About Colton Wilkinson

Colton Wilkinson is a Senior Strategy Consultant at WebFX. Since joining WebFX in September 2018, he has moved through five roles in eight years, progressing from Internet Marketing Specialist to his current position, where he leads paid media strategy for the company’s own brand portfolio — webfx.com, SEO.com, and the B2B CRM platform Nutshell — directing ad spend across Google, Meta, LinkedIn, and other channels, while also leading strategy and solution engineering for the sales organization.

Before his current role, as Lead Consultant at WebFX from 2023 to 2025, Colton managed $1.2–1.3 million of ad spend per month, not to be outdone by his career $10M+ in spend management, across a portfolio of about a dozen client accounts, including some of the company’s largest partnerships, consulting on paid media and SEO strategy across more than 29 industries. On one account, he diagnosed an internal linking gap that drove 43% year-over-year organic revenue growth and a 123% improvement in organic ROI. On another, a home services client facing a planned 58% cut to paid search spend, he shifted the paid strategy ahead of the reduction, resulting in an 84% improvement in closed-lead conversion rate despite the smaller budget.

Colton’s reputation inside WebFX rests less on any single campaign than on the systems he’s built. He designed and continues to refine WebFX’s forecasting methodology, which has informed more than 700 new clients since its inception. He also designed and launched a cross-functional Experiment Charter process that formalizes test parameters, secures leadership sign-off, and centralizes results tracking. That same judgment has made him a go-to resource for his team, who frequently seek out his advice on navigating complex and ambiguous strategic circumstances.

His approach to Google Ads starts from a simple premise: the platform, for all its apparent complexity, behaves like a system that will always take the shortest path to whatever reward signal it’s given. In his view, that’s exactly why getting extremely specific about data signals and bid strategy targets matters more than most advertisers assume — vague inputs produce a system that optimizes for the wrong thing.

Colton constantly looks for ways to improve his work, and it shows up in the AI-assisted workflow tools he’s built for the team, which have enabled them to level up their skills and effectiveness — exactly the kind of work that made him WebFX’s go-to resource for applying AI to PPC strategy and forecasting. He’s also credited as an expert contributor (and executor) on WebFX’s published breakdown of a value-based bidding overhaul that cut cost per qualified lead 47% year-over-year by fixing the conversion signal feeding Google’s bidding algorithm — work that also reduced customer acquisition cost 30% and grew pipeline value 17%.

When ChatGPT announced it would begin testing ads, SEO.com sat him down for a Q&A on what it would mean for advertisers. He argued that ad engagement would likely bleed into ChatGPT’s organic recommendations the way Google’s 2024 API leak suggested paid and organic visibility aren’t as separate as platforms claim, and flagged the uneven information diet that ads could create between free and paid AI tiers.

Outside the agency, he was named a SCORE Volunteer of the Year for pro bono digital marketing consulting and website strategy work with small business owners, and was invited to speak at Weber State University on communications and the impact of AI.

Ask Colton what he’d tell someone new to PPC or forecasting, and the answer isn’t a growth hack. It’s fundamentals — "get genuinely good at the basics," he says, "and the rest tends to fall into place." He’s more animated talking about where the discipline is headed: "As bidding systems get more automated and harder to see inside, having a clean revenue signal and closed-loop reporting back to the platform is turning into less of a nice-to-have and more of a prerequisite for running ads effectively at all."

Colton holds a B.S. in Business Administration and Management from Mount Aloysius College, along with certifications spanning Google Ads, Google Analytics, Google Shopping Ads, HubSpot Inbound Marketing, OmniSEO, and AI-Powered Performance Ads, plus Subject Matter Expert-level certifications in forecasting, conversion tracking, results diagnostics, and more.

Outside of work, he spends time on the golf course, reading, tending his garden, and taking on projects around the house.

He can be reached via LinkedIn.