Marketing & Growth

How to manage a paid ads budget as Educators, Coaches, and Course Creators

Marketing & GrowthFor Educators, Coaches, and Course Creators2 apps10 steps~20 min to set up

You're running Facebook and Google ads to fill your next cohort or sell your signature course, but your ad budget lives in Meta Business Manager, your revenue lives in Stripe, your email list lives in ConvertKit, and your course enrollments live in Kajabi or Teachable. To figure out whether your $2,000 ad spend this month actually worked, you manually download CSVs from three platforms, paste them into a Google Sheet, and do the math yourself on a Friday afternoon. You have no idea which ad creative drove the $497 course purchases versus the freebie downloaders. You're guessing at budget allocation based on vibes.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

Marketing & GrowthFor Educators, Coaches, and Course Creators2 apps10 steps~20 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A cross-channel ads dashboard that shows your Google and Meta spend, ROAS, and cost-per-enrollment side by side — without logging into three separate accounts

A weekly digest delivered to your inbox that tells you which campaigns are converting paying students versus freebie seekers, so you can reallocate budget before you blow your next cohort launch window

An automated budget-pause rule so no underperforming ad set quietly burns $50/day while you're busy delivering live sessions

The Starch recipe

Apps, data, and prompts

The combination of Starch apps, the data sources they pull from, and the prompts you use to drive them.

Apps used

Ads Agent Growth Analyst

Data sources & config

Starch connects to Google Ads and Meta Ads from its integration catalog — the agent queries them live when your dashboard or automation runs. Starch syncs your Stripe data on a schedule so enrollment revenue is matched against ad spend automatically. The Growth Analyst app connects to PostHog from the integration catalog to pull traffic and signup conversion data alongside the ad numbers, giving you a full funnel view from ad click to paying student. ConvertKit is connected from Starch's integration catalog so you can see which campaigns grew your list versus which grew your customer count.

Prompts to copy

Connect my Google Ads and Meta Ads accounts and build me a dashboard showing weekly spend, cost per lead, cost per course enrollment, and ROAS broken out by campaign. Flag any campaign where spend is above $30/day and ROAS has dropped below 2x for three consecutive days.

Every Monday at 8am, email me a summary of last week's ad performance: which campaigns drove actual Stripe payments for my $497 course, which drove free lead magnet downloads, and what I should shift budget toward this week.

If any ad set exceeds $40 spend in a day with zero conversions tracked, pause it automatically and Slack me a note explaining which one and why.

Run these in Starch → or paste them into your favorite agent

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect Google Ads and Meta Ads from Starch's integration catalog — takes about five minutes per platform, no developer required.

2 Connect Stripe as a scheduled-sync provider so Starch has your actual payment data: which purchases came in, at what price point, and when.

3 Connect ConvertKit from Starch's integration catalog so the agent can distinguish 'downloaded the free guide' leads from 'bought the $497 course' customers when it evaluates campaign quality.

4 Open the Ads Agent app (currently in beta — request access) and describe your campaign structure: 'I'm running three campaigns — one for my free webinar, one for my $297 mini-course, and one retargeting people who visited my sales page but didn't buy.'

5 Tell Starch your budget rules in plain language: 'My total monthly ad budget is $3,000. No single campaign should spend more than $1,200/month. If cost per enrollment on any campaign exceeds $80, flag it.'

6 Set up a weekly Growth Analyst digest: 'Every Monday, email me a breakdown of which ad channels drove signups to my email list, which drove course purchases, and what the conversion rate was from click to enrolled student.'

7 Configure the automated pause rule: 'If any ad set spends more than $35 in 24 hours with zero Stripe conversions recorded, pause it and send me a Slack message with the campaign name and spend amount.'

8 Ask the dashboard a natural-language question to validate it's working: 'Which creative drove the most $497 course purchases last week, and what was the cost per purchase?' — Starch pulls the answer from live ad data matched against Stripe payments.

9 Before your next cohort launch, run: 'Compare my ad performance in the two weeks before my last launch versus this week — where should I put the extra $500 I'm adding to the launch push?'

10 After launch closes, pull a retrospective: 'Show me total ad spend for the March cohort launch, total Stripe revenue from students who came through paid ads, and net ROAS for the full campaign window.'

See this running on Starch

Connect your tools, describe what you want, and the agent builds it. Closed beta is free.

