Performance Marketing · Paid Media

John D. Wendler

I build paid acquisition programs from zero — and scale them efficiently.

Seven-plus years owning paid media across Google and Meta. I built a nonprofit's entire acquisition engine from the ground up, and turned around online revenue for small e-commerce clients. Data decides; I execute.

$1.6M+
Managed spend
35×
Lead growth
7+ yrs
Paid media
$0 · start scaled
Selected Work

Three programs, three different jobs — all built to measure.

Scalable Event Acquisition
From unmeasured event to proven channel
37:1
Return on event spend, measured over 5 years
Challenge
The event predated me but ran essentially blind — no landing page, no email capture, only token ad spend, and no tracking of who actually enrolled afterward. Its value to the funnel was assumed, never measured, and never funded to perform.
What I did
Built the whole acquisition system from scratch: landing page, paid campaigns, conversion tracking, and downstream enrollment attribution matching roughly 6,900 registrants against five years of student records. Funded the ads to a level where they could actually work — instead of the token budgets of prior years — and surfaced the delayed, multi-year conversions no one had been counting.
Result
Lifted registrant-to-enrollment conversion from 2% to 7%, scaled the program past 6,800 registrants, and proved a strong multi-year return. Bigger picture: it established events as a repeatable, high-converting acquisition channel for the organization — not a line-item cost.
Audience Building
Filling the top of the funnel
54K+
Registrants from a single launch
Challenge
Growth was capped by a shallow top of funnel. Too few new people were discovering the brand, which starved everything downstream.
What I did
Launched Masterclass, a free online teaching event built to introduce cold audiences to the organization's style and content. Ran it across Meta and Google as a brand-and-acquisition play, optimizing for the volume of genuinely new prospects rather than instant conversions.
Result
A single launch pulled in more than 54,000 registrants and became the largest single source of net-new prospects entering the funnel — cold audiences that keep converting to enrollment over the long term, not just at first touch.
Conversion Optimization · Freelance
From 3 sales a year to 3 a month
~12×
Order volume, from the same traffic
Challenge
A small e-commerce retailer had steady site traffic but almost no sales — roughly three a year. A confusing layout and thin trust signals meant the visitors who arrived had little reason to buy, so the traffic never converted.
What I did
Rebuilt the store for conversion: restructured the page layout, sharpened the offers, and added the trust factors the old site lacked — so the visitors already arriving finally had a clear reason to purchase.
Result
With no increase in traffic, orders climbed within the first 30 days and settled at about three a month — roughly a 12× lift over the prior year, purely from converting visitors the site was already getting.
How I Work

Measurement first. The spend follows the evidence.

Tracking from scratch

I build the measurement, not just the campaigns

Stood up an organization's first analytics, conversion pixels, CRM migration, and a multi-touch attribution model spanning hundreds of thousands of records.

Attribution that acts

Findings that move budget

Traced conversions downstream and found one channel converted at roughly 10× the rate of another despite far lower volume — then reweighted spend around real value, not surface cost-per-lead.

Budget ownership

Accountable to efficiency

Manage to CAC, cost-per-lead, and efficiency targets; forecast spend across channels and markets; and translate the numbers into business impact for senior stakeholders.

AI-native workflow

Faster analysis and creative

Use Claude and ChatGPT daily — data analysis, campaign strategy, and creative — held to the same quality bar as my own work.

Get in touch

Let's build something that scales.

Open to performance and growth marketing roles. Happy to walk through any of this in detail.

John.Wendler88@gmail.com LinkedIn ↗