Fix the measurement before you touch the bids.
Automated bidding optimises towards whatever you tell it a conversion is. If that signal is wrong, the system gets very good at buying the wrong thing. Here is how we check it.
Ask a small business owner to show you their brand and they will usually show you a logo. Ask them to show you last month's social posts, their proposal template, their van livery and their website, and you will often see four slightly different businesses.
That is not a failure of taste. It is what happens when a brand is delivered as a file rather than as a set of decisions. Every new piece of material means someone improvising: which blue, which typeface, how big the logo goes, whether the headline is in capitals. Each choice is reasonable on its own. Together, over a year, they drift.
A working brand identity is the logo plus the rules that make every later decision quick and consistent.
What the rules actually need to cover
It is a shorter list than the hundred-page guidelines documents of large companies suggest. For most businesses, these decisions do nearly all of the work.
Positioning in a sentence or two. What you do, for whom, and what you will not do. This sounds like strategy rather than design, but it is what every headline and caption is written against. Without it, visual consistency just makes inconsistent messages look tidy.
The mark, and its limits. The logo in its full version, a compact version for small spaces, and the smallest size at which each still reads. A mark that turns to mush at 16 pixels will fail in browser tabs, app icons and social avatars, which is where most people see it most often.
Colour, with jobs attached. Not just a palette, but what each colour is for: which is the background, which is for text, which is reserved for the one thing you want people to click. When colours have jobs, people stop picking them by mood. It also means checking text and background pairs for contrast, so the palette works for people with low vision rather than failing them quietly.
Type, with a scale. One or two typefaces, the sizes you use, and which size is for what. A typographic scale removes a surprising amount of daily decision-making and does more for visual consistency than almost anything else.
Space and layout. Margins, the grid, how much room the logo needs around it. This is the rule that separates material that looks designed from material that looks assembled.
Imagery. What kind of photography or illustration you use, and just as importantly what you do not. If you have no photography yet, say so and set a rule for what fills the gap, rather than letting stock images decide your character.
Voice. A few lines on how you write, with examples of the words you use and the words you avoid. Visual identity without a voice produces a well-dressed business that sounds like everyone else.
Why a short guide beats a long one
The guidelines only work if people use them, and people do not read long documents under deadline. We aim for a guide someone can absorb in ten minutes and keep open while they work: each rule stated once, with a correct and an incorrect example beside it.
The guide should also say who decides when a new situation comes up that the rules do not cover. Brands rarely drift because someone ignored a rule. They drift because nobody knew whose call it was.
Templates do the rest
Rules make decisions quick. Templates make them unnecessary. Once the system is set, the most useful thing to build is a small kit of the materials you actually produce: a social post in each size you publish, a proposal, a presentation, an email signature, a letterhead. Built properly, the kit carries the rules inside it, so your team fills in content rather than designing from scratch each time.
That is also where the investment pays back. A brand that holds together across a hundred small pieces of material is noticed as a business that has its act together, which is exactly the impression a new or growing business needs to give.
Files people can find
The last part is the least exciting and the most often neglected: a single, well-organised set of files. Every logo version in the formats you will need (vector for print, PNG and SVG for screens), the colour values written out for screen and print, the fonts with their licences, and the templates. Named clearly, in one shared place, owned by you.
If any of those is missing, someone will eventually recreate the logo from a screenshot, and the drift starts again.
Where to start
If your brand already exists but has drifted, you usually do not need a new logo. You need the rules written down, the palette given jobs, and the templates rebuilt. That is a smaller, faster piece of work than a rebrand, and it is often what the business needed all along.
If you are starting from nothing, start with the positioning sentence. Every other decision is easier once that is settled.
