Search terms nobody checked
Broad match with thin negatives sends a plumber's budget to "how to fix a tap yourself" and a law firm's to "free legal advice". The report showing this is one click away and most accounts have not had it read in months.
Service 03
Google Ads management judged on cost per booked job.
Clicks are easy to buy. We build accounts backward from what a customer is actually worth to you, then spend every week cutting the searches that will never become one. Flat fee, never a slice of your budget.
Service recordADS
- Fee model
- Flat monthly
- Spend cut
- Zero percent
- First data
- Week one
- Workable CPL
- 30 to 60 days
- Search terms review
- Weekly
- Account owner
- You
Where budgets leak
The first thing we do is stop the bleeding.
On almost every account we take over, a large share of last month's spend went somewhere the owner would never have approved. These are the four leaks we find most often, in the order we close them.
Conversion tracking that counts the wrong thing
Page views counted as conversions, one form counted three times, calls under ten seconds counted as leads. The optimisation algorithm believes your tracking, so bad tracking does not just mislead the report, it actively trains the account to buy the wrong traffic.
Brand traffic dressed up as performance
People searching your company name were going to find you anyway. Counting those conversions as campaign results makes a mediocre account look excellent and hides how the non-brand money is really doing.
One landing page for twelve different intents
Sending every keyword to the homepage costs you twice: a worse conversion rate, and a lower quality score that makes every click more expensive than your competitor's.
What is included
Built in this order, every time.
01
Economics before campaigns
What is a customer worth, what share of enquiries close, and therefore what can you pay for a lead and still profit. Every bid, budget and target in the account is derived from those three numbers. Agencies that skip this step are optimising toward a target nobody chose.
02
Tracking that tells the truth
Server-side conversion setup where it is warranted, call tracking with a minimum call duration, form and booking events tied to real enquiries, and offline conversion import when you can send back which leads actually closed. Nothing launches until this is verified.
03
Search campaigns with tight intent
Campaigns grouped by what the searcher wants and what that intent is worth, not by an alphabetical keyword dump. Ad copy that names your actual offer, your area and your price position, and responsive search assets tested against each other rather than left on defaults.
04
Landing pages that match the ad
The promise in the ad has to be the first line on the page. We build or rework the pages behind each campaign group, because a two percent lift in conversion rate is cheaper than a two percent cut in cost per click and nobody ever gets both by tweaking bids.
05
Weekly search term and bid work
Every week: search terms read line by line, negatives added, bad placements excluded, budgets shifted toward what is converting, and ad copy rotated on what is losing. This is unglamorous and it is where the cost per lead actually comes down.
06
Performance Max and remarketing, when earned
Once search proves the economics and the conversion data is clean, we expand into Performance Max with brand exclusions, asset groups split by product line, and a remarketing window that reflects your actual sales cycle rather than a default 540 days.
Reporting
Four numbers, every month, on a call with the person who ran the account.
We will send a dashboard if you want one, but the monthly conversation is about four figures and what we are doing about them.
01Leads, split by campaign
02Cost per lead against target
03Wasted spend removed
04Next month's single biggest bet
The uncomfortable one
If the auction has moved against you and the maths no longer works, we say so and recommend cutting spend. That conversation costs us revenue and it is the reason clients stay. An agency on a percentage of spend will almost never have it with you.
Questions
Google Ads, answered straight.
What is the minimum ad budget worth running?
Enough to buy roughly 30 clicks a day on your main terms. In cheap categories that is a few hundred dollars a month. In legal, insurance or B2B software, where a single click can pass twenty dollars, it is several thousand. Below that threshold the account cannot gather enough data to optimise, and you are paying to guess.
Why do you not charge a percentage of ad spend?
Because it pays us to raise your budget. A flat fee means the only way we look good is by bringing your cost per lead down, which is the same thing you want. It also means we can recommend spending less when the auction turns, without it costing us money to be honest.
Should we run Performance Max?
Sometimes, and rarely first. It works when you have clean conversion data and enough volume to feed it. Started too early it absorbs your brand traffic, reports it as new demand, and hides where the money actually went. We prove the economics on search first, then expand with brand exclusions in place.
How fast will we see results?
Data in the first week and, in most accounts, a workable cost per lead within 30 to 60 days. The first fortnight is deliberately about cutting waste, because the search terms report on a newly inherited account usually shows a third of the spend going to queries you would never have chosen.
Next step
Let us read your search terms report for free.
Give us view access for 24 hours and we will send back the wasted spend we found, the tracking problems we found, and what we would change in the first fortnight. No obligation and no deck.