Marketing & Growth
PPC & Paid Advertising Services
Paid search run on a flat fee rather than a share of your budget, with the landing pages and the tracking built by the same team.
Paid acquisition, and whether it works for you
Who it’s for: Businesses that can define what a customer is worth, or are willing to work it out, and want paid acquisition run by people with no financial interest in the budget growing.
Paid search is the most measurable channel in marketing and the easiest one to lose money on quietly. It is measurable because every click has a price and an outcome. It is easy to lose money on because the outcome is usually recorded by tracking nobody has validated, attributed by a model nobody has read, and reported by a supplier whose fee rises with the spend. Each of those is defensible alone. Together they produce confident reporting on a channel that is losing money.
Our position is different in two structural ways. We charge a flat fee rather than a percentage of your budget, so a recommendation to spend less costs us nothing. And we build the landing pages and the measurement rather than advising someone else to, which matters because the conversion rate of the page is a larger lever on profitability than the bidding usually is.
The first question we try to answer is whether the channel can work at your economics at all. For some businesses the answer is no: the cost per click in that auction, multiplied by a realistic conversion rate, exceeds what a customer is worth. That is arithmetic, it can be estimated before spending much, and telling you is more useful than optimising your way slowly towards the same conclusion.
What you get
- A pre-flight economic assessment: what a customer is worth to you, what the auction costs, and whether the gap is large enough for the channel to work
- Conversion tracking rebuilt and validated before spending, because optimising against events that fire incorrectly is worse than not optimising
- Campaign structure, keyword and audience selection, and negative keyword discipline that keeps improving rather than being set once
- Ad copy written against the query intent rather than reused from the site
- Landing pages built for the campaign, since sending paid traffic to a general page is the most common cause of poor returns
- Shopping and product feed work for online retail, where the feed quality decides more than the bidding does
- Integration with your CRM so reported conversions can be reconciled against real revenue, not just form submissions
- Reporting in the currency of your business, cost per qualified enquiry and per customer, rather than impressions and click-through rate
What PPC & Paid Advertising does for you
A flat fee, so the advice is not compromised
Charging a percentage of spend means a supplier earns more when you spend more, which quietly puts them on the wrong side of every question about whether to scale back. We charge for the work. It removes an incentive problem that most of this industry has simply agreed not to discuss.
Landing pages built, not recommended
Doubling the conversion rate of a landing page halves your cost per customer as surely as halving the click price would, and it is usually far more achievable. Because we build the pages, that lever is available to us rather than being a recommendation sent to your developers.
Measurement treated as engineering
Tracking is code, and code that has never been tested is usually broken somewhere. We validate it the way we would validate anything else, which is the only way to trust the numbers every subsequent decision rests on.
Why teams choose us for PPC & Paid Advertising
- Flat fee, never a percentage of your advertising budget, and your spend goes directly to the platform on your own account rather than through us.
- You own the accounts. If the engagement ends you keep the account, the history and the learning, which is not true of every arrangement in this market.
- We will tell you when the channel does not work for your economics, and we would rather do that in month one than bill for a year of getting there slowly.
- The landing page and the tracking are built by the same team running the campaigns, so the two largest levers on profitability are not on the other side of a handoff.
What PPC & Paid Advertising includes
The concrete pieces of work this covers, scoped to what your problem actually needs.
Paid search
Campaigns against queries with genuine purchase intent, structured so performance is legible and negative keywords can be worked continuously. The bulk of the value in most accounts, and the part most often left to run on automatic settings.
Shopping and product feeds
For retail, feed quality (titles, attributes, availability and pricing accuracy) determines when and where products appear. It is a data problem more than an advertising one, which suits us.
Paid social and retargeting
Where the audience genuinely justifies it, with a sceptical view of the attribution. Retargeting in particular is prone to taking credit for people who were going to return anyway, and we would rather size that honestly than report it flatteringly.
Landing page development
Pages built for the campaign, fast on mobile connections, with the promise from the ad carried through to the page. Built properly rather than assembled in a page builder that adds two seconds of load time.
Conversion tracking and attribution
Event tracking, offline conversion import and CRM integration, so the figures the platform reports can be checked against the customers you actually gained. Built as data work with the same rigour as anything else we ship.
Where it fits
An inherited account nobody can explain
Spend continuing on an account set up by a previous supplier, with a structure nobody understands and reporting nobody trusts. The first job is an audit and usually a substantial simplification.
Good click-through, poor conversion
The ads are working and the money is being lost after the click. This is a landing page and tracking problem, and it is the case where being able to change the page rather than recommend a change matters most.
