Paid Search Manager

Wpromote names Jared Malagon Director, Client Strategy. Wpromote has named Jared Malagon as Director, Client Strategy, adding to its client leadership team as the agency continues to integrate media, data, creative, and strategy across marketing programs. Malagon joins Wpromote in a role focused on client strategy and the development of integrated marketing approaches. The position involves connecting client business objectives with media and marketing strategies while working across teams responsible for planning, analytics, creative, and execution. The move comes as agency client strategy roles are becoming increasingly connected to measurement and business performance. As brands operate across paid search, social, programmatic, video, connected TV, retail media, and emerging channels, strategy leaders are increasingly required to consider how these channels work together rather than treating them as separate activities. Wpromote's current Director, Client Strategy function includes responsibility for developing full-funnel, multi-channel media strategies, aligning measurement approaches, and guiding audience and budget decisions. The role also involves working with analytics, creative, and business development teams to translate business objectives into marketing plans. Wpromote describes its operating model as bringing together strategy, media, creative, data, and technology. The agency also maintains capabilities across paid search and media, SEO, paid social, content marketing, digital intelligence, and other areas of digital marketing. Malagon's appointment comes as Wpromote continues to expand its integrated approach to marketing. The agency recently joined forces with Giant Spoon, bringing media, creative, and data capabilities into a broader operating structure. For Malagon, the new position places him within a client strategy function that increasingly sits between business priorities and marketing execution. His role will involve working across client relationships and internal teams as brands navigate a fragmented media environment and increasingly complex measurement requirements. The appointment reflects the broader shift in agency strategy roles toward connecting marketing activity with business objectives, data, and measurable outcomes.

How Wpromote cut cost per lead and drove award-winning growth for education provider. Think with Google Editorial Team Whether someone is picking an early childhood education provider, securing a mortgage for a new home, or choosing a specialized doctor, high-consideration buying journeys are long, complex, and laden with anxiety. Buyers don't click an ad and instantly sign on the dotted line. They consult friend groups, read local reviews, double-check credentials, and compare options across weeks or months. For lead-generation advertisers, this creates a major paradox. How do you engage prospective customers across an extended research journey while maintaining lead quality and avoiding overwhelming your call center and enrollment teams? Digital agency Wpromote solved this exact challenge when it partnered with Learning Care, a leader in early childhood education that operates 11 subbrands across more than 1,100 schools, proving how data strength and AI can turn complex research journeys into predictable growth. The award-winning Wpromote team, from left to right: Alison Buchheit, Lexi Hoffman, and Amy Adams. Why high-consideration leads fail to convert. Because of the complexity of these types of decisions, parents and prospective buyers bring complex, multilayered queries to Google, asking long questions, comparing local options, and weighing trade-offs. People frequently fill out initial contact forms simply to gather basic information. However, many traditional lead-gen advertising campaigns treat every form fill as a successful conversion, instead of optimizing for lead quality. Learning Care's media efficiency problem was causing organizational strain. Operating hundreds of local schools across brands like La Petite Academy, Childtime, and Tutor Time, Learning Care was generating strong lead volume online. Yet local enrollment teams and call-center staff absorbed friction, following up with inquiries that never translated into enrollments. Paid search has moved beyond lead generation and become a strategic driver of the broader business. Wpromote identified the core issue: Google Ads bidding algorithms were optimizing for shallow online form submissions, rather than qualified prospects. To address this, Wpromote reframed the measurement strategy from basic online form fills to CRM-validated "lead-activated" conversions as the primary offline conversion signal for bidding. "What excited me most was how this work brought our agency team and Learning Care's internal teams closer to the same ultimate goal: driving meaningful enrollment outcomes," said Lexi Hoffman, associate director, paid search at Wpromote. "It showed how paid search has moved beyond lead generation and become a more strategic driver of the broader business." Steering AI with first-party data. To align marketing spend with true business outcomes, Wpromote built a foundation of data strength. Using Data Manager, Wpromote securely linked Learning Care's customer relationship management (CRM) data directly into Google Ads. Wpromote upgraded the primary bidding signal in Google Ads by routing call-center-qualified leads directly into the system, bypassing shallow form submissions. In addition, full-funnel milestones including "tour scheduled," "tour given," and "registration" were imported for comprehensive full-funnel analysis and to support future value-based bidding strategies. Connecting offline CRM data to Google's AI bidding tools transforms digital ad campaigns into a predictable growth engine. With rich first-party signals guiding the campaigns, Wpromote deployed Google's full-stack AI suite across Search and YouTube. Here is where they focused. * Performance Max: Activated across Search, YouTube, Display, and Discover using CRM lead-activated data to identify and capture high-intent prospective families. * AI Max for Search: Deployed AI Max for Search alongside separate Broad Match testing initiatives with target CPA bidding, shifting away from static exact-match keyword lists to capture complex, long-tail search queries from researching parents. * Customer Match: Allowed Google's AI to reach high-intent audiences using privacy-safe, first-party customer signals. Proof that not all leads are created equal. By connecting offline CRM data to Google's AI bidding tools, Wpromote proved that not all leads are created equal, transforming Learning Care's digital ad campaign into a predictable growth engine. Stronger CRM-based lead-activated signals improved campaign optimization across the board, ultimately driving a 4X increase in downstream student registrations. "Strengthening the quality of our conversion data changed what was possible for the account," explained Hoffman. "It gave us the confidence to lean into AI-powered strategies, like AI Max and Performance Max, expand beyond the limitations of a more manual approach, and navigate the evolving search landscape without losing sight of the outcomes that matter most to Learning Care." The campaign delivered substantial efficiency and enrollment growth across every metric. These outstanding results earned Wpromote the 2026 Google Ads Impact Award for AI Excellence. The core takeaway for lead-gen advertisers. If your prospective customers face complex, research-heavy decisions, whether enrolling a child, securing a mortgage, or choosing a healthcare provider, a form fill is not the end of the journey. Optimizing for lead volume instead of lead quality wastes call center capacity and starves AI models of the signals they need. By building data strength and feeding downstream CRM outcomes back to Google Ads, you empower AI to capture intent earlier, personalize messaging, and deliver confirmed revenue to better support complex decision-making journeys. Think with Google Editorial Team.

