Jeremy Chung
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Jeremy Chung
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— case study —
I rebuilt paid acquisition at Pilot.com into a portfolio governed by ROAS, payback, and pipeline-to-spend. Search did the heavy lifting at 9×. Acquired Podcast was the contrarian win at 12×. Paid Social got capped at ~2×. Honest version below.
The view I walked finance through quarterly. Paid-sourced, campaign-attributed, reconciled to bookings monthly.
End-of-tenure performance vs. baseline. Multi-touch attribution, finance-reconciled monthly.
Three consecutive years of 3× YoY paid-sourced revenue. Search at the core, partner media compounding on top.
Search and partner media carried the program. Paid Social never cleared 3× — capped, not killed. OOH was directional, not scalable.
Paid Social was capped — not killed — and kept for branded-search lift. Spend was reallocated monthly.
A case study that only tells you the wins is selling you something.
Lagging metrics tell you what already happened. I run a layer of leading indicators — and a written prioritization rubric — to stay a step ahead.
I run a layer of predictive metrics — leading indicators that move 4–12 weeks before financials do — and a written prioritization rubric that decides where dollars and hours go. The job is to act on the signal, not narrate the lag.
By the time CAC and ROAS shift, the cause has been visible for weeks. These five signals move first. If any two slip in the same week, I rebalance spend before the monthly review — not after.
Every test gets scored on Impact, Confidence, and Effort — then a written kill criterion before launch. If we don't know how we'd shut it down, we don't turn it on. Ruthless on what we say no to.
Marketing only compounds when the loops close. I run three standing meetings every week, each with a single decision output. No status updates — only reallocations.
The work that actually compounds is the work no one assigned. I default to picking up the orphaned number and running with it until it's fixed — then handing it back wrapped in a process.
Five levers, attacked in parallel. Capped the channels that would have given the gain back.
The specific things I built inside Pilot's accounts — each tied to the CAC and ROAS gains above.
Inherited a product-keyword account structure. Tore it down. Rebuilt around ICP segments (industry × size × pain) so bidding, copy, and LPs could be tuned per segment. Added a tight branded shell around defensive terms to lock down high-intent traffic at low CPC.
Audited 14 months of search-term reports. Built a 3,200-term negative-keyword list. Moved broad-match into phrase + exact wherever it was burning budget on bookkeeping/CPA generic terms. Wasted spend dropped within two weeks.
One LP per campaign was costing us conversion rate. Built a templated system with eight LPs — four industries × SMB/MM — each with industry-specific social proof, pricing framing, and CTA. Shipped the whole system in five weeks with a single contractor.
Stock conversion signals were too noisy — form fills aren't equal. Wired offline conversion imports from the CRM so Google was bidding on SQLs and Opps, not raw leads. Switched to tCPA per segment with strict ceilings.
Cheapest, fastest-payback channel — but only if the audiences are right. Built three tiers: pricing-page visitors (hot), feature-page visitors (warm), blog visitors (cold), each with its own creative and frequency cap. Killed the catch-all retargeting list.
B2B fintech wasn't sponsoring podcasts in 2022. Made the case the founder/CFO audience overlap was real and SOV was cheap. Owned the read scripts personally; A/B'd two creative angles; instrumented post-roll vanity URLs to attribute.
Twelve creative iterations, three audience strategies, two LP redesigns. LinkedIn + Meta never broke 3×. Made the call to cap at 22% rather than kill, to keep brand reach. The hard part was saying no to a channel everyone in B2B says you have to run.
Built a single-page reallocation report finance and I review every Monday: ROAS, payback, pipeline:spend by channel, week-over-week. Spend moves the same day. The discipline mattered more than any single tactic — it's what kept the gains compounding.
The hardest trick in B2B paid is scaling spend without diluting quality. Conversion rates rose as volume grew.
Where the gain came from. Search efficiency improved as the partner channels came online. Paid Social was capped to keep it from dragging the blended payback.
From Pilot's CMO and Marketing Operations Manager.
Jer is a rare combination of deep performance marketing expertise and true business ownership, and is an asset to any executive team that cares about efficient, scalable growth. He has high agency, and works around the clock to make things happen.
At Pilot, he took full ownership of paid search and turned it into one of our most reliable and efficient pipeline engines, consistently meeting all KPIs; in several months he drove 30–40% of total company pipeline and ARR through branded and non-branded campaigns.
Since his time at Pilot, it has been great to see Jer continue to evolve his craft and expand his impact in the ecosystem. While I haven't managed him directly since then, it's clear from the companies he partners with and the reputation he has built that he's grown into a true paid media leader and agency owner. He brings the same rigor, ownership, and cross-functional mindset he demonstrated in-house, and it's no surprise to see him become a trusted partner for teams looking for both strategic guidance and hands-on execution.
Jer has a unique blend of strategic vision, analytical prowess, and creativity that sets him apart in the growth marketing world. When we were working at Pilot, he immediately identified growth opportunities and crafted innovative strategies to achieve our targets.
In just 4 short months, Jer helped Pilot scale the performance marketing function from 0 to a 100. His ability to deep dive into analytics and extract insights helped us achieve visibility into the pipe to spend ratio and also experiment with different demand gen initiatives that helped grow and scale the business.
Jer is intelligent, humble and is great at making complex tasks easy to implement. He's the best growth partner I've worked with and I hope I get a chance to collaborate with him again in the future!
No marketing language. The numbers a finance team needs to underwrite a paid program.
I now run Ads by Jer — a fractional growth practice running this same playbook for B2B fintech, AI, and enterprise SaaS. If your CFO is asking the same questions Pilot's was, I can help.
Or email jer@adsbyjer.com directly · adsbyjer.com