Paid media where every pound is watched

The organisation

Trainline is one of the biggest names in rail booking, with millions of customers and a marketing operation to match. At that size, paid advertising stops being about individual ads and becomes a system: structured accounts, constant testing, and reporting that people actually make decisions from.

Working inside a large in house team is its own skill. There are channel specialists, analysts, brand guardians and product teams, and your work has to fit alongside all of them. Nothing ships on a whim, and that is a feature, not a bug.

What we did

Our focus was performance: keeping campaigns healthy day to day and making them steadily better through structured testing.

• Paid search and paid social campaign management at scale, across accounts far too big to run on instinct
• Creative testing with a proper method: clear hypotheses, clean comparisons and decisions made on the numbers rather than on taste
• Audience and budget management, moving spend towards the segments and placements that earned it
• Performance reporting that told stakeholders what happened, why it happened and what we would do next
• Working within a large in house marketing organisation, coordinating with analysts, brand and product teams to keep campaigns aligned

What it taught us

Scale forces honesty. When budgets are large and results are visible to everyone, you cannot hide behind vanity metrics or a nicely designed report. Either the numbers moved or they did not. That habit of judging work by outcomes, not effort, is one we have kept.

It also taught us that most paid media wins are boring. Tighter account structure, cleaner tracking, one clear message per ad, budgets reviewed on a schedule rather than a whim. Small businesses often think big companies have secret tactics. They mostly have discipline, and discipline is portable.

Drawn from work with this organisation. Some details are generalised for confidentiality.