Google and Meta advertising, managed properly

What management actually means

Setting up a Google Ads account takes an afternoon. Google will even do it for you, and their suggestions are designed to spend your budget, not to protect it.

The work is what comes after. A campaign left alone drifts: it starts matching searches you never wanted, spending on terms that will never convert, and showing the same tired advert until it stops being clicked. Every week it is not looked at, it gets a little worse and a little more expensive.

So the plans below are priced on attention, not on features. The honest question when you buy advertising management is how much time somebody is actually spending on your account, and that is the number we lead with.

Already running ads? We start with an audit

If you are already advertising, we do not tear it down and start again. An account that has been running has history, and history is data. The first job is a full audit of the advertising account itself, your Google Ads account or your Meta Ads Manager account, before anything changes.

This is the ads account, not your Google Business Profile, the listing that shows your business on Google Maps. Looking after that listing is part of our digital marketing.

What we go through:

• Campaigns and budgets. How the account is laid out, what each campaign is meant to do, and whether the budget is going where the enquiries come from.
• Wasted spend. Campaigns, keywords and placements taking money and bringing nothing back.
• Keywords and search terms. The keywords you chose, and the actual searches that triggered your ads, which are often not the same thing. This is often where the waste is.
• Negative keywords. Words you tell Google never to show your ad for, such as “free”, “jobs” or “DIY” for most trades. Every missing one is a search you can keep paying for and never win.
• Match types and bidding. How loosely Google is allowed to match your keywords, and whether the bidding strategy suits the amount of data the account actually has.
• Audiences. Who the ads are shown to, on Meta especially, and whether the targeting matches the people who actually buy.
• Conversion tracking. Whether it is installed, whether it is counting the right things, and whether it is counting them once. An account with broken or missing tracking cannot be optimised properly, because it cannot tell what worked.
• Landing pages. Where the ads send people, and whether that page loads fast on a phone and makes the next step obvious.

Then we optimise what you have. The adverts, keywords and audiences that already work are kept and given more of the budget. The ones that do not are fixed or switched off. You see what we found before we change anything.

Return on ad spend, and the target we work to

Return on ad spend, usually shortened to ROAS, is the revenue your ads bring in divided by what the ads cost. If the ads cost one pound and bring in six pounds of sales, that is a 6x return.

We work to a target of at least 6x return on ad spend. Where an account cannot get there, because of the margins, the market or the offer, we tell you, and we tell you why.

In some niches we have seen returns of up to 14x. That is a real result from real accounts, and it is not a promise: what your account can reach depends on your prices, your margins and how many people are searching for what you sell.

That is a target, not a promise. Whether an account reaches it depends on things outside the account: how much margin there is in what you sell, how many competitors are bidding against you, how good the offer is, and what happens on the page people land on. Some of those we can help with. Some we cannot, and you will hear that from us rather than work it out from the invoices.

For a business that sells on the phone or on site rather than through a checkout, we agree with you what a typical job is worth, so the return can still be worked out honestly from the enquiries and bookings the ads bring in through your website. The standard tracking does not count phone calls, so if most of your work comes in by phone, call tracking is included on the Growth and Scale plans.

Conversion tracking comes first

Conversion tracking is easy to mistake for counting visitors. It is not that.

It records what people do on your website after they click one of your adverts: fill in the enquiry form, book or buy. Each of those is a conversion, and each one is tied back to the click that started it. So you can see which advert, which keyword and which campaign each enquiry or sale came from, which landing page it happened on, and what each one cost.

Visitor numbers are a different thing. They tell you how many people arrived. Conversion tracking tells you which of them became an enquiry or a sale, and which adverts sent them.

Without it you are looking at clicks and impressions and guessing. It is also what the return on ad spend is worked out from, so without it there is no honest way to report one.

That is why it is required on every plan, and nothing starts until it is in. It is a £150 one off setup. If we did not build your website, we need admin access to it so we can add the tracking code.

It does not track phone calls. The £150 setup covers what happens on your website: enquiry forms, bookings and purchases. If someone rings you after seeing an advert, that call is not counted. Call tracking, included on the Growth and Scale plans, counts those too.

Where your ads run

• Google Search. Text adverts shown when someone searches for what you do, in the places you cover. The most direct form of advertising there is, because the person is already looking.
• Performance Max. Google’s campaign type that runs one campaign across Search, YouTube, Display, Gmail and Maps from one set of headlines, images and videos. Powerful, and easy to waste money on if it is left to its own devices, so it gets watched closely.
• YouTube. Video adverts before and during videos, run through Google Ads. Our 3D motion design is made for exactly this.
• Facebook and Instagram. Adverts in feeds, Stories and Reels, run through Meta Ads. People are not searching here, so the targeting and the creative do the work, and Meta is best for showing people something they did not know they wanted.

Which plan covers which platform is set out in the plans above. Essential is Google Ads. Growth and Scale cover Google and Meta.

We do not manage TikTok ad accounts. If you want a video made for TikTok, our motion design can make it, and you run it on your own account.

About your budget

Your advertising budget goes to Google or Meta directly. It is separate from what you pay us, and it is yours. We do not take a percentage of it, because a percentage quietly rewards us for persuading you to spend more.

We usually suggest a minimum of around £500 a month for Google Ads. It genuinely depends on your trade, your competition and where you work, and it is a recommendation rather than a rule. The reason for it is that below a certain level there is not enough traffic for the campaigns to learn anything, so you end up paying for data you never get.

Allow two to three weeks at the start for a campaign to gather enough data to optimise properly. What happens after that varies enormously by industry, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

What we will not tell you

That we can promise you a position, a cost per lead, a number of enquiries or a guaranteed return. Nobody can. There is an auction, your competitors are in it, and Google and Meta change the rules.

What we will tell you every month is what was spent, what it produced, how that compares with the target and what we did about it.