Try it on Starch →

Worked example

March 2026 Cohort Launch — 4-Week Paid Ads Window

Sample numbers from a real run

Meta — Webinar Registration Campaign	980
Google — 'Online business coaching' search keywords	620
Meta — Retargeting (sales page visitors, last 30 days)	400
Stripe — Course enrollments attributed to paid ads	8,946
Stripe — Webinar registrants who did not purchase	0

You set a $2,000 budget for the March cohort launch and split it roughly 50/30/20 across Meta webinar traffic, Google search, and retargeting. By day 8, Starch flagged that your Google search campaign had spent $310 with only two email signups and zero Stripe conversions — cost per lead was $155 against a $497 course price, which made the math ugly. The automated rule paused it overnight and Slacked you a note before your 9am coaching call. You moved that $310 into the Meta retargeting campaign, which was converting sales-page visitors at $38 per purchase. By launch close, the retargeting campaign alone drove 14 of your 22 new enrollments. Total ad spend: $1,980. Total attributed Stripe revenue: $8,946. ROAS: 4.5x. The Monday Growth Analyst digest told you that your webinar-to-purchase conversion rate was 11% for people who watched live versus 3% for replay viewers — a number you'd never calculated before because it lived across three platforms.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Cost per course enrollment (not just cost per lead — actual Stripe payments tied to ad source)

ROAS by campaign, broken out by product price point ($297 mini-course vs $497 signature course)

Webinar-to-purchase conversion rate by traffic source

Email list growth rate from paid vs organic, tracked weekly

Ad spend as a percentage of cohort launch revenue (target: under 25%)

Comparison

What this replaces

The other ways teams handle this today, and how the Starch version compares.

Checking Meta Business Manager + Google Ads separately each week

You see platform-native metrics (clicks, impressions, CPM) but never match them against actual Stripe enrollments without a manual spreadsheet step — Starch does that match automatically.

Google Sheets with imported CSVs

Works if you're disciplined, but breaks the moment you skip one Friday export during a live cohort week; Starch pulls data on a schedule so the dashboard is current even when you're delivering sessions.

Triple Whale or Northbeam

Built for e-commerce brands with high order volume — pricing and complexity assume a dedicated media buyer; Starch is built for a solo operator running $1,500–$5,000/month in ads without a performance marketer on staff.

Kajabi or Teachable built-in analytics

Shows you enrollment counts but has no visibility into what you spent to get each student or which ad creative drove the purchase — you still need to reconcile ad spend separately.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — ads agent, growth analyst all running on connected data. Setup in plain English; numbers stay current via scheduled syncs and live agent queries.

Try it on Starch →

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

My course platform is Kajabi and there's no direct Kajabi integration listed — can Starch still track enrollments?

Yes. Starch syncs your Stripe data on a schedule, so any Kajabi payment processed through Stripe shows up as a real conversion you can match against ad spend. Kajabi's admin dashboard is also browser-reachable, so Starch can automate pulls from it directly — no API needed.

The Ads Agent says it's in beta. What can I use right now while I wait for access?

The Growth Analyst app is live today. Connect your PostHog account from Starch's integration catalog and wire in your ad platform data through Google Ads and Meta Ads connections; you can get a weekly digest covering traffic, signup trends, and conversion shifts by channel right now. Request Ads Agent beta access and you'll get notified when the full campaign management layer goes live.

Will Starch actually pause underperforming ad sets automatically, or does it just flag them?

The Ads Agent is designed to take action — pausing ad sets, reallocating budget — not just surface alerts. You define the rules in plain language ('pause if spend exceeds $40 with zero conversions in 24 hours') and the automation runs them. During the beta period, confirm the exact action scope when you get access, since beta capabilities can evolve.

Is my ad account data stored in Starch, or is it just queried live?

Google Ads and Meta Ads are queried live from Starch's integration catalog — data isn't stored in Starch's database on a schedule. Your Stripe payment data is synced on a schedule and stored in Starch. That means your revenue attribution is always current, while ad metrics are pulled fresh each time your dashboard or automation runs. For most course operators running monthly or weekly budget reviews, this is exactly what you need. If you wanted a multi-year historical archive of ad spend, that's not what Starch is built for.

I only spend about $1,500/month on ads. Is this overkill?

That's actually the sweet spot Starch is built for. At $1,500/month, a single misallocated campaign eating $400 in two weeks is a real hit to your launch budget — but you can't justify hiring a media buyer to watch it. Starch runs the watch-and-pause logic automatically so you're not logging into Meta at 11pm to check if your retargeting is still on.

Does Starch connect to ConvertKit so I can see whether my ad traffic is growing my list or just hitting the sales page?

Yes. Connect ConvertKit from Starch's integration catalog and the agent can query your subscriber data live. You can ask 'how many new ConvertKit subscribers came in during the last two weeks of my launch campaign, and how many of those converted to a Stripe payment?' and get a real answer rather than logging into both platforms and doing the math by hand.