Programmatic Acquisition Architecture
“Most marketplaces bid on ‘templates’ and wonder why CAC is high. Meanwhile, ‘minimal SaaS Framer template for startups 2024’ has zero competition and converts at 4x the rate.”

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Who Is This Actually For? (Hint: Not Everyone)

Is programmatic acquisition right for every business? This approach makes sense for marketplaces with hundreds of products, national companies with many locations, content publishers, voucher sites, or established affiliates—not for local businesses with 10 products or fewer.
Let me save you time if you’re the wrong fit. “People think programmatic acquisition is a one-size-fits-all solution,” I tell clients. “Technically, yes, the system works the same for three variants as it does for a thousand. But that’s like taking a nuke to a knife fight. It’s overkill.” This approach makes sense if you’re:
  • A marketplace or directory with hundreds of products across multiple categories
  • A national company with locations in every major city (think hundreds of location × service combinations)
  • A content publisher like Motley Fool pumping out monetized articles daily and needing to buy traffic at scale
  • A voucher or deals publisher managing thousands of brand relationships
  • An established affiliate ready to systematize beyond manual campaigns
If you’re a local plumber with three service areas, close this tab. Got 10 products total? Traditional PPC will serve you better.
“With 50 products and 10 modifiers—that’s 500 combinations—absolutely, go for it. But understand what you’re buying: a system. It’s an investment upfront, then you’re off to the races.”

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The Mental Model Shift That Changes Everything

What’s the key mindset change for programmatic acquisition? Shift from “What keywords should I bid on?” to “What problems can I solve for customers at different points in their journey?”—applying traditional product thinking to acquisition strategy.
Forget everything you think you know about PPC. “Most people start by thinking, ‘What keywords should I bid on?’” Wrong question entirely. The programmatic mindset requires a different frame. I ask clients to imagine this: “What if you had unlimited budget, unlimited time, and an unlimited team that could implement things immediately? What would you do differently?” But even that’s not quite right. The real shift happens when you flip it entirely:
“Start with the end goal. You want as many people as possible to click your affiliate link, buy your stuff, whatever. Work backwards from there. What is the customer doing? At what point? What problems can you solve? It’s traditional product thinking applied to acquisition.”
Every combination of product attributes is a human with their credit card out, searching for something specific.

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Why Programmatic Works (And Why It’s Not Magic)

What makes programmatic acquisition effective? It systematically targets long-tail keywords with lower competition and higher conversion rates, like “minimal SaaS Framer template for startups 2024” instead of competing on generic terms like “templates.”
After building and exiting Vouchernaut—which Groupon acquired after we dominated UK voucher PPC—I’ve applied this playbook multiple times. Each time, the same realization hits. “The holy shit moment isn’t one moment,” I explain. “It’s when you do the cost exercise. What would it take to hire someone in-house to do this manually? Even with spreadsheets and tools, it’s insane. Then you tick a few boxes, and off the revenue machine goes to print money.” Here’s what programmatic acquisition really means:

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Why Everyone Gets It Wrong

Picture a typical marketplace marketing team. They sit in a meeting room, brainstorm 20-30 keywords, set up campaigns, and call it a day. They bid on “templates” alongside everyone else, pay $2.50 per click, and wonder why CAC is astronomical. Meanwhile, someone searching for “minimal SaaS Framer template for startups 2024” can’t find what they want. Credit card out, ready to buy. Nobody’s bidding on it.
“The math is simple. Lower cost, higher conversion, less competition. But executing at scale? That requires systematic thinking.”

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The Toolzilla Experiment: Lessons from the Trenches

What did the Toolzilla experiment teach about modern programmatic strategies? Key lessons included building self-healing scrapers using AI, discovering that direct-linking to marketplaces tripled conversions, and learning that affiliate success requires platform relationships, not just automation.
To validate these strategies with modern AI tools, I built Toolzilla—aggregating design assets from 50+ platforms. Not to brag about revenue (the test numbers were solid but that’s not the point), but to learn what works in 2024.

