Paid search and paid social
Google and Microsoft Ads, Shopping and Performance Max, Meta, TikTok, LinkedIn and YouTube, planned together and bought by the person you meet on the call. The account stays yours and the card stays yours.
Bring your ad account to the call and we will go through it with you on the screen.
A note from us: the first thing we look for in any paid account is how much of the budget is buying people who were coming to you anyway. Usually it is more than anyone expects. That saving pays for the testing that finds you the customers who were never coming at all.
Where the budget goes
Nothing gets a share of the budget because it is fashionable. It gets one because the numbers earned it.
Why they sit on one page
They are usually bought from two different suppliers who never speak, which is how a business ends up with a search account living off the awareness that social paid to build and nobody able to say so.
Somebody has already decided they want the thing. The job is to be there at that moment, at a price that still leaves you a margin once the click has been paid for.
Nobody was looking for you. The advert has to earn the attention first and sell second, which makes the creative the largest single lever on the whole account.
Run apart, each one takes credit for the other's work. Search reports beautifully because it is picking up people social introduced you to a fortnight earlier, and social looks expensive because the sale gets counted somewhere else. Held in one budget, the money can move to whichever half is short, and the honest question becomes what a new customer cost you across both rather than which platform told the better story. If what you want is the wider campaign, with creators, production and content built around it, that lives on the social media marketing page.
Where we come in
The wording changes, the shape of the problem does not. The money is going where it is easiest to spend rather than where it is doing any work.
Strip the brand campaigns out of the report and what is left is often a fraction of what the account appeared to be producing. Some brand spend is worth keeping, particularly where competitors bid on you, but it should be a decision somebody made deliberately rather than a line that has been running since 2019 because it always looked good.
Broad match, automated bidding and one Performance Max campaign holding the entire budget. It is not that automation is wrong, it is that it has been handed the decisions nobody wrote down first. Without exclusions, feed control and a target worth hitting, it will happily find you the cheapest conversions in the country and none of them will be new.
Google claims one figure, Meta claims another, the finance export shows a third and the meeting turns into an argument about attribution instead of a decision about next month. Until one number is agreed as the one decisions are made on, every optimisation is guesswork with a chart attached.
What the work is made of
Take all of it or take the pieces you are missing. Plenty of clients have the creative and want the buying and the measurement, which is a perfectly sensible way to spend the money.
Every campaign, every audience, every search term, checked against what it actually brought in. The first fortnight usually frees money rather than asking for more, and that freed budget funds the testing that follows. We show you the list before anything is paused.
Campaigns built around intent rather than around whatever the account inherited. Match types chosen on purpose, negatives maintained weekly, search terms read by a person, and bidding automation given a target and boundaries instead of the run of the account.
For anyone selling products the feed is the campaign. Titles, attributes, images and stock data get the attention that would otherwise go into bid tinkering, and Performance Max is fenced with exclusions so it stops quietly harvesting your own brand traffic and billing you for it.
Retargeting is cheap, converts well and mostly bills you for people who were already on their way back. We spend the majority of a social budget on people who have never met you, then judge it on whether the total number of new customers moved, not on the return the platform reports.
The advert only carries someone to a door. If the page is slow, vague or asking for eleven fields, the campaign gets blamed for a problem it did not cause. We will tell you when the page is the thing to fix first, even though that is the smaller invoice.
Conversion tracking rebuilt properly, server side where it is warranted, values passed through rather than counting every enquiry as equal, and one agreed source of truth. Then a monthly page in plain English: spend, enquiries, sales, and what each one cost.
We buy media on our own money as well as yours. The in-house ventures are run on the same structure and the same reporting, so none of this is a method we have only ever tried on somebody else's budget.
AI and paid media
Bidding, budget shifting and placement decisions left people years ago, and trying to beat a machine at arithmetic is not a service worth selling. What automation cannot do is decide what a customer is worth to you, notice that it has spent a fortnight buying people who were already yours, or tell you when the honest recommendation is to spend less. Those still belong to a person, and on your account that person is named.
How we use AI across the agencySmart bidding, Advantage+ and Performance Max all work well when they are told what winning looks like and fenced off from what they are not allowed to buy. Handed an account with neither, they optimise towards the cheapest conversions available, which is nearly always your own audience.
