Paid Advertising
Paid advertising built around real business results
Google Ads and paid social can put you in front of potential customers within days rather than months. But good results depend on far more than raising the budget.
We work on the targeting, the messaging, the landing pages, the conversion tracking and the ongoing optimisation, so the advertising is judged on what it brings into the business.
Every campaign should have a job to do
The platform is the second question. The first is what you need the campaign to achieve.
“We should probably be doing some Google Ads” is a reasonable instinct, but it isn't a brief. Once we know what a good result looks like, and roughly what it's worth to you, the platform, targeting and budget tend to sort themselves out.
Generating enquiries
Selling products
Promoting one service
Reaching a new area
Valuation requests
Filling appointments
Supporting a launch
Remarketing
01
Platform
Google Ads
Google Ads earns its place when people are already looking for what you do. Someone typing “BMW performance specialist near me” has a need right now, and search advertising lets you be there for it. That's very different from interrupting someone's afternoon.
Search campaigns
Shopping
Performance Max
Display
Remarketing
Local campaigns
Performance Max only where it suits the account. It hands a lot of control to Google, which is fine for some businesses and a problem for others.
02
Platform
Facebook & Instagram
Paid social works on a different footing. Nobody on Instagram is actively searching for a new driveway or a remap, so the job is to reach the right people before they start looking, and to be memorable enough that they come back when they do.
That makes it strong for visual work, for remarketing to people who've already visited the site, and for local awareness. It's usually weaker than search when someone is ready to buy today.
New audiences
Visual products
Remarketing
Lead generation
Local campaigns
Awareness
03
Everything else
Other channels, when they fit
We don't recommend every platform to every client. Some of these are excellent for the right business and a waste of money for the wrong one, so the honest answer usually depends on who you're trying to reach.
Worth considering for B2B, professional services and recruitment. Expensive per click, which only matters if the leads aren't worth it.
Microsoft Ads
Smaller audience than Google, often cheaper, and skews older and more corporate. Sometimes a quiet win.
YouTube
Needs decent video to be worth doing. Strong for demonstrating a product or a process people don't understand yet.
Managing an account well
Google Ads
Anyone can increase clicks. Doubling the budget will do it. The harder and more useful question is which searches are producing enquiries worth having, and which ones are quietly spending money every month.
What's easy to buy
Traffic
What we're after
Commercially useful traffic
Negative keywords are a good example. Nobody finds them exciting, but stripping out the searches that will never convert is often the single fastest way to make an account cheaper to run.
01 Campaign structure
02 Keyword research
03 Search intent
04 Negative keywords
05 Geographic targeting
06 Ad copy
07 Conversion tracking
08 Call tracking
09 Landing page relevance
10 Budget allocation
11 Ongoing optimisation
Where the money is won or lost
Advertising can't rescue a weak page
If you're paying for every visitor, the page they land on is doing the expensive work.
You can improve a campaign for months and still lose most of the value at the point where someone arrives, reads a vague page, can't see a phone number and leaves. Because we build and improve websites as well, we can look at the whole journey rather than optimising the advert and hoping the site holds up.
Clear offer
What you do, for whom, in the first screen.
Message match
The page says what the advert promised.
Trust
Reviews, real photography, credentials.
Speed
Loads fast, especially on mobile data.
Mobile
Most paid traffic arrives on a phone.
One clear CTA
Not five competing options.
Easy to enquire
Short form, visible phone number.
Easy to buy
Fewest possible steps to checkout.
Measurement
Knowing what happened next
Impressions and clicks tell you the advert appeared and somebody pressed it. Neither tells you whether the phone rang. Good tracking answers the only question that matters: what did this campaign bring in?
Set up sensibly, it also tells you which campaigns to stop, which is often the more valuable half of the answer.
What we track
Form submissions
Phone calls
Purchases
Lead sources
Campaign performance
What we use
GA4
Google Ads conversions
Call tracking
CRM lead source
Search Console
Campaigns left alone tend to get worse
Setup is the beginning. The gains come from what you do in month three and month twelve.
Search behaviour shifts, competitors change their bids, and Google keeps finding new interpretations of your keywords. Decisions should follow the actual performance data rather than an account being set up once and reviewed a year later.
Search term reviews
Negative keywords
Budget adjustments
Ad testing
Landing page work
Geographic tuning
Audience refinement
Cutting what isn't working
Backing what is
Budget
What should you spend?
Honestly, we don't know yet, and anyone who gives you a figure in the first conversation is guessing. A £400 job and a £14,000 job justify very different budgets, and the same is true of a competitive city versus a quiet county.
What we can do is work backwards from your numbers: what a lead is worth, how many convert, and what you'd be happy to pay for one. That gives a budget with some reasoning behind it.
Worth being clear about
Your advertising spend goes to Google or Meta directly. Our management fee is separate, and we'll always show you both figures rather than quoting one blended number.
What changes the answer
Your sector
Competition
Geographic area
Value of a lead or sale
Campaign objective
Search volume
Is it right for your business?
Paid advertising suits some situations far better than others. If none of these sound like you, we'll say so.
01 You need enquiries sooner than SEO alone can deliver them
02 Your service or product is high value, so a lead is worth paying for
03 You want to target one town, county or radius specifically
04 You're launching something and need visibility from day one
05 There's clear existing demand for what you do
06 You want lead generation you can turn up or down predictably
07 You need to test a new market or offer before committing to it
08 You run an ecommerce store and want to shift more product
Low pressure, as ever
Would paid advertising work for you?
We'll look at the market, your current website, the likely search demand and what a customer is worth to you, then tell you whether it's worth spending money on and roughly how much. Sometimes the answer is that your website needs work first.