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The Self-Healing Innovation Nobody Talks About

The biggest challenge wasn’t building scrapers—any developer can do that. It was maintaining them. “When you’re scraping 50 sites, something breaks daily. I spent entire weekends just fixing broken scrapers, watching my aggregation engine slowly fall apart.” The solution came from applying programmatic thinking to the problem itself. Instead of fixing scrapers manually, I built scrapers that fixed themselves:
  1. Scraper fails
  2. System detects the failure pattern
  3. LLM analyzes the new page structure
  4. Rewrites extraction code automatically
  5. Tests and deploys if successful
This handled 80% of maintenance automatically. Not perfect, but it turned a full-time job into a weekly check-in. This is where it gets good.
“I always ask: instead of solving problems, how can we skip them? How can we bypass them entirely? Sometimes the best growth tactic is to not do anything and let the problem solve itself.”
I’d built this beautiful search interface with TypeSense, sub-100ms response times, perfect filtering. Then I had a thought: What if I skip my own website?
  • Traditional funnel: Ad → My site → Click → Marketplace → Maybe purchase
  • Direct funnel: Ad → Marketplace (with affiliate code) → Purchase
Conversions tripled overnight. The “landing page” became just a testing ground for finding winning combinations.

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The Expensive Lessons (So You Don’t Repeat Them)

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You Can’t Force Scale in Affiliate

“You can’t force affiliate. You can’t force scaling. You have a relationship with partners at the end of the day.” Here’s what killed the momentum: Framer didn’t want Google as my primary acquisition source. I can respect that—they’re trying to build their own brand, and affiliate is a channel, not a business model.
“Go into this understanding: in affiliate, you can’t do whatever you want. You’re essentially a servant to the brand. But if you’re doing this for your own brand? You’re king. You get to do what you want.”

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The 90-Day Cash Flow Trap

This one almost killed Vouchernaut, and it’s crucial for anyone considering programmatic affiliate. “I started spending £200 a month, then quickly scaled to £5-10k. With a 90-day lag on payment, I was in over my head with costs. If I took my foot off the pedal, I wouldn’t have grown as fast. But keeping it down meant potential bankruptcy.” The lesson? Have a plan. Have funding. Or have patience. You can’t have none of the three.

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Building Trust Can’t Be Programmatic

One thing that can’t be automated: relationships.
“Nothing beats human connection. There are tricks to building trust programmatically—you can read the Vouchernaut case study for those—but if you don’t have that connection, you’re going to be seen as a problematic affiliate.”
Being able to jump on UK calls during UK hours, talking strategy, positioning yourself as a partner rather than a parasite—that matters more than perfect automation.

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Calculate Your Reality (Not Your Dreams)

How do you model realistic programmatic acquisition returns? Factor in setup costs, cash flow gaps (often 90 days for affiliate payments), platform fees, and relationship building time—the calculator shows potential, but success requires surviving the investment period.
Before you get excited about 30x returns, model your actual situation. This calculator factors in the realities of cash flow, setup costs, and platform fees:
A Reality Check on the CalculatorThose numbers look amazing, right? Remember: this assumes you’ve already built the system, negotiated rates, established trust with platforms, and survived the cash flow gap. Budget accordingly.

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The Playbook: From Theory to Implementation

What are the core phases of programmatic acquisition implementation? The process involves understanding your inventory through data analysis, building scalable campaign architecture with single keyword ad groups, and implementing automation that matters while maintaining human oversight.
Let me walk you through how this actually works, using Toolzilla as the example.

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Phase 1: Understanding Your Inventory Isn’t Optional

You can’t generate keywords for products you don’t understand. This isn’t about having a spreadsheet with SKUs. It’s about knowing every meaningful attribute that affects purchase intent. For Toolzilla, that meant:
  • Scraping 50+ platforms (most had no APIs)
  • Using LLMs to categorize based on visual and text analysis
  • Creating a unified taxonomy from chaos
“Every platform had different categories. What Framer called ‘landing pages,’ Webflow called ‘marketing sites.’ The LLM approach let me standardize without manual work.”

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Phase 2: The Campaign Architecture That Scales

Forget everything you know about campaign structure. Programmatic requires discipline: 
Campaign: Category_Intent_Modifier
  └── Ad Group: ONE keyword (SKAG)
      └── Ads: Dynamic insertion based on keyword
          └── Landing: Filtered to exact match
Why single keyword ad groups (SKAGs)? Because at scale, you need to know exactly what’s working. No guessing which keyword in a themed group drives performance.

