TAS-AU-2017-009
February 2017, Canberra
Google Partner & Meta Business Partner agency
About the crew that
runs your ads
About Target Ad Solutions — we're eleven people in Canberra who got tired of watching agencies bill for reports nobody read. So we built the one we always wanted to hire: small, senior, and paid to perform.
buyers, creatives, tracking
run since day one
Nine years in the trenches
Started with two laptops and one client who'd been burned by three agencies in a row.
Kitchen-table start
First client: a Canberra plumber paying A$4k/mo for clicks that never rang. Fixed his tracking, halved his CPA, never looked back.
First proper office
Deakin, above a bakery. Jack joined to run search; the Friday change-log ritual started here and never stopped.
Creative bench opens
Sophie built the in-house creative pod — the moment we stopped being "the Google Ads guys" and became a full media shop.
Today
Eleven people, six channels, A$28M managed. Still no account managers — you talk to the person touching your campaigns.
No acquisitions, no VC money, no holding company upstairs. Still the same deal as 2017.
Numbers are the medium
We run accounts like engineers run systems — logged, versioned and auditable. Every bid change lands in a change log, every test has a hypothesis, and "the algorithm felt off this week" is never an acceptable explanation. If a metric can't survive a spreadsheet, it doesn't make our reports.
- Server-side tracking on every account
- Weekly change logs since 2019
- CRM-attributed reporting where data allows
Judgement is the product
But dashboards don't write hooks, and automation doesn't know your customer hates the word "synergy". The other half of the job is taste — knowing which ad to kill before the data does, when to spend less, and when to tell a client the honest thing over the billable thing.
People who'll touch your account
No account managers, no handoffs. The person on the call is the person in the dashboard.
Founder · ex-agency headDaniel Rourke
Started TAS after a decade inside big agencies. Reads every audit personally and still writes the nastiest search-term scrubs.
Search · DV360Jack Mercer
Nine years inside Google Ads. Reversed 11 suspensions, keeps the screenshots, treats wasted spend like a personal slight.
Social · creative testingAmelia Vo
Ran Meta for three DTC brands before joining. Judges a hook in 1.2 seconds and keeps a graveyard file of losing angles.
Creative · scriptsSophie Tran
Storyboards every test batch and writes UGC briefs in comment-section dialect. Believes great ads should be invisible as ads.
Tracking · CAPILiam O'Connor
Builds the server-side plumbing nobody sees and everybody needs. Allergic to attribution excuses and "platform reported" ROAS.
B2B · ABMRachel Kim
Six years in demand-gen before TAS. Builds account lists sales teams actually trust — and reports on meetings, not impressions.
Projects & field research
A sample of campaigns and internal studies we're allowed to show. Full case library available on a call — most of it lives behind NDAs because our clients like their edge.
Request case filesFurniture e-com rebuild
Google Shopping + Search restructure for a Melbourne retailer. A$41 CPA down to A$17 in 90 days.
The Hook Rate Index
Our quarterly study of 400+ tested hooks across Meta and TikTok — what stops thumbs in 2026. Shared with clients only.
Read the related articleBroad match stress test
Six-month controlled experiment on broad vs phrase match across 14 accounts. The results changed how we structure search.
HR software pipeline
LinkedIn ABM + Meta funnel for a Sydney HR platform. 41 meetings booked in one quarter from a cold account.
“I started this agency because I kept inheriting accounts where the previous agency's main deliverable was a PDF. If we ever send you a report you can't act on, we've failed — that's the whole company policy, really.”
Daniel Rourke — founder, Target Ad Solutions · read in every kickoff call
What people ask first
Deakin studio, Friday sync
Prefer coffee to calls? The office is above the bakery — first meeting smells like croissants. Fair warning.
Meet the team before you sign anything
The free teardown call is with the people who'd actually run your account — not a salesperson reading a script. Bring your hardest questions.