The clicks are real, the customers are not
Traffic arrives and nothing converts. What we do: we read the search terms that actually triggered the ads, then exclude the ones that spent money on people who were never buying.
Paid search that gets audited
PPC Advertising Company
Paid search spends money whether the traffic is any good or not. That is why a PPC advertising company is worth judging on traffic quality rather than click volume: we look at what the account actually bought, cut what never had a chance of converting, and make sure every lead can be traced back to the keyword that produced it.
What paid search should look like
PPC advertising is judged on what the account bought, not on how busy it looked.
Search ads, shopping, display and video all sit in the same account, and all of them can quietly spend money on people who were never going to buy. The dashboards look healthy either way, which is why the search-term and placement work matters more than the reporting does.
The problem
Most PPC accounts are not poorly managed. They are poorly examined.
Google's defaults are built for Google's revenue, not your margin. Display and partner networks arrive switched on. Broad match widens quietly. Search terms accumulate that nobody has read in months. Left alone, an account drifts toward buying the cheapest clicks available rather than the ones that become customers.
Fixing that is unglamorous work: reading search terms, excluding placements, cutting geographies that cannot buy, and matching each ad to a page that answers it. It is also where most of the recoverable money is.
What we check
- Search terms that spent money and could not convert
- Display and partner placements left on by default
- Geographies and schedules buying the wrong traffic
- Ad copy against actual landing page content
- Conversion tracking accuracy and duplicates
- Cost per lead against what a customer is worth
- Lead quality, not just lead quantity
Problems we see most
A PPC advertising firm is only as good as the traffic it refuses to buy.
These are the situations we are usually called in for, and what we do about each one.
Nobody can say which keyword produced a customer
Reports show cost and clicks, never the link to a sale. What we do: we rebuild tracking so each enquiry carries its keyword and campaign, and report cost per lead by term.
The monthly report is impressions and nothing else
Numbers that look like activity but cannot be acted on. What we do: we report what was spent, what it bought, what was switched off, and what changed as a result.
Budget is being spent on placements you never chose
Display and partner sites quietly consuming a share of spend. What we do: we audit placements, exclude what cannot convert for your business, and keep the network settings deliberate rather than default.
The ad promises something the page does not deliver
The click was earned, then wasted on arrival. What we do: we align ad copy, offer and landing page, and rebuild the pages that consistently fail to convert their traffic.
Competitors and bots are using your budget
A share of every click is never a potential customer. What we do: we review placement and pattern data, use exclusions and IP blocking where warranted, and measure what remains.
The account was paused and restarted, and performance fell
Learning is lost, history is broken and results take longer to return. What we do: we stabilise the structure, resist restarting what already works, and rebuild the data cleanly rather than starting from scratch.
Leads arrive and then go cold
Forms fill a spreadsheet nobody opens quickly enough. What we do: we connect the enquiry to an actual follow-up path, including automation and response, because an unanswered lead is the most expensive outcome in the account.
Nobody agreed what a good lead is worth
Spend gets judged on whether the invoice felt reasonable rather than against a target anyone set in advance. What we do: we agree the acceptable cost per lead with you before a cent is spent, then report every month against that number instead of against impressions.
What we change
PPC marketing agencies bill for activity. We would rather bill for enquiries that arrive.
The work is structural before it is creative: tighten what the account is allowed to buy, then improve the pages that receive it. Ad copy matters, but it cannot rescue traffic that was never qualified or a page that asks for nothing.
Where paid search runs alongside organic, the two feed each other. Paid tells you which terms convert within weeks, and those are the terms worth building SEO services around rather than guessing. If you only want the audit and not the management, the Google Ads management page covers how that works, and agencies reselling this work should look at PPC management for agencies.
What we deliver
- Account and conversion tracking audit
- Search term and placement exclusions
- Geography, schedule and device control
- Ad copy to landing page alignment
- Landing page fixes where traffic fails
- Cost per lead reported by keyword
- Lead quality review, not just volume
Where is the account right now?
A brand new account, a leaking account and an account that needs to scale all need different work.
We scope by what the current spend is producing, because that number decides whether the job is repair or growth.
No paid search yet, or almost none
We build a deliberately small, tightly targeted account, establish true cost per lead, and find out which terms are worth scaling before committing real budget.
Buy data cheaply before buying volume.Spend is steady and results are not
Search terms, placements, geographies and tracking get audited first. Most accounts at this stage are losing money in two or three specific and fixable places.
Stop the leak before adding budget.The economics work and you want more of it
We widen carefully, add the campaigns that complement what already converts, and protect the terms that are producing customers at an acceptable cost.
Scale what is proven, not what is available.How we approach it
Audit the traffic, fix the leak, then decide what deserves more money.
Paid search is the one channel where you can see the answer inside a month, provided the tracking is honest.
Audit
Search terms, placements, geographies, schedules, tracking accuracy, cost per lead and what the current spend is genuinely producing.
Cut
Remove what cannot convert, fix the tracking that is inflating or hiding results, and align ads with the pages receiving the traffic.
Build
Rebuild the structure around intent, improve the pages that fail to convert, and connect enquiries to an actual follow-up path.
Scale
Increase spend only on what is producing customers at an acceptable cost, and report cost per lead by keyword every month.
Frequently asked questions
Questions about PPC advertising.
Send us the account and we will tell you what it is buying, what it is wasting and what a realistic cost per lead looks like in your market.
Ask for a PPC review →How much should we spend on PPC?+
It depends on what a customer is worth and what a click costs in your market. The useful starting point is working backwards from an acceptable cost per lead, because a budget too small to buy data can never optimise properly.
How do you stop wasted ad spend?+
Most waste comes from broad matching, search terms nobody has read, Display and partner placements left on by default, and geographies that cannot buy. We review those on a schedule and exclude what does not convert.
PPC or SEO first?+
PPC buys visibility immediately and stops when you stop paying. SEO compounds but takes months. For most businesses the honest answer is PPC to discover which terms convert, then SEO to own the ones that proved themselves.
Do you charge a percentage of ad spend?+
We scope the management fee to the work the account requires rather than taking a percentage of your budget, so there is no incentive to spend more of your money than the results justify.
Paid search
Find out what the account is actually buying.
Give us access to the account and a rough idea of what a customer is worth. We will show you where the money is going and what it produced.