Paid Advertising
Paid advertising is the easiest place to waste money quietly, because the platforms are designed to spend your budget whether or not it is working. Google will happily show your ad to someone who typed “free” in front of the thing you sell.
An account review before you commit to anything — you get the findings whether or not you go ahead · Conversion tracking built or repaired first, with GA4 and call tracking where it is worth it · Offline conversion import where your sales cycle is long enough to need it · Campaign, ad group and keyword structure organised so budget can be controlled and performance can be read
On this page
- Whose advertising account is it, and who pays for the media?
- Whose account is it, and what should you insist on?
- Which paid advertising platforms do we run?
- Google Ads or Meta — which should you start with?
- What do we do differently from most PPC agencies?
- How much should you budget before you can tell whether it works?
- What is a realistic cost per enquiry for your business?
- What drives the cost of managing paid advertising?
- Is your ad spend big enough to be worth managing?
- How does paid advertising fit with organic and social?
Whose advertising account is it, and who pays for the media?
The account is yours and you pay the platforms directly. This matters more than most people realise, so it comes before anything else.
- The advertising account is yours. Registered to your business, your card, your name on it. You can log in at any time and see every penny.
- You pay the platforms directly. We never buy media through our own account and invoice you a bundled figure. Agencies that do this are hiding the ratio between what you paid them and what actually reached Google.
- We do not mark up media. Our fee is our fee, stated separately — the same principle that runs through the rest of our digital marketing plans.
- If we part company, you keep everything — the account, the campaign history, the conversion data, the learning the algorithm has accumulated. That last one has real value, and losing it is a genuine cost of switching agencies who own your account.
Whose account is it, and what should you insist on?
Insist on the account sitting in your own billing, administrator access in your name, conversion tracking you can read yourself, the search terms report every month, no conversion actions owned by the agency, and a written exit that leaves the history with you. Any agency worth hiring agrees to all of it.
- The account in your own billing. Your company name on it, your card or direct debit paying Google and Meta. If the agency's payment method is on the account, the campaign history is effectively theirs and your leverage at renewal is nil.
- Administrator access rather than a read-only view. The agency should be added to your account, not you to theirs. It costs nothing to set up correctly at the start and it decides who holds what at the end.
- Conversion tracking you can see and check. You should be able to log in and read what a conversion is defined as. If one fires on every page load, or counts a click on a telephone number as a sale, the reported cost per enquiry is fiction and the bidding algorithm is being trained on that fiction.
- The search terms report, unedited, every month. Not the keyword list — the actual searches that triggered your ads. It is the quickest way for a non-specialist to judge whether an account is being looked after, and it is the report agencies are least keen to volunteer.
- No agency-owned conversion actions. Where the conversion action lives in the agency's own Google Ads account and is merely shared with yours, leaving costs you the conversion history and the learning attached to it. It is a quick check inside the interface and it comes up far more often than it should.
- Tracking that lives on your own website, in containers you own. Tag Manager and analytics set up under your accounts, so the tags survive the relationship — the same principle as owning the site those tags are installed on rather than renting it.
- The fee stated separately from the media. One bundled invoice hides the ratio between what you paid and what actually reached the platform. Ask for both figures side by side; how readily they arrive tells you most of what you need to know, much as it does when weighing up a freelancer, an agency or hiring in-house.
- A clean exit, written down. Access revoked rather than campaigns deleted, administrator rights handed back, tracking left intact, and no notice period that outlasts the value of leaving.
Which paid advertising platforms do we run?
Six campaign types across Google, Meta and LinkedIn. We will recommend the ones your market supports rather than all six.
- Google Search Ads. The core of most paid programmes. People typing what you sell, with intent already formed. Expensive per click and the highest-intent traffic available.
- Google Shopping. For e-commerce. Product feed management, which is most of the work and where most Shopping campaigns are actually won or lost — and where having the team that handles the store build itself removes a whole class of feed problem.
- Performance Max and display. Useful in some cases, and worth scrutiny — these campaign types give Google a great deal of discretion over where your money goes. We will use them where they work and tell you when we think the reporting is too opaque to justify the spend.
- Remarketing. Reaching people who visited and did not convert. Cheap relative to cold traffic, and the most commonly neglected easy win.
- Meta advertising on Facebook and Instagram. Different job from search. Search captures demand that already exists; paid social creates it. Works when you can define an audience precisely and have something worth interrupting them for. Better for consumer products and considered B2C than for niche B2B.
- LinkedIn advertising. Expensive per click and sometimes worth it. Justified when you sell something high-value to a job title you can name. Rarely justified otherwise.
