Marketing & Growth

How to manage a paid ads budget as Event Agency Founders

Marketing & GrowthFor Event Agency Founders2 apps10 steps~20 min to set up

You're running paid ads for your event agency — maybe Google Search for 'corporate event planner Chicago' or Meta retargeting past inquirers — and your budget tracking is split across the Google Ads dashboard, Meta Ads Manager, and a spreadsheet you update manually every Friday. You don't have a dedicated media buyer. You're making budget calls — pause that ad set, shift money to the campaign that's booking venue consultations — based on week-old data and gut feel. When a $3,000/month ads budget is the difference between a full Q4 calendar and a slow one, that's a real problem. You need to know which ad is actually driving inquiry form fills, not just clicks.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

Marketing & GrowthFor Event Agency Founders2 apps10 steps~20 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A single cross-channel view of every active Google and Meta campaign you're running, with spend, ROAS, and inquiry-to-consultation conversion data in one place — no tab-switching between dashboards

Automated budget reallocation rules that pause underperforming ad sets and shift spend toward campaigns that are actually generating event inquiry submissions

A weekly digest that tells you the three things that actually changed in your paid acquisition last week — which creative drove the most qualified leads, where spend leaked, and what to adjust before Monday

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

Ads Agent connects to Google Ads and Meta Ads from Starch's integration catalog — the agent queries them live when your dashboard loads or an automation runs. Growth Analyst syncs your PostHog traffic and conversion data on a schedule and syncs your Gmail on a schedule to deliver the weekly digest to your inbox.

Prompts to copy

Connect my Google Ads and Meta Ads accounts. Build me a dashboard that shows weekly spend, cost-per-inquiry, and ROAS for each campaign. Flag any ad set that has spent more than $150 this week with a cost-per-inquiry above $80 and pause it automatically.

Connect PostHog and Gmail. Every Monday morning, email me a digest that covers which paid channels drove the most inquiry form fills last week, how my conversion rate from ad click to booked consultation changed, and one specific recommendation for where to shift budget.

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect your Google Ads account and Meta Ads account from Starch's integration catalog. This takes under two minutes per account — OAuth, done.

2 Open the Ads Agent app (currently in beta — request access from Starch) and describe your campaign structure: 'I run Google Search ads targeting corporate event planner searches in Chicago and Denver, and Meta retargeting ads for people who visited my inquiry page but didn't submit.'

3 Tell Starch what a conversion means for your agency: 'A conversion is a completed inquiry form submission on my website. My target cost-per-inquiry is under $60.'

4 Set your budget guardrails in plain language: 'If any ad set spends more than $200 in a week and generates fewer than 3 inquiry form fills, pause it and Slack me.' Starch builds the automation.

5 Connect PostHog from Starch's integration catalog to pipe in your site traffic and form-fill conversion data alongside ad spend — so you can see the full funnel, not just clicks.

6 Enable the Growth Analyst app. Tell it: 'Every Monday at 8am, send me an email digest covering which paid campaigns drove inquiry form fills last week, how my click-to-inquiry conversion rate changed week over week, and which ad creative had the best ROAS.'

7 Set up a budget reallocation rule: 'At the end of each week, take 20% of budget from my lowest-ROAS campaign and redistribute it to my top-performing campaign, then notify me with the reasoning.'

8 Ask Starch to build a custom view showing your pipeline alongside ad spend: 'Show me a table of active event leads this month next to the paid channel that sourced them, so I can see which campaigns are booking actual events, not just generating cold inquiries.'

9 Run a creative performance question once a week: 'Which ad creative drove the best cost-per-inquiry this week across Google and Meta?' Ads Agent pulls the real numbers — no spreadsheet stitching.

10 At the end of each month, pull a cross-channel summary: 'Give me a report showing total spend, total inquiries, cost-per-inquiry, and estimated revenue from booked events sourced from paid ads in April 2026.' Use this for your own agency P&L review and to justify the ad budget to yourself.

