The case for boring growth strategy.

The growth team has just spent four weeks investigating a new channel. The channel turns out not to work. The team writes a thoughtful retrospective. The next quarter, the team investigates a different new channel. This pattern is so common it is almost universal. It is also, in our experience, one of the largest sources of wasted effort in performance marketing.

The novelty bias

Marketing teams are biased towards new channels for understandable reasons. Senior leadership rewards initiative; senior leadership reads the same trade press as the marketing team and asks why the team isn’t experimenting with the latest platform; senior leadership often confuses motion with progress. The team picks up the cue. New channels also feel important because they require the team to learn something; established channels feel boring because the team has already learned what there is to learn. The latter feeling is almost always wrong.

The compounding problem with established channels

Most established channels in a stable account have a long ceiling for improvement that goes unobserved because nobody is paying attention. We routinely take over Google Ads accounts that have been “optimised for years” and find six-figure efficiency gains in the first quarter — not because the previous team was incompetent but because the account hadn’t had focused senior attention in eighteen months. Established channels degrade silently if not actively managed; new channels announce their existence loudly and demand attention. The result is a chronic mis-allocation of attention towards the loudest channels and away from the highest-leverage ones.

The portfolio effect

Even when a new channel works, it usually works less well than further investment in an established channel. The exceptions are rare and they are obvious in hindsight: TikTok in 2021 for consumer brands, Connected TV in 2022 for direct-response, retail-media networks in 2023 for endemic categories. Most new-channel experiments do not produce these breakthroughs; they produce a marginal incremental contribution at a CPA twice that of the established channels. The team then has to argue for the channel’s continuation against its CPA, and either it gets cut (six weeks of effort wasted) or it persists at a worse-than-portfolio CPA (slow drag on overall performance).

What we recommend instead

Three established channels, well-run, will outperform six channels run badly. The boring discipline is to identify the two or three channels that have the highest demonstrated marginal value to your business and to invest disproportionately in their continued optimisation. New channels get tested only when (a) the existing portfolio is genuinely at saturation, evidenced by declining marginal returns over multiple quarters, or (b) a new channel demonstrates an obvious match to your business in early external data — not in a vendor pitch deck.

The opportunity cost is high

The senior buyer who spends their Q3 on a TikTok experiment that doesn’t work has not spent their Q3 deepening the Google Ads account that produces 70% of the company’s revenue. That account had a roadmap of optimisation work waiting; that work didn’t happen. Compounded over years, this is the difference between a marketing programme that gets sharper over time and one that runs in place.

The short list of new things worth doing

This essay is not arguing for never trying anything new. It is arguing for trying new things in the right proportion. The 90/10 split — ninety percent of effort on perfecting what works, ten percent on disciplined experimentation — is the right starting point for most accounts at scale. The ten percent should be planned, time-boxed and judged against pre-committed criteria. The ninety percent is where the compounding lives.

The boring playbook

• Quarterly account audit, by a senior person, with written findings.
• Weekly negative-keyword discipline.
• Monthly creative refresh on the channel where creative degrades fastest.
• Bid-strategy review by campaign every quarter against the most recent ninety days of conversion data.
• Server-side conversion-tracking integrity checks, daily.
• One genuinely new test per quarter, scoped before it starts and judged when it ends.

Closing observation

The teams that do the best paid-media work are not the teams running the most experiments. They are the teams running the fewest experiments and finishing all of them. The skill is in distinguishing the experiment that’s worth running from the experiment that’s a distraction — and in having the discipline to refuse the latter even when senior leadership is asking why the team isn’t trying it. That refusal is usually the most valuable conversation a marketing team has all year.