Google Ads or Meta — which should you start with?
Start with Google Ads if people already search for what you sell, and with Meta if they do not yet know they need it. That one question settles the decision more often than budget does. The differences below matter once you have answered it.
| Google Ads | Meta | |
|---|---|---|
| What the person is doing when they see it | Typing the thing they want into a search box, often with a problem that has already become urgent. The intent is formed before your ad appears. | Scrolling. They were not looking for you and they were not looking for anything. Your ad interrupts something else, so it has to earn the attention before it can sell anything. |
| How fast it produces enquiries | Quickly, where demand exists. The constraint is usually budget and competition rather than time — if people are searching, the clicks start the day it goes live. | Slower to settle. Audience and creative both have to be found, and the first version of each is rarely the one that ends up working. |
| What creative it needs | Text, mostly — headlines, descriptions and extensions — plus a landing page built for the ad rather than the homepage. | Images and video, in volume, refreshed as they tire. A business already producing photography for its own organic accounts starts with a real advantage here. |
| What it costs to test | Higher per click, often lower in total to learn something, because a modest number of high-intent clicks tells you whether the demand converts. For retailers the test is usually Shopping rather than Search, which makes it a product feed problem before it is an advertising problem. | Lower per click, and it can take a great many more of them before the answer is clear. Cheap traffic that does not convert is not cheap. |
| What it is bad at | Creating demand. Nobody searches for a category they have never heard of, and no amount of budget fixes that. | Capturing urgency. Someone with a burst pipe is not browsing Instagram, and the best targeting in the world will not rescue an offer nobody wants. |
| Where it quietly wastes money | Broad match and Performance Max spending on searches that were never going to buy, unless somebody reads the search terms report every month and acts on it. | Audience overlap, automatic placements nobody has checked, and clicks from people who will happily watch a video and never become customers. |
What do we do differently from most PPC agencies?
Four things, and the first two are the reason accounts we take over usually improve before any bid is touched.
- We fix the tracking first. More paid accounts than you would believe are optimising towards a conversion event that fires on every page load, or towards nothing at all. Until conversion tracking is accurate, the platform's algorithm is being trained on noise and every optimisation decision is a guess.
- We check the landing page before increasing the budget. Sending more traffic to a page that does not convert is the most expensive mistake in paid advertising. If the page is the problem, we will say so — and we can rebuild it, which most PPC agencies cannot. Fixing the page rather than buying more clicks is frequently the cheaper answer.
- We use negative keywords properly. The single biggest source of waste in most Google Ads accounts is money spent on searches that were never going to buy — “free”, “jobs”, “salary”, “DIY”, “how to”, competitor names, and the long tail of irrelevance the platform will match you to if nobody is watching.
- We report on cost per enquiry. Not cost per click, not impression share. What it costs you to get one person to make contact, by campaign.
How much should you budget before you can tell whether it works?
Enough to buy a meaningful number of conversions every week, for long enough to see a pattern rather than a run of noise. That is the whole answer, and the figure is different for every business because it is built from three things you already know or can find out: what a click costs in your sector, how many clicks it takes to produce one enquiry, and how long your sales cycle runs.
Start with the conversion count. Automated bidding learns from conversions, and so does the person reading the report. If the account produces only a trickle of enquiries a week, a quiet week and a good week look identical, the algorithm has nothing to optimise towards, and every decision made on top of that data is a guess dressed up as analysis. The budget that matters is not a monthly total — it is whatever buys enough conversions per week that a change in performance is visible as a change rather than as noise.
Then adjust for the two things that stretch the learning period. A long sales cycle means the enquiries arriving now will not be known to be good or bad for a while, so the budget has to cover the gap between spending the money and knowing what it bought. Expensive clicks — the legal, insurance, emergency trade and high-value B2B markets, where several well-funded bidders are chasing the same search — mean the same conversion count costs considerably more to reach. Multiply your realistic cost per click by the clicks it takes to get one enquiry, then by the enquiries a week you need before the data means anything, and you have your floor. If that floor is more than you are prepared to lose while finding out, paid search is not where this quarter's money should go, and building organic visibility instead is the slower, cheaper route. The same arithmetic collapses entirely if the page receiving the click cannot turn it into an enquiry, which is why we look at that before we look at bids.
What is a realistic cost per enquiry for your business?
The one you can afford, which you work out rather than look up. Take what a customer is worth to you over the whole relationship, decide what share of that you are willing to give up to win one, then divide by the proportion of enquiries that actually become customers. The result is your ceiling, and any benchmark you read elsewhere is somebody else's business.
