Will you guarantee a cost per lead?

No. We do not own your market, your competitors or your prices, and anyone quoting a number before seeing your account is guessing. What we will commit to is correct tracking, a structure you can see, weekly work on the account, and an honest answer within about 45 days on whether Search can work at your budget. If the answer is no, you will hear it from us rather than find it out six months later.

How much of my budget should the management fee be?

The useful question is not what percentage the fee is, but what it is tied to. A fee charged as a share of your ad spend earns us more the more of your money goes to Google, which puts a conflict of interest inside your own invoice; a flat monthly fee does not, which is why ours is one. Ad spend and management fee are also two separate things and should never reach you as a single number. What you are entitled to ask of any quote — ours included — is which of those two models it is, and what work the fee buys on your account each month.

I get leads but they are all time-wasters. Is that the ads or the site?

It is answerable rather than arguable. Send us the last 30 days of search terms and your last 20 leads. Either the gap between the keyword and what people actually typed has widened, or the landing page is setting the wrong expectation, or the form has no qualifying question in it. Those three produce different fixes and we will tell you which one you have before quoting.

Do I pay Google through you?

No, and you should refuse that arrangement from anyone. Ad spend goes on your own card, on your own account, so the money stays in your control and you can shut it off yourself. We invoice only the management fee. Beyond the obvious safety of that, Google treats accounts where one card pays for several unrelated businesses with suspicion.

Should I run Google Ads or do SEO?

They answer different questions. Ads buy the position marked Sponsored and start today, and stop the day you stop paying. SEO earns the results underneath and takes months. Most lead-gen businesses need the ads first to find out which searches actually produce work, and that knowledge then makes the SEO investment far less speculative.

What happens in the first two weeks?

Daily checking, not daily changing. New campaigns are watched every morning for the first fortnight because that is when a mistyped budget, an unapproved ad or a broken form does the most damage. Changes are made weekly. Looking at a campaign does not disturb the learning phase — editing it does.

Paid Media & Performance

Google Search Ads management

Campaigns built, pruned and reported every week — including the search terms report, opened on a fixed day, in every account.

From: $300–$2,500/mo
Typical time: ongoing
Usually bought by: Lead-gen businesses

What this actually solves

Almost every enquiry for this service arrives in one of two conditions. The first is an account that was set up once, years ago, by someone who has since moved on. It is still running. Money still leaves the card every month. Nobody has opened the search terms report since it was built. The owner knows clicks are happening because the dashboard says so, and knows nothing else. The second is newer and more painful — a business that has decided to compete on Google and has discovered what clicks cost there. In plumbing, legal, dental, roofing and HVAC, every competitor is bidding on the same handful of high-intent searches, so what a click costs is set by them rather than by you. At those prices, an account nobody is managing is not underperforming, it is haemorrhaging.

The reason Search is worth that money is intent. Nobody types "emergency plumber Manchester" out of curiosity. On social platforms you interrupt people; on Search, people are already looking for you and the only question is whether you are there and whether the page they land on deserves them. That makes Search the most reliable paid channel for lead-generation businesses and also the least forgiving one, because every wasted click is a click a competitor did not have to pay for.

There is one relationship worth understanding before you buy anything, because it decides what any honest manager can actually do for you: cost per lead is cost per click divided by conversion rate. There is no third lever. If your cost per lead is too high, either the clicks get cheaper or the page converts better. Anyone describing a more elaborate route is selling activity.

What we do, and in what order

Establish what a customer is worth before touching the account. Average job value, gross margin, the jobs you do not want, and your service radius. Without those numbers there is no target to bid towards and the campaign is being run blind — this is also where we find out whether Search is affordable for you at all. Half a day to a day.
Verify tracking, and refuse to launch without it. Form submissions, phone calls and WhatsApp clicks each configured and each tested with a real submission. Two failures are routine here — a thank-you page counted as a conversion so refreshes are double-counted, and a tap-to-call click counted as a lead when a good share of people never complete the call. Both inflate your results and both mislead the bidding. Half a day to a day.
Build the structure and the words. Keyword research split by intent, one campaign or ad group per service so budget and bids can be controlled separately, responsive search ads whose headlines actually echo the keyword, and a negative keyword list of at least fifty terms on day one covering job seekers, DIY, free and cheap, wrong services and wrong locations. Built in Google Ads Editor so bulk changes are possible later. Two to four days.
Launch conservatively and watch daily for a fortnight. Maximise clicks with a bid cap while the account has no conversion history, an account-level monthly spend limit set, and fifteen minutes every morning for the first fourteen days. Only once roughly 30 conversions have accumulated does a smart bidding strategy such as Target CPA become a sensible move. Two weeks.
Weekly maintenance on a fixed day, then a monthly report. Search terms cleaned, weak ads replaced, budget moved towards what is producing work. Monthly, the report gives cost per lead against the job value you gave us in step one, and the plan for the coming month. Ongoing.

