Step 02 · Within 1 week
Written proposal
Fixed scope, fixed number, written up. The proposal names deliverables, timeline, the people involved, and the price. No hourly billing, no retainer drift.
Step 03 · Within 2 weeks
Engagement starts
Senior operators from day one. The measurement rebuild starts, we take over day-to-day buying on the channels we can measure, and the first working session lands. Inside two weeks of the call.
Next step
Capped intake. We take operators, not buyers.
If you are an Australian operator running paid acquisition and the reports have stopped reconciling, the next step is a free 30-minute profit audit. We will look at three of your dashboards on the call and tell you, in writing, what the rebuild would cover and what it would cost.