Each of those three inputs is worth being honest about. Customer value means margin, not revenue, and it means the repeat work and the referrals as well as the first job — which is why a maintenance contractor whose first job starts years of work and a trader whose average customer buys once can afford wildly different figures for the identical click. The share you will give up is a commercial decision about what growth is worth to you, not a rule. And the close rate is the number most businesses guess, and guess high: knowing it properly means recording what happened to every enquiry instead of remembering the ones that went well.
Then compare your ceiling with what the market actually charges for a click in your sector, multiplied by the clicks it takes to produce one enquiry. If the market price sits above your ceiling, paid search will not work at any budget, and no amount of management skill or clever bidding changes that — it is arithmetic, not execution. Finding that out before you commit is exactly the point of the account review, and it is the same calculation sitting underneath the choice between earning the position and paying for it. Where the ceiling is comfortably above the market price, the question stops being whether to advertise and becomes how much you can profitably spend.
The point
If the market price sits above your ceiling, paid search will not work at any budget, and no amount of management skill or clever bidding changes that — it is arithmetic, not execution.
What drives the cost of managing paid advertising?
The management fee is a flat monthly amount or a percentage of ad spend, whichever is greater. Percentage-of-spend creates an incentive to recommend spending more, so the flat floor exists to blunt that and we will tell you when to cut budget. Setup is a separate one-off where an account has to be built or rebuilt, and the media itself is always paid by you, directly to the platform.
| Service | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Management fee | Ongoing management across Google Ads and paid social — search term reviews, negatives, bids, budgets, ad testing and monthly reporting. A flat monthly amount or a percentage of ad spend, whichever is greater. |
| Account setup and structure | One-off, where an account needs building or rebuilding: tracking, campaign structure, keywords, ad copy. |
| Account review | What exists, what is working, what is wasting money. You get the findings whether or not you go ahead. |
Is your ad spend big enough to be worth managing?
Ad spend is separate and paid by you directly to Google or Meta. Below a certain level of monthly spend there is usually not enough data for management to add much value, and you may be better running it yourself with a good initial setup. We will tell you if that is your situation.
How We Work
Account review
What exists, what is working, what is wasting money. You get the findings whether or not you go ahead.
Tracking
Conversion events, GA4, call tracking where it is worth it, offline conversion import if your sales cycle is long. Nothing else starts until this is right.
Structure
Campaigns, ad groups and keywords organised so that budget can be controlled and performance can be read.
Launch and learn
The first two to four weeks are the platform learning. Judging performance before that period is complete produces bad decisions.
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Frequently Asked Questions
How much should I spend on Google Ads?
Work backwards from what a customer is worth rather than picking a figure. Customer value, the share of it you will give up to win one, and your conversion rates together tell you what a click can afford to cost. Below a certain level of spend there is rarely enough data to optimise, and we will say so.
How quickly will I see results from paid advertising?
Clicks immediately. Enquiries usually within the first fortnight, where the demand already exists. Efficient enquiries later, once there is enough conversion data for the platform to learn from — how much later depends on how many conversions a week your budget buys and how long your sales cycle runs. Anyone promising efficiency in week one is guessing.
Do you take a percentage of ad spend?
Our fee is a flat monthly amount or a percentage of spend, whichever is greater. We are aware that percentage-of-spend creates an incentive to recommend spending more, which is why there is a flat floor and why we will tell you when to reduce budget. Ask any agency how they handle that conflict — the answer is informative.
Who owns the advertising account?
You do. It is registered to your business with your own payment method on it, and you keep the account, its campaign history and its conversion data if we part company. Administrator access stays in your name throughout, which is the part that decides who holds what at the end.
Should I do SEO or PPC?
Both, usually, doing different jobs. PPC for immediate volume and for the competitive terms organic cannot realistically win. Search engine optimisation for the compounding value that continues after you stop paying. If you can only do one and you need enquiries this quarter, start with PPC.
Can you work with our existing Google Ads account?
Yes, and we would generally prefer to — an established account carries conversion history that is worth keeping. We will review it, tell you honestly whether it needs restructuring or just better management, and only rebuild if rebuilding is genuinely the better option.
What if paid advertising does not work for us?
Some markets do not respond to paid search, and some products cannot support the cost per acquisition it demands. If that is what the data shows after a fair test, we will tell you and recommend stopping rather than continuing to bill you for management.
Do you run Meta ads as well as Google Ads?
Yes. Facebook and Instagram campaigns are managed on the same terms as Google — your account, your spend, no markup. They do a different job from search: search captures demand that already exists, paid social creates it, and it works best for consumer products and considered B2C rather than niche B2B.
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