Paid search you can audit line by line. Tight campaigns built around genuine buying intent, negatives maintained every week so you stop paying for the wrong searches, and landing pages built for the ad instead of a homepage doing a job it was never designed for.
At a glance
From £400 a month flat management fee, never a percentage of spend · sensible media budget £600 to £1,000 a month · your account, your data, your billing.
In the accounts I'm asked to rescue, the bidding is rarely the problem. It's four other things, and they're all fixable in the first fortnight.
Why the budget disappears
How it should be built
Whether it's a new account or a rescue, the sequence is roughly the same.
Before anything is switched on: what's being counted as a conversion, and is it real? Most rescues start here because the numbers the previous setup reported were measuring the wrong thing. Calls, forms and chats get separated, and thresholds get set so noise doesn't count as success.
Campaigns rebuilt around how you actually sell, not around a keyword tool's suggestions. Match types tightened, a starting negative list built from your industry and from the account's own history, and budget concentrated on the handful of terms that carry real intent.
If the destination page isn't right, the campaign can't be. Either we use pages that already work, or I build the ones that are missing — same words as the ad, one clear action, fast enough that the click isn't wasted on load time.
Campaigns go live and then get worked on every week: search terms mined, negatives added, ad copy tested, bids and budgets adjusted against cost per enquiry rather than cost per click. The account is never left to "learn" unattended for a month.
Percentage-of-spend pricing is the industry standard and it's a bad incentive dressed as alignment. If I earn 15% of your budget, every conversation about scaling back is a conversation about cutting my own pay. That's not a position either of us should be in.
A flat fee means when the honest advice is "spend less this month, the phones are already full", I can just say it.
It also means small accounts aren't neglected. On a percentage model, a £700-a-month advertiser is worth about £105 to the agency — which buys you roughly one hour of attention, and it shows.
For a local service business in Lancashire, roughly £600 to £1,000 a month in media spend is where campaigns start producing enough data to optimise properly. Below about £400 you're guessing rather than testing. Management is charged on top of that, never taken out of it.
No. Percentage-of-spend pricing rewards me for spending more of your money, which is exactly the wrong incentive. I charge a flat monthly fee based on how many campaigns there are and how much work the account genuinely needs.
Sometimes, and rarely on its own. Performance Max hides most of what it's doing, which is tolerable once you have a proven search campaign and enough conversion data to feed it properly. Starting a brand new account on Performance Max is how you spend three months learning nothing.
Those calls come from a sales team measured on your spend, not your profit. The advice is usually broad match, bigger budgets and automated bidding. Some of it is reasonable; some of it is expensive. The rule is simple — never apply a recommendation you haven't read, and turn auto-apply off.
Yes, and it's the part most accounts are missing. Calls, forms and chats get tracked as separate conversion actions. Where your CRM or job system can push the outcome back, we tie spend to jobs won and revenue rather than to enquiries received — which is when the reporting starts being worth reading.
Clicks and enquiries can start within days of launch. Reliable numbers take longer — usually four to eight weeks before there's enough data to say confidently which campaigns and terms are worth scaling. The first month is deliberately about learning cheaply, not about hitting a target.
Read-only access is enough. In twenty minutes I can usually show you where the budget is going and what I'd change in the first week.