You’ve heard guarantees before. “Results or your money back.” “ROAS-guaranteed.” “Performance pricing.” Most of the time it turns out the guarantee is either defined in a way that makes it impossible to fail, or defined in a way that lets the agency walk away while keeping the setup fee and the first three months of retainer.

So when we say we guarantee 5X ad-attributable ROAS or we keep working for free, the reasonable first reaction is scepticism. Good. Let’s walk through why the model actually holds.

The three-part structure

The guarantee only makes sense inside a three-part structure. Any one piece missing and it’s marketing fluff.

1. A narrow, pre-qualified client pool. Our core program is built for physical retail stores — brick-and-mortar businesses with an online Shopify — doing between $1M and $5M in online revenue per year. We’re careful about who we take on. When we decline, it’s rarely about quality. It’s about fit: product mix that can’t plausibly clear 5X, margin structure that’s too thin, tracking too broken to fix, or a business still too early in its digital life for paid search to be the right lever. We also run a separate program for larger advertisers, so if your spend is above the core band, say so and we’ll point you in the right direction.

2. Zero dollars from you below the 5X floor. No setup fee. No monthly retainer. No percentage of ad spend. Below a 5X ad-attributable ROAS in a given month, we invoice nothing — not for our time, not for tracking setup, not for campaign management, not for reporting. All of that runs at our cost until the account clears the floor. We are literally paying for the privilege of fixing your account when it’s underperforming. That is the only way “we keep working for free” can mean something — the fee below the floor has to genuinely be zero.

3. A performance share that only activates above 5X, capped at 16%. Once total ad-attributable ROAS clears 5X, our fee scales 1:1 with ROAS and caps at 16%: at 5X we earn 5% of attributable revenue, at 10X we earn 10%, at 16X+ we earn 16% and no more. The only way we make a meaningful living is if the account is genuinely clearing 5X. The cap matters too — even our best months have a ceiling, so we can’t engineer our way to an outsized payday at your expense. Total marketing cost (ad spend plus our fee) is engineered to stay at roughly 20% of the revenue it generates.

Missing any of these three and the guarantee falls apart. Together they make it arithmetic, not faith.

Why the selectivity matters

A ROAS guarantee is only honest if the agency is willing to say no when the math doesn’t work. If we accepted every client, the guarantee would collapse — we’d be promising 5X to accounts with 20% margins and no tracking, which nobody can honestly promise. So the guarantee forces the pre-qualification discipline.

When you apply, we go through a specific set of checks:

Margin reality. A 5X ad-attributable ROAS on a product with 18% gross margin is net negative after fees, shipping, and fulfilment. We check your margin profile before we accept.
Tracking integrity. We can fix most tracking. Some we can’t — usually because a platform change is pending or a core analytics implementation is so broken it requires the client’s engineering team to resolve first.
Product-market signal. If you’ve never cleared 2X on paid search, we want to see what your organic and retail signal looks like before committing to 5X in paid.
Geographic fit. Physical-store retailers with online delivery have fundamentally different economics than pure DTC. We’re built for the physical-retail profile.

If any of those fail, we decline — usually the same week you apply, usually with a direct explanation of why. We would rather you hear a fast “no” than a slow “we can’t quite get you there.”

Why 5X and not a lower number

In our audits of retail paid-search accounts, 3X headline ROAS is roughly where most agencies comfortably settle — and that 3X is usually padded with blended brand revenue, so the real acquisition number is lower again. It’s high enough to feel defensible on a monthly slide and low enough that almost anyone can hit it with enough spend and optimisation. But a 3X blended figure on a physical retailer’s margin profile is usually break-even at best, once you factor in COGS, fulfilment, and the fee structure.

5X is the threshold at which the channel actually contributes meaningfully to store profitability. It’s where paid search becomes a growth lever rather than a cost centre. We picked it because it’s the number where our clients get real value — not because it sounded dramatic in a headline.

What “keep working for free” actually means

If your account is below 5X in a given month, our invoice for that month is zero dollars. Not reduced. Not discounted. Zero. We continue optimising — tracking fixes, creative iteration, bid strategy adjustments, negative keyword work — until we get above the floor. All of it at our cost. There’s no setup fee hiding behind the guarantee, no retainer we quietly kept, no “well, the market shifted” carve-out clause.

If we never get above 5X for sustained periods, we have a direct financial incentive to either fix the issue fast or offboard the client. Accounts that aren’t clearing the floor are costing us money. That’s the point of the structure.

What we don’t guarantee

We don’t guarantee a specific revenue number. Revenue depends on spend, and spend should track with what the account can productively absorb. We don’t commit to scaling you to a target — we commit to efficiency on whatever spend makes sense.

We don’t guarantee the relationship lasts forever. If after a reasonable window the account genuinely can’t clear 5X — not because of execution, but because of structural issues on the business side — we’ll tell you directly and offboard cleanly. You’ll owe nothing for the months we couldn’t clear the floor, because you never owed anything to begin with.

We don’t guarantee that Google Ads is the right channel for every physical retailer. For some product categories and geographies, the honest answer is “paid search won’t work for you at any ROAS target.” When we see that, we say it.

Test the guarantee before signing

The form below takes two minutes. It’s a call request, not a commitment. If we take you on, the first thirty days are an audit window — tracking setup, campaign restructuring, the clean split of brand from non-brand at the campaign level. If during that window we conclude the 5X floor isn’t realistic, we end the engagement and walk away. There’s no retainer to argue over and no setup fee to claw back, because you were never invoiced for either. No friction.

That’s the clearest test of whether the guarantee is real. An agency willing to walk away in month one, with zero on the invoice, isn’t running a retainer mill.

Yes, It's A Real Guarantee. No, It's Not Magic. Here's The Arithmetic.