Wpromote x Giant Spoon launches The Care Index(TM), connecting brand strength to revenue. Jun 17, 2026, 08:00 ET The new framework diagnoses where a brand's consumer relationships are breaking down, then translates those learnings into growth opportunities EL SEGUNDO, Calif., June 17, 2026 /PRNewswire/ - Just six months after joining forces, Wpromote x Giant Spoon has launched the Care Index(TM), a proprietary diagnostic framework for measuring long-term sustainable brand growth across three key drivers: know, like, and care. The Care Index identifies exactly where consumer connections fracture and diagnoses precisely where media and creative investments will yield the highest growth, giving the agency a foundation for translating insights into action. The Care Index evaluates where consumers stand in their relationship with a brand. Most brands can get people to know them. Fewer earn genuine affinity. But "care" is where real business value lives: that's the stage when consumers choose the brand over competitors, come back on their own, and recommend it to others. "When we came together as Wpromote x Giant Spoon six months ago, our primary mission was to eliminate silos between brand building and bottom-line performance," said Janna Navarro, VP, Managing Director at Wpromote, who led the development of the Care Index. "The Care Index is the realization of that vision. To drive growth, you need customers to know your brand, like you, and care about you. For the first time, we aren't just measuring that emotional care, we are translating it directly into media and creative actions that drive revenue." Using behavioral, engagement, and advocacy signals, the Care Index identifies exactly where consumers are dropping off and why. That diagnostic then shapes everything: which audiences to prioritize, what creative will spark the right interest, where to invest media dollars, and what success looks like. The same framework that diagnoses the brand problem also drives creative ideation and media planning. Audience targeting, messaging, and budget allocation all flow from the same source of truth, allowing creative and performance media teams to work in lockstep from day one. The Index continues to measure the brand's health so teams can refine strategy and optimize over time. Early validation of the Care Index across more than 100 mid-market B2C retail brands in 22 subcategories shows that each five-point increase in brand care correlates with approximately 10% increase in incremental annual revenue, establishing a clear financial value for brand-building efforts. In initial alpha testing, Care Score improvements correlated with next-month revenue results at 90%, suggesting the Index functions as a predictive signal, not just a diagnostic, and a source of agile brand insights that will help marketers move faster. "For years, CMOs have had to defend brand investment in a language CFOs don't speak," said Wpromote x Giant Spoon CEO Andrea Bendzick. "The Care Index changes that. When you can show that each point of care drives real revenue impact, and you have the data to back up where to invest next, you're not debating brand versus performance anymore. You're just talking about growth." Wpromote x Giant Spoon partnered with Northwestern University's Medill School Immersion Quarter Program to test and validate the Care Index. Through the initiative, the agency worked with a team of graduate marketing students to pressure-test early hypotheses and strengthen the framework, combining academic rigor with real-world marketing application. "We're working with students who'll be running marketing teams in a few years, so we focus on where the consumer journey is headed, not where it's been," said Ryan Reis, Northwestern Lecturer and Faculty Advisor. "Wpromote x Giant Spoon came to us because they wanted that perspective built into the framework from the start. Our students helped stress-test the early concepts and push back on what wasn't connecting." The Care Index(TM) is integrated into Wpromote x Giant Spoon's intelligence platform, Polaris IQ, giving clients real-time visibility into brand progress, with five clients across multiple industries currently participating in its alpha release. About Wpromote x Giant Spoon Wpromote x Giant Spoon is an independent, full-funnel marketing agency that unites brand and bottom line to drive measurable business growth. By integrating media, data, performance, and world-class creative, we help leading brands across industries like GE, Walmart, Vuori, and Intuit QuickBooks deliver immediate results while building long-term value. SOURCE Wpromote