Variants, cutdowns, alternative hooks and every required size produced in an afternoon rather than a fortnight. More in market means the winner is found by evidence rather than by whoever argued hardest in the meeting, and fatigue is caught before the numbers slide.
Search terms, placement reports, creative fatigue and cost per enquiry summarised daily. A term that started costing you money on Tuesday gets dealt with on Wednesday, rather than being noticed at the month end when the budget has already gone.
A person approves every advert and every budget change before it runs. In regulated sectors that approval is documented as a matter of course, and everywhere else it is simply the thing that keeps the work good.
How it runs
Long enough for a pattern to appear, short enough that nobody is stuck with a decision they made on a hunch in January.
Accounts, tracking, feeds and your own sales data. We agree what a customer is worth and what you can afford to pay for one. Everything after this is judged against that figure rather than against a platform's opinion of itself.
Waste turned off, structure rebuilt, tracking fixed, the first round of adverts and landing pages approved by you. One page covering where the budget is going and why, before a penny moves.
Watched daily, adjusted weekly, budget moving towards whatever is working across both halves. You get a short note each week saying what changed and what it did, without having to ask.
What a new customer cost, what we would scale, what we would stop, and whether paid is genuinely where your next pound belongs. If it is not, we will say so, because the alternative is a client who works it out themselves in month five.
Most people start with the first. Nobody is asked to sign for a year to find out whether this works.
A rebuilt account, a real budget behind it and a written answer at the end of it.
A fixed piece of work for anyone who has a team already and wants a second pair of eyes on the account.
Ongoing management of both halves once the first ninety days have shown what is worth continuing.
Our fee and your ad budget are two separate things. The budget stays on your own card in your own account, where you can watch it go out, and we never take a percentage of it.
What we measure
Google counts a sale as its own. So does Meta. So does TikTok, if it showed an advert somewhere in the fortnight beforehand. Add the reported revenue up and most businesses discover they made two or three times more money than ever reached the bank.
So before anything spends we agree which number the decisions get made on. Usually it is yours, out of your own system, cross checked against the platforms rather than governed by them. Once that is settled the meetings get considerably shorter and the arguments stop.
If we cannot tell you what a new customer cost, we have not measured the account. We have only described it.
Before you ask
If people are already searching for what you sell, search first, because you are collecting demand somebody else built. If nobody knows the category exists or the product is a discovery rather than a decision, social first. Most businesses need both eventually, and the useful question on the call is which one your next thousand pounds should go to, not which one we would rather sell you.
Enough that the platforms can find a pattern rather than guess, which in practice means a steady flow of results each week rather than a trickle. We work backwards from what a customer is worth to you and tell you honestly whether the figure you have in mind is enough. If it is not, we will say so rather than take it and hope.
No. Charging a share of the budget pays an agency more for spending more of your money, which is a strange thing to build into a relationship. We quote a fee for the work, it does not rise because your budget did, and the recommendation to spend more or less is made on the numbers rather than on our invoice.
You do, from the first day to the last. Google, Microsoft and the social accounts sit in your own business manager, billing stays on your card, and everything we build is handed over in a folder you control. Nothing we do should be difficult to walk away from.
Yes, and we do it often. You get every campaign and search term reviewed, the wasted spend listed with figures next to it, the tracking checked end to end, and the findings on a call and then in writing. Sometimes the outcome is that the account is in decent shape and the problem is somewhere else, and we would rather tell you that than invent work.
Often, once it is fenced. Given exclusions, a clean product feed, brand terms kept out of it and a target that matches your economics, it does a real job. Given the whole budget and no boundaries, it will find the cheapest conversions available, which usually means people who already knew you, and the report will look wonderful while the revenue sits still.
Waste comes out in the first fortnight and you tend to feel that quickly. Early signals on new campaigns arrive in two to three weeks. A trustworthy answer on what a customer costs takes closer to ninety days, because anything shorter is usually a good run being mistaken for a result.
It depends on how many platforms are involved, how much creative is being made and the state of the tracking, so we quote after the first call rather than putting a package price on a website. You get the scope and the number on a single page before anything starts, and it does not change unless you agree to it.
Also worth a look
An advert can move somebody one step. Whatever happens after that step is being done by something else on this list.
Book a call
Open the ad account on the screen and we will go through it with you. You will leave with at least one thing worth changing this week, whether or not you ever hire us.
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