Services/Paid Media & Demand Generation
Paid buys attention. It cannot buy a reason to choose you.
Ads are the fastest way to get in front of people who are ready to buy, and the fastest way to lose money when the page they land on cannot close. The channel is rarely the problem. The destination usually is.
Which is why we look at what happens after the click before recommending you spend more on getting one.
Why Ad Budgets Underperform
The ads usually worked. Something after them did not.
The most common conclusion after a disappointing campaign is that the channel does not work for this business. Occasionally that is true. Far more often the ads delivered exactly what they were bought to deliver, and the page they pointed at could not convert the person who arrived.
The second failure is measurement. Platforms report on what they can see, which is clicks and conversions they were told to count. If a form fill and a booked job are treated as the same event, the account optimises toward whichever is cheaper, and cheap leads are usually cheap for a reason.
The third is sequencing. Spend rises before the conversion path is fixed, because raising spend is easy and fixing the path is not. Paid multiplies whatever your page already does. Multiplying something that does not work simply loses money faster.
What The Work Is
Fix the destination, then buy the traffic
Campaigns built on intent
Not all clicks are worth the same, and most wasted spend goes to searches that were never going to buy. We build around the queries where someone is close to a decision, and exclude aggressively.
- Google Ads across Search, Shopping, Performance Max and Display where each earns its place
- Google Local Service Ads for trades and local professionals, where you pay per lead
- Meta and LinkedIn where the audience is defined by who they are rather than what they searched
- Negative keyword discipline, which is where a large share of savings actually comes from
- Retargeting scoped so it does not simply re-buy people who were already coming back
The page the ad points at
An ad and its landing page are one unit. Optimising the ad while ignoring where it lands is the most expensive habit in the discipline, and it is extremely common because the two are usually owned by different people.
- Message match, so the page answers the exact question the ad raised
- Dedicated pages per service or campaign rather than sending everything to the homepage
- Conversion paths tested against real behaviour, not assumptions
- Speed, since paid traffic is disproportionately mobile and impatient
- Testing that runs long enough to mean something
Tracking that reaches revenue
If your reporting stops at the conversion the platform can see, you are optimising toward form fills rather than customers. Getting past that is unglamorous configuration work and it changes which campaigns look successful.
- Conversion tracking configured properly, including server-side where it matters
- Call tracking, because for many businesses the phone is the conversion
- Offline conversion import, so the platform learns which leads became work
- Attribution that distinguishes a lead from a booked job
- Reporting on cost per booked job, not cost per click
Related
Website & Landing Pages
Where the click lands and the money is won or lost.
Analytics & Measurement
Connecting spend to booked work.
On the trade-off between paid and organic, see Google Ads vs SEO.
FAQ
Common questions
Enough to buy a meaningful number of clicks in your category, which varies enormously: a modest budget goes a long way in a cheap category and vanishes in an expensive one. The right way to set it is backwards from what a customer is worth to you and what you can afford to pay to acquire one. Budgets set as a round number tend to be either wasteful or too thin to learn anything.
We would rather not, because it rewards us for spending more of your money. Fees are set against the scope of work in your service agreement. Ad spend goes to the platforms directly and stays in accounts you own.
Usually both, in that order of urgency. Ads produce leads immediately and stop the moment you stop paying. SEO is slow and compounds. Running paid while organic matures is the standard sequence, provided the conversion path is fixed first, otherwise you are paying to expose a problem.
You do. Accounts are set up in your name wherever the platform permits it, and you retain access throughout and afterwards, including the historical data. Account history is a real asset and it should not leave with an agency.
Find out where the spend is going
The audit covers the conversion path and how your spend is currently tracked, which is usually where the answer sits.