Paid Ads (PPC)
PPC Management Services for Small Businesses
PPC management is the ongoing work of running paid advertising profitably — building campaign structure, writing ads, managing bids and budgets, and improving the pages the clicks land on. Done properly it is the fastest way to generate demand, because you can be in front of buyers within days rather than months. Done carelessly it is the fastest way to lose money.
Paid advertising is the one channel where you can be in front of buyers this week. That immediacy is why almost every business tries it, and it sits alongside our other digital marketing services as the demand-capture side of a growth programme — the counterweight to the slower compounding of organic search.
It is also the channel where money disappears fastest when something is misconfigured. An account can look healthy on every dashboard while quietly losing money, because the metric everyone reports on — return on ad spend — says nothing about whether the revenue was profitable. We have reviewed accounts running at a reported 4× ROAS that were losing money on every order once product cost, shipping and returns were counted.
That is the difference in how we manage paid media. The target is not a ratio on a dashboard; it is contribution margin and the cost of acquiring a customer worth keeping.
What decides whether paid ads work.
Three things, and most accounts get the third one wrong.
Structure & targeting
How the account is organised determines what the platform can learn and how precisely you can control spend. Poor structure means budget leaking into searches that will never convert, and no clean way to see which segments actually earn.
Creative & landing experience
The ad earns the click; the page earns the money. Sending expensive traffic to a slow, generic page is the most common and most expensive mistake in paid media — and usually the cheapest thing to fix.
Measuring the right number
If your tracking reports revenue rather than margin, you will optimise toward your least profitable products. Getting measurement honest is unglamorous and it changes decisions more than any bidding tactic.
What our PPC management includes.
Get a free proposal →Google Ads management
Search, Shopping and Performance Max built with a structure that protects margin as spend scales. Our Google Ads management covers everything from keyword strategy to feed optimisation.
Meta Ads management
Facebook and Instagram campaigns pairing audience strategy with a disciplined creative testing cadence. Meta Ads management is where creative volume matters more than targeting sophistication.
Account restructure & audit
Most engagements begin here. We rebuild campaign architecture so budget flows to what earns, negative keywords stop the waste, and reporting finally reflects reality.
Conversion tracking & attribution
Server-side tracking, offline conversion imports and margin-aware conversion values, so the platform optimises toward profitable outcomes rather than raw conversion counts.
Landing pages & CRO
Improving the destination, not just the traffic. Handled with our conversion rate optimisation team, because a lift in conversion rate improves every campaign at once.
Budget & bid management
Ongoing pacing, bid strategy and budget allocation across campaigns and channels — scaling what is profitable and cutting what is not, weekly rather than quarterly.
Where paid media works hardest
Paid is not right for every business at every stage. These are the situations where it tends to earn its place:
How we work
How we run paid accounts.
Fix measurement first. Every decision after that depends on the numbers being honest.
Audit & tracking repair
We review account structure, spend efficiency and — critically — whether conversion tracking is accurate. Roughly half the accounts we inherit are reporting numbers that do not survive scrutiny, and no optimisation matters until that is fixed.
Restructure & set targets
Rebuild campaign architecture around how you actually make money, agree a target cost per acquisition or margin threshold, and stop the obvious waste. This usually produces the first visible improvement.
Test systematically
A running roadmap of creative, audience, landing page and bidding tests — one variable at a time, with enough volume to draw a real conclusion rather than reacting to noise.
Scale what earns
Push budget toward the campaigns clearing your margin threshold, cut what does not, and expand into adjacent channels once the core is reliably profitable.
What paid ads can and cannot do
They can put you in front of in-market buyers within days, test messaging and offers far faster than organic, and scale volume predictably once the economics work. For a business that needs pipeline this quarter, nothing else comes close.
What they cannot do is fix a weak offer, rescue poor unit economics, or make an uncompetitive product competitive. Paid media amplifies whatever is already true about your business. If your margins are thin and your conversion rate is poor, advertising will find that out expensively and quickly. We would rather spend the first conversation on whether the numbers can work than take a budget we know will not.
There is also a floor below which management is not worth paying for. If your total monthly budget is small, agency fees consume a large share of it, and you would often be better served running things yourself or putting the money into organic search first. We will tell you if that is the situation rather than sell you a retainer that cannot pay for itself.
Why measurement got harder, and what to do about it
Paid media used to offer near-perfect attribution. Privacy changes across browsers and operating systems, cookie restrictions and consent requirements have steadily eroded that, and the platforms have filled the gap with modelled estimates. The practical consequence is that reported conversions are increasingly a projection rather than a count, and different platforms will confidently claim credit for the same sale.
