Senior Growth Audit: Paid, Organic, and AI Search for a Multi-Location Services Brand

Type: Fixed-price project (Phase 1), with an optional month-to-month contract (Phase 2) Location: Remote, US Eastern hours Reports to: Founder, directly ABOUT THE ENGAGEMENT We are an established, multi-location appointment-based consumer services business operating in several major US metros, with a membership model alongside retail product sales. Monthly paid media spend is in the six figures across Google Ads, Meta, and secondary channels including TikTok, Bing, local marketplace ads, and newer AI search placements. Three things are happening at once and we do not yet know how they connect. New guest acquisition is down year over year while paid spend is up. Organic search traffic has fallen materially. Direct traffic has fallen alongside it. We want a senior practitioner to work out how much of this is media, how much is measurement, and how much is the broader shift in how people find local services now that AI answers sit above the results. The category and company are disclosed after an NDA is signed. Applicants who are a fit get the full picture before any work begins. PHASE 1: INDEPENDENT AUDIT (three to four weeks, fixed fee) You receive read-only reporting access and data exports covering roughly the last five months and the same period of the prior year. You report to the founder only. Deliverables are a written findings document and a 90-minute walkthrough covering four workstreams. A. Paid media, all channels 1. Account structure and change history across every funded channel. Campaign architecture by market, bidding strategies, budgets, what changed and when, and which changes line up with movements in bookings. 2. Funnel composition. Share of spend reaching new audiences versus re-reaching people already in our orbit, by market, defined by actual audience settings rather than campaign naming conventions. 3. Wasted spend and compliance. Campaigns funded but not serving, zero-conversion spend, trademarked or restricted terms in copy, disapproval history, policy exposure. 4. Efficiency, apples to apples. Cost per new guest by market and channel using account-level spend, year over year, with every figure stamped with its source and date. B. The full funnel to a booked appointment 5. From impression to booked appointment: landing page performance, the booking flow itself, mobile experience, and where guests drop. Which of our pages earn their traffic and which do not. 6. Membership conversion. A guest who becomes a recurring member is worth a multiple of a one-time visitor, and our targeting and offers should reflect that. Tell us whether they do. C. Organic, direct, and AI search 7. Diagnose the organic search decline. Separate ranking loss from click loss to AI overviews and zero-click results, from indexation or technical issues, from seasonality, from a site or platform change on our side. We want the causes ranked by contribution with the evidence for each. 8. Diagnose the direct traffic decline in the same way, including the boring explanations: analytics configuration, channel misclassification from newer placements, app or browser referral stripping, a tracking change, or real demand loss. Say which and show your work. 9. AI search visibility. Where we appear and do not appear in AI-generated answers and recommendations across the major assistants and AI overviews, by market and by query type, and what actually moves that. We are looking for a working method, not a vendor dashboard subscription. 10. The interaction between paid and organic. Whether paid is buying clicks we would have earned, and whether the two are being read as independent when they are not. D. Measurement and modeling 11. Tracking and attribution. Google conversion actions (including view-through settings and any non-purchase actions inside the default goal), Meta pixel and Conversions API deduplication, GA4 channel classification, UTM discipline on newer channels, and a plain statement of what each platform's "conversion" actually counts. 12. Platform claims versus real new guests. Reconcile platform-attributed conversions against booking-system new guests (a person's first-ever non-cancelled visit, counted once), per platform, never summed across platforms. Tell us how much of each platform's reported performance is repeat or member rebooking and branded-search capture. 13. Marketing mix modeling. We maintain a weekly market-level panel of spend and outcomes and have begun modeling it. Review how the panel is built, whether the channel classifications and geographic allocations hold, and whether the model's conclusions can bear weight. Tell us what it can and cannot answer, and what geo holdout or incrementality test would settle the questions the model cannot. 14. A 90-day plan. Budget by market and channel, the reach versus harvest split you recommend, the two or three experiments you would run first with pre-registered success criteria and stop rules, and the measurement fixes that must land before a