Paid search
Google Ads, measured on the enquiries rather than the clicks.
We run paid search: account structure, keywords, negatives, ad copy, bidding and budget. We also take responsibility for what happens after the click — the page it lands on, whether the enquiry completes, and whether you can see where it came from.
Paid is a way to reach demand that is active now. It is chosen because it fits your business, not because every client gets one.
Where paid search sits in the work
Paid search is one of several ways we reach buyers, and it earns its place for a particular business or it does not. What we are accountable for here is the same as everywhere else on this site: enquiries you can act on, measured.
That difference is practical rather than philosophical. A supplier paid to manage spend improves the account. We are working to a number two steps further down the chain, which changes what gets attention on the week the account looks healthy and the enquiries have stopped.
Spend, fee, and what we will not promise
Whatever the arrangement, the two are stated as separate things.
On every invoice and in every report — and the fee is never expressed as a percentage of spend in a way that rewards spending more.
What we will do instead is capture where you are starting from and report against it.
We do not report ROI. Where you supply close data, we report the revenue your own system recorded against the enquiries, and state what we did not control.
- a return on ad spend
- a cost per enquiry
- a cost per lead
- a number of enquiries per month
Those depend on your market, your price, your competitors and your own follow-up, none of which we control.
What is in scope
The account.
Structure, search terms and negatives, match types, ad copy, extensions, bidding and budget pacing. Ordinary work, done properly.
Search-term review, continuously.
Reading what people actually searched before they clicked, and excluding what should never have matched. It is not a setup task — irrelevant matches are where a budget quietly goes, and they accumulate.
The landing experience.
Whether the page answers the search it was bought for. A campaign pointed at a page that does not is the most common way spend disappears without a trace.
The enquiry path.
The form, the booking, the phone route, and whether the enquiry actually arrives.
Conversion measurement that is real.
Conversions recorded server-side against the enquiry itself, not a thank-you page view or a button click. A conversion counted client-side inflates the number, and the account then optimises towards the inflation.
Reporting against enquiries.
Enquiries and qualified enquiries by campaign, with what could not be attributed shown as such.
What you will actually see
Qualified enquiries, separated from total enquiries.
Enquiries by campaign and by search term where the data allows it, against a starting point captured before we change anything. The two move differently, and the gap between them is usually the interesting part.
Where an enquiry arrives by phone after someone saw an ad, we will usually not be able to attribute it, and we will show it as unattributed rather than assigning it to paid to make the campaign look better.
Related: if the clicks arrive and the enquiries do not · the whole system · the enquiries themselves.
Tell us what the account is doing now
What you spend, and what you get back.
If you are already spending, the useful first message is what you spend, what you are getting, and whether you can currently tell which enquiries came from it. If you are not spending yet, tell us what you sell and what a single new customer is worth — that decides whether paid search makes sense at all.