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Phase 3: Automation That Actually Matters

“People think automation means set-and-forget. That’s how you burn money.” The automation that matters:
  • Feed updates: When products change, campaigns pause automatically
  • Bid adjustments: Based on actual conversion data, not Google’s suggestions
  • Creative refresh: Adding current dates increased CTR by 65%
But weekly human review? Non-negotiable.

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Advanced Strategies from the Field

What are some lesser-known programmatic acquisition tactics? Timing opportunities like January “New Year, New Website” campaigns, using specific inventory counts for credibility (“847 Templates” vs “Browse Templates”), and optimizing quality scores before bid management.

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Seasonal Timing Most Miss

Forget Black Friday. Everyone’s there. The real opportunities: “January is gold. ‘New Year, New Website’ isn’t just a cliché—it drives 3x normal conversion. March has ‘Spring Launch’ positioning. September gets ‘Fall Refresh.’ Same conversion rates as Black Friday, fraction of the competition.”

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The Inventory Count Psychology

Simple psychology:
  • Generic: “Browse Templates”
  • Specific: “Choose from 847 Templates”
Specificity signals abundance and credibility. It’s not lying—you’re literally telling them what you have. But that number makes the click.

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The Quality Score Optimization Most Miss

“A quality score of 8+ reduces CPC by 25%. But everyone obsesses over bid management instead of fixing their quality scores first.” The fix is usually simple: better keyword-to-ad-to-landing alignment. If someone searches for “minimal SaaS template,” your ad better mention “minimal SaaS template,” and your landing better show minimal SaaS templates. Sounds obvious. Most don’t do it.

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The Hard Truth About When to Walk Away

When should you stop a programmatic acquisition project? Consider stopping when maintenance overhead exceeds value creation, when platform relationships become restrictive, or when the insights gained become more valuable applied elsewhere than continuing the single project.
Not every experiment needs to become a business. With Toolzilla, I made a strategic decision that surprises people. “With those returns, why stop? The decision was strategic. The maintenance overhead of 50+ scrapers would require either hiring a team—turning it into a traditional business—or using expensive services that would kill margins.” The insights gained became more valuable applied to client projects than running a single aggregator. Sometimes the win is in the learning, not the running.

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The Reality of Getting This Built

What’s the difference between agency and systematic approaches to programmatic acquisition? Agencies often provide manual labor dressed as expertise with ongoing retainers, while systematic approaches build the infrastructure once for your team to use forever without monthly dependencies.

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The Agency Trap

Here’s what happens when you hire a typical agency for this: They’ll be chomping at the bit to take your retainer. Why? Because they’ll just offset it to some junior doing data entry at scale. It’s manual work dressed up as expertise.
“Agencies love this because it’s recurring revenue for them. But they’re not building you a system—they’re selling you labor. Your marketing team ends up in 24/7 ads maintenance instead of working on strategy that actually moves the needle.”

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The WithSeismic Difference

We build the system once. Your team uses it forever. No monthly retainer for manual work. No junior data entry. Just a programmatic engine that runs while your team focuses on what matters.

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Should You Even Bother?

Don’t waste your time if:
  • You have fewer than 50 products (the math doesn’t work)
  • Your margins can’t handle 20-30% CAC
  • You need profit in month one (this takes 90 days minimum)
  • You think this is set-and-forget (it’s not)

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The Bottom Line

What’s the key decision point for programmatic acquisition? The choice is between continuing to pay for manual campaign management that doesn’t scale or investing in a systematic approach that operates by different rules and creates compound value over time.
Every marketplace leaves money on the table because they think in campaigns, not systems. They hire agencies to do manual work at scale instead of building the infrastructure once. The playbook works. We’ve proven it multiple times. The question is whether you want to keep paying for manual campaign management or invest in a system that scales.
“The difference between marketplaces that struggle and those that thrive isn’t budget—it’s methodology. Programmatic acquisition is that methodology. But only if you’re willing to think differently about the problem.”

Read the Vouchernaut Case Study

See how this approach drove 60% of revenue and led to Groupon acquisition

Discuss Your Situation

Let’s talk about whether programmatic acquisition makes sense for your specific business