Tools, so you know what you are paying for — Google Ads and Google Ads Editor, Keyword Planner, Google Tag Manager and GA4, Looker Studio for reporting, CallRail where calls matter, and a working spreadsheet where the arithmetic is done independently of what the platform claims.

What moves the price

The engagement is $300–$2,500/mo and ongoing, and three things decide where in that range you sit.

The size of the ad budget. A larger budget is not more clicking, it is more responsibility, more frequent checking and more consequence attached to a single mistake. The fee tracks the money at risk, not the hours of button-pressing.

How regulated your industry is. Legal, medical and financial advertisers work under stricter ad policies, more disapprovals and more rewriting. The same campaign takes materially longer to get and keep running.

Whether landing pages and creative are included. Managing an account you send traffic into is one rate. Building the page that traffic lands on is a separate project with its own price, and we would rather say so in the proposal than quietly absorb it and then have no time for the account.

What usually goes wrong

The search terms report is never opened. This is the most common and most expensive failure in Search advertising. The keyword you bought and the phrase someone actually typed are not the same thing, and the gap fills up with searches like "free bathroom remodel grants" — real clicks, real money, no possible customer at the end. We open that report on a fixed weekday in every account, and the negative list grows every week for as long as the account runs.

A smart bidding strategy is switched on before there is anything to be smart about. Setting a new account to Maximise conversions when it has recorded zero conversions gives the system nothing to learn from, and it spends the whole budget finding that out. The sequence matters — manual control with a bid cap first, conversion history second, automated bidding third.

Every service is jammed into one campaign. When a full bathroom remodel and a dripping tap share a budget and a bid, you cannot fund the profitable work without also funding the work you do not want. Separating services into their own campaigns is what makes it possible to move money towards the jobs worth having, and it is the single change that most often transforms an inherited account.

See where the site stands before you brief anyone.

If the site is already live, start from what it scores rather than from a guess. The audit reports what it checked, what it found, and — the part most tools leave out — what it could not check, and why.

See the website audit Talk about this work

Questions people ask before they commit.

Will you guarantee a cost per lead?: No. We do not own your market, your competitors or your prices, and anyone quoting a number before seeing your account is guessing. What we will commit to is correct tracking, a structure you can see, weekly work on the account, and an honest answer within about 45 days on whether Search can work at your budget. If the answer is no, you will hear it from us rather than find it out six months later.
How much of my budget should the management fee be?: The useful question is not what percentage the fee is, but what it is tied to. A fee charged as a share of your ad spend earns us more the more of your money goes to Google, which puts a conflict of interest inside your own invoice; a flat monthly fee does not, which is why ours is one. Ad spend and management fee are also two separate things and should never reach you as a single number. What you are entitled to ask of any quote — ours included — is which of those two models it is, and what work the fee buys on your account each month.
I get leads but they are all time-wasters. Is that the ads or the site?: It is answerable rather than arguable. Send us the last 30 days of search terms and your last 20 leads. Either the gap between the keyword and what people actually typed has widened, or the landing page is setting the wrong expectation, or the form has no qualifying question in it. Those three produce different fixes and we will tell you which one you have before quoting.
Do I pay Google through you?: No, and you should refuse that arrangement from anyone. Ad spend goes on your own card, on your own account, so the money stays in your control and you can shut it off yourself. We invoice only the management fee. Beyond the obvious safety of that, Google treats accounts where one card pays for several unrelated businesses with suspicion.
Should I run Google Ads or do SEO?: They answer different questions. Ads buy the position marked Sponsored and start today, and stop the day you stop paying. SEO earns the results underneath and takes months. Most lead-gen businesses need the ads first to find out which searches actually produce work, and that knowledge then makes the SEO investment far less speculative.
What happens in the first two weeks?: Daily checking, not daily changing. New campaigns are watched every morning for the first fortnight because that is when a mistyped budget, an unapproved ad or a broken form does the most damage. Changes are made weekly. Looking at a campaign does not disturb the learning phase — editing it does.

Often taken together.

Start with the brief, not the invoice.

Send what you are trying to achieve. You get a written scope, a price and a date — or an honest “this is not the right service for that”.

Talk about Google Search Ads management All Paid Media & Performance services