Paid Ads
Paid advertising run by the people who tell you what is not working.
Google, Meta, LinkedIn — one budget, one team, one weekly page. Most agencies are paid to spend it. We are paid to put it in front of people who were already looking for what you sell, and to show you exactly where every pound of it went.
No pitch deck. We look at the accounts you already have — whichever channels they are on — and tell you what is wrong with them, whether or not you hire us.
One team across
- Google Ads Search, Shopping, Performance Max, YouTube
- Meta Facebook and Instagram, prospecting and retargeting
- LinkedIn Where the deal size justifies the click price
- Microsoft Ads Cheaper clicks, older buyers, often overlooked
- TikTok When the product can be shown in six seconds
- GA4 The measurement all of it reports back into
We will tell you which of these you should not be on. That is usually a shorter list than the one you are on now.
01 The problem
What your budget is doing right now
This is the shape of almost every account we are handed, on every platform, including ones run by agencies you would recognise. Not because anyone was careless — because the defaults on all of them are built to spend, and nobody was being paid to argue with them.
- 34% Search terms that were never going to buy Broad match, left to interpret you generously.
- 21% Counted wrong, or not counted at all Duplicate conversions teach the algorithm the wrong lesson.
- 18% Right click, wrong page Paid for the visit, then asked them to go and find it.
- 27% Reaches someone who actually wanted it This is the part worth scaling. Our whole job is to make this slice bigger.
02 What we do differently
Nine things we check before we touch a bid
Most agencies start spending in week one, because that is when the fee starts. We spend the first two weeks proving what is broken — every account, on every channel you run, goes past us one item at a time. You get the findings as a document whether or not you go ahead with us.
If it says your account is already in good shape, it says that — and we will tell you so.
03 How we build it
Built around buying intent, not your org chart
Most accounts are organised the way the business is organised. That is convenient for whoever built it and useless to the auction. We rebuild every channel around how close someone is to buying — the only thing any of these platforms can actually act on, and where the gains are.
- 01 Brand People typing your name Cheap, and someone else will take it if you do not. 12%
- 02 High intent Ready to buy, comparing on price or proximity Where the budget should concentrate. 46%
- 03 Category Still deciding what to buy at all Held to a looser target, watched closely. 28%
- 04 Discovery Do not know you exist yet Capped. Earns its budget or loses it. 14%
The split above is a starting point, not a rule. It moves every week based on what the numbers say — that is the whole job.
04 What you are paying for
Five things, every week, in the same order
This is the part most retainers leave vague. An account that is not touched drifts, and one that is touched at random drifts faster — so the same five things happen every week, and you can see all of them.
- Step 01 of 05 Read the search terms Every term that took money last week. Anything that should not have becomes a negative.
- Step 02 of 05 Check the tracking agrees Ad platform against analytics against your CRM. They drift, quietly.
- Step 03 of 05 Move the budget Toward what converted, away from what did not — in small steps, so the bidding keeps learning.
- Step 04 of 05 Change one thing on purpose A headline, a landing page, an audience. One, so we know what caused the change.
- Step 05 of 05 Write down what we did So the weekly page is a record rather than a reconstruction.
Then it starts again. The account is never finished — it is either being kept up or quietly drifting.
05 What you get back
One page, every week, that you will actually read
No dashboard login you will never open, and no forty-page deck. One page a week covering every channel together, readable in four minutes, with the number that matters at the top and every change we made underneath it.
- 61 cost per lead, USD was 112
- 52 qualified leads
- 3,180 USD spent
- Removed 41 search terms that had never produced a lead
- Split high-intent campaigns away from category terms
- Rewrote the quote page after tracking showed where people left
Scope
What you are paying for, and what you are not
One team across every channel, so nothing falls between two agencies blaming each other. The second column matters as much as the first.
Included
- Search, Shopping and Performance Max
- Meta, Instagram and LinkedIn
- Conversion tracking rebuilt from scratch
- Landing page and offer testing
- One weekly page across every channel
Not included, on purpose
- A dashboard login you will never open
- Impressions, reach and other numbers you cannot bank
- A standing call to read you a report you have already read
- Lock-in past the first three months
- Work quietly handed to someone you have not met
Search is where intent lives. We build account structures that map to how people actually buy, then optimise against revenue rather than clicks.
Reviews
What our clients say
Unedited, and from people still working with us. We would rather you heard it from them than read another page of our own claims.
They spent the first three weeks telling us our tracking was broken instead of spending our money. That honesty is why we are still with them two years later.
Our cost per lead halved and — more importantly — sales stopped complaining about lead quality. That had never happened with an agency before.
The monthly report is one page and I actually read it. They tell us what to stop doing, not just what they did.
They turned down two of the channels we asked them to run because the numbers did not support it. That is the whole reason we trust the ones they do run.
Our previous agency sent a 40-page report nobody read. This one sends a page, and it always ends with what they are changing next.
They rebuilt our tracking before touching a bid. Painful for a month, then everything downstream finally made sense.
Before you ask
The questions people ask before signing
Answered the way we would answer them on a call, which is to say plainly and without the hedging.
Who owns the account?
You do. We work inside your Google Ads account, not a reseller account of ours. If we stop working together you keep the account, the history and the data — there is nothing to hand back because it was never ours.
How long before it works?
Tracking is fixed in the first two weeks. Structural changes need roughly a month before the bidding has learned enough to judge them. Anyone promising a result in week one is either lucky or guessing.
We already have an agency.
Then take the free review and do not tell us who they are. If the account is in good shape we will say so, and you will have a second opinion that cost you nothing.
Is there a minimum spend?
Below roughly $4,000 a month across all channels, the management fee eats too much of the budget to be worth it for you. We would rather say that now than take the retainer.
Do you lock us into a contract?
A month at a time after the first three. The first three exist because the work before that point is mostly repair, and leaving halfway through repair leaves you worse off than when you started.
The same approach, elsewhere
Cutting a subscription brand’s churn-adjusted CAC
Fernhill
- -44%
- Churn-adjusted CAC
- 2.7x
- LTV to CAC
- +118%
- Retained subscribers
Taking a legal firm from referrals to pipeline
Halden & Roe
- $2.9M
- Pipeline in year one
- -34%
- Cost per consult
- 61%
- Consult-to-retain
Rebuilding a marketplace’s paid search from zero
Kestrel Market
- +186%
- Contribution margin
- -52%
- Wasted spend
- 12
- Campaigns from 400