This matters because most advertisers still make budget decisions from in-platform numbers. If Google and Meta each report the conversions they influenced, their combined claimed revenue can comfortably exceed what your accounts actually recorded — and scaling on that basis means scaling something that is not there.
The response is not to give up on measurement but to stop treating platform reporting as ground truth. We implement server-side tracking and offline conversion imports so real outcomes flow back to the platforms, reconcile what they claim against what your business actually banked, and use incrementality testing on significant budget decisions — pausing a campaign to observe what genuinely changes, rather than trusting an attribution model to tell us.
How we measure
ROAS is not profit.
Return on ad spend ignores product cost, shipping, returns and the fact that some customers never come back. Two campaigns at identical ROAS can have completely different effects on your bank balance. We manage to contribution margin and customer acquisition cost, which occasionally means recommending you spend less on something that looks good on a dashboard.
Explore Google Ads →- Margin-aware conversion values, not raw revenue
- Customer acquisition cost against lifetime value
- New vs returning customer economics separated
- Reporting that ties to your P&L, not the platform’s
Paid and organic are not a choice
Businesses often arrive framing this as a decision between channels, as though budget spent on ads is budget taken from search. In practice the two work considerably better together, and the reason is data. Paid search tells you within a fortnight which keywords produce customers rather than merely traffic — information that would take months to establish organically, and which makes your entire content strategy sharper. Meanwhile, strong organic rankings reduce how much you need to bid on your own brand terms.
The channels also cover each other's weaknesses. Paid is instant but stops the moment you pause it, and grows more expensive as competitors bid up the auction. Organic is slow but compounds and holds. A business running only paid has no asset; a business running only organic has no lever to pull when it needs revenue this month.
Where we do push back is on scale. There is a point in most categories where additional paid spend produces diminishing returns — the high-intent searches are already captured and further budget goes to progressively colder audiences. Recognising that point and redirecting the money into <a href="/services/seo/">organic</a>, <a href="/services/email-marketing/">email</a> or conversion improvements is usually worth more than another increment of ad spend. An agency paid a percentage of media spend has an obvious incentive not to tell you that.
If you want an honest read on your account, the fastest route is a review. We will tell you what is being wasted, whether your tracking is trustworthy, and what the realistic upside looks like.
Related services
Questions, answered.
Still unsure? Ask us directly →
What does PPC management actually involve?
Campaign structure and setup, keyword and audience research, ad writing and creative direction, bid and budget management, conversion tracking, landing page improvement, and ongoing testing and reporting. The management fee pays for judgement and continuous optimisation, not for logging into an account occasionally.
How much should I spend on PPC?
Enough to gather meaningful data in your category, which varies enormously — a local service business needs far less than an eCommerce brand competing nationally. The more useful question is what a customer is worth to you and what you can afford to pay to acquire one. We work backwards from that rather than proposing an arbitrary budget.
Do you charge a percentage of ad spend?
We prefer not to, because it creates a conflict of interest: an agency earning more when you spend more has little incentive to tell you when spending less would be more profitable. We scope fees to the work involved. If percentage-of-spend suits your situation better we will discuss it, but we will be explicit about the incentive it creates.
How quickly will I see results from paid ads?
Traffic immediately, meaningful data within two to four weeks, and reliable optimisation after roughly six to eight weeks depending on volume. Campaigns need enough conversions before decisions are anything more than guessing. Anyone promising profitability in week one is either lucky or not counting properly.
What is a good ROAS?
The honest answer is that ROAS alone cannot tell you. A 3× return is excellent on a high-margin product and loss-making on a low-margin one after shipping and returns. The number that matters is contribution margin after all variable costs. We set targets from your actual economics rather than an industry benchmark that ignores them.
Should I run Google Ads or Meta Ads?
They do different jobs. Google captures existing demand — someone is already searching for what you sell. Meta creates demand by putting you in front of people who were not looking. Businesses with clear search demand usually start with Google; visually-driven products and new categories often do better on Meta. Many run both, but rarely from day one.
Is Performance Max worth using?
Sometimes, with reservations. It can perform well, particularly for eCommerce with a strong product feed, but it is comparatively opaque — you get less visibility into where spend goes and less granular control. We use it where it earns its place, alongside campaigns that give us proper control, rather than handing the entire account to an automated system.
Can you take over an existing account?
Yes, and it is most of what we do. We start with an audit covering structure, wasted spend and tracking accuracy. You keep ownership of your account and data throughout — we will never hold an account hostage, and if we part ways you take everything with you.
Find out what your account is really doing.
We will review your campaigns, check whether your tracking can be trusted, and show you where budget is being wasted — free, with no obligation.