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

Q4 2026 Event Season Paid Push — October Review

Sample numbers from a real run

Google Search — 'corporate event planner Chicago'	1,240
Google Search — 'holiday party venue Chicago'	680
Meta Retargeting — inquiry page visitors	510
Meta Prospecting — lookalike audience	370

In October, you spent $2,800 across four campaigns targeting Q4 holiday party and end-of-year corporate event bookings. The Ads Agent dashboard showed that your Google Search 'holiday party venue Chicago' campaign was generating inquiries at $42 each — well under your $60 target — while the Meta Prospecting lookalike campaign had burned $370 with only 2 inquiry submissions ($185 per inquiry). Starch's automation paused the Meta Prospecting campaign mid-week when it crossed the $150 / 3-inquiry threshold, and sent you a Slack message explaining why. You redirected that $370 toward the Google 'holiday party' campaign. The Growth Analyst digest on Monday October 28 flagged that your inquiry-to-consultation conversion rate dropped from 38% to 24% week over week — not an ads problem, but a follow-up speed problem — which you spotted because you were looking at the full funnel, not just ad platform metrics. Total result: 19 qualified inquiries in October, 7 booked consultations, 4 signed contracts for December events averaging $14,000 each.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Cost-per-inquiry by campaign (target: under $60 for corporate event searches)

Inquiry-to-consultation conversion rate (did the ad lead actually show up for a call)

Paid channel attribution by booked event (which campaign sources actual signed contracts, not just form fills)

Weekly ROAS by ad creative (which specific image or copy variant is earning its spend)

Budget utilization rate (are you spending the monthly budget, or leaving money that should be working)

Comparison

What this replaces

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

Managing Google Ads and Meta Ads Manager separately with a manual Friday spreadsheet

Free, but you're making budget decisions on week-old data you assembled yourself — and one slow Friday means you burned $300 on a bad ad set you meant to pause.

Hiring a freelance media buyer

A good freelancer knows paid ads deeply, but costs $1,500–$3,000/month for part-time help, which often exceeds the ad budget itself for a small agency running $2–4k/month in spend.

Triple Whale or Northbeam

Excellent attribution tools built for e-commerce brands with high transaction volume — but overkill and misaligned for a service business where a 'conversion' is an inquiry form fill leading to a $10k+ event booking, not a $60 Shopify checkout.

AdEspresso or Revealbot for Meta only

Solid automation for Meta ad sets, but doesn't cover Google Ads in the same interface and won't connect to your event inquiry pipeline or PostHog funnel data — you're still stitching across tools.

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

The Ads Agent is listed as in beta. Can I use it now?

Ads Agent is currently in development — you can request beta access through Starch and you'll be notified when it launches. In the meantime, Growth Analyst is live today and can deliver your weekly paid-channel digest by connecting PostHog and Gmail on a schedule.

My ad spend is only $2,000–$3,000 a month. Is this overkill?

That's actually exactly the range where this matters most. At $2,500/month, a single mis-allocated campaign running for two weeks can waste 20–25% of your budget. You don't have enough room to absorb bad spend the way a $50k/month advertiser does — so having automated guardrails pays for itself fast.

I use HoneyBook for client management. Can Starch connect my ad spend data to my actual bookings?

HoneyBook isn't currently available as a scheduled-sync provider, but it's reachable through browser automation — Starch automates your HoneyBook dashboard through your browser, no API needed. You can describe the connection you want: 'Pull my new bookings from HoneyBook each week and show me which paid channel sourced each client.'

Does Starch store my ad spend data, or does it query Google and Meta live?

Google Ads and Meta Ads are queried live from Starch's integration catalog — the data isn't stored in Starch's database. That means you're always seeing current numbers, but Starch isn't a long-horizon data warehouse. If you need years of archived campaign history for audits, export that directly from the ad platforms.

Can Starch actually pause a campaign automatically, or does it just alert me?

Ads Agent is designed to take actions — pausing ad sets, reallocating budget — not just surface alerts. You define the rules in plain language and it executes them. That said, you can always configure it to notify you first and wait for approval before making changes, if you'd rather stay in the loop on every move.

What if I run ads on LinkedIn too? A lot of my corporate event clients come from LinkedIn.

LinkedIn Ads isn't currently a scheduled-sync provider, but LinkedIn is reachable through browser automation — Starch can automate your LinkedIn Ads dashboard through your browser. Alternatively, LinkedIn organic outreach and connection data is available through the LinkedIn Automation app in the Starch App Store, which is live today.