A launch that needs demand before organic exists
A new product with no search authority yet, where paid is the only way to reach buyers while the organic work matures. A legitimate and time-limited use, and it should be planned as such rather than becoming permanent by default.
Spend that cannot be tied to revenue
A budget running monthly with no reliable link between campaigns and customers. Until that link exists, every decision about the account is guesswork dressed up as optimisation.
How we approach PPC & Paid Advertising
Nothing gets spent until the measurement is trustworthy. This delays the start of most engagements by a week or two and it is not negotiable, because every optimisation decision afterwards depends on the conversion data being real. Duplicate conversion events, goals counting page views, and platform-reported figures that nobody has reconciled against actual sales are so common that we assume they are present until proved otherwise.
After that the work is deliberately unexciting: tight campaign structure, relentless negative keyword work, ad copy matched to intent, and landing pages built for the specific promise the ad made. The largest gains in most accounts come from stopping wasted spend and from raising the conversion rate of the page, both of which are less interesting than bidding strategy and considerably more effective.
How an engagement runs
We start with economics and measurement rather than with campaigns. What is a customer worth, what does the auction cost, what is currently tracked and is any of it accurate. This phase sometimes ends the engagement, and that is a legitimate outcome: a business whose customer value cannot support the click prices in its market is better served by hearing that than by a test that takes a year to say the same thing.
If the arithmetic works, we build. Tracking first and validated end to end, then campaign structure, then the landing pages, then a controlled initial spend aimed at learning rather than at volume. Early budget buys information about which queries and audiences convert; scaling before that is known is how accounts acquire expensive habits that are hard to unwind.
Ongoing management is continuous rather than monthly: negative keyword work, structural adjustments, ad testing and landing page iteration. Reporting is in your terms, cost per qualified enquiry and per customer, with platform-reported figures shown alongside what your CRM says and the gap between them explained rather than smoothed over.
Signs it’s time
- You are spending on ads and cannot say confidently whether it is profitable
- An agency charging a percentage of your budget keeps recommending a larger budget
- Click-through is healthy and the conversions are not arriving
- Your platform-reported conversions and your actual sales figures do not agree
- You are launching something with no organic visibility yet and need demand now
- Nobody has audited the negative keywords or the campaign structure in over a year
Why we do not charge a percentage of spend
The standard model in this industry is a management fee set as a percentage of advertising spend. It is easy to sell and it embeds a conflict that nobody involved has much incentive to raise: the supplier is paid more when the client spends more, and paid less when the honest recommendation is to scale back, pause a campaign or leave the channel.
This is not an accusation of bad faith. It is a structural observation. Incentives shape judgement gradually and invisibly, particularly on marginal decisions, and the decisions in paid media are almost all marginal. Removing the incentive is simpler than relying on everyone to resist it.
So we charge for the work: a flat fee reflecting the effort the account needs. Your budget is paid by you, directly to the advertising platform, on accounts you own. If the right advice is to halve the spend or stop entirely, that advice costs us nothing to give, which is the only condition under which you should fully trust it.
Technologies we build it with
Chosen per problem, not per fashion. This is the stack we most often reach for on this work.
How we deliver
- 01
Discover
We map the system, the constraints and the business it serves, including the parts nobody documented.
Architecture brief
- 02
Architect
Decisions get made, written down and defended before a line of production code exists.
Decision records
- 03
Build
Short cycles against working software. You see progress in the product, not in a status deck.
Shipping increments
- 04
Operate
Monitoring, incident response and iteration. The system is alive, so the engagement is too.
Runbooks & SLOs
Want a straight answer on PPC & Paid Advertising?
A short call with a senior engineer, before you write a brief. If PPC & Paid Advertising is the wrong answer for your situation, we will say so and tell you what we think is right.
What changes
Wasted spend identified and stopped
Most inherited accounts are spending a meaningful share of the budget on queries that will never convert, matched in through broad targeting nobody has audited. Cutting that improves returns immediately and requires no additional budget.
Reporting you can reconcile against revenue
Platform-reported conversions and actual customers routinely differ, sometimes by a lot. Connecting the two, so a campaign is judged on customers rather than on form fills, changes which campaigns look successful more often than clients expect.
A straight answer on channel viability
For some businesses the auction economics simply do not work. Knowing that within a small test budget, rather than after a year of gradual optimisation, is the most valuable outcome this service can produce even though it ends the engagement.
Industries we serve
Domain knowledge changes what gets built. A few of the sectors we know before the first meeting.
How pricing works
- Management is a flat monthly fee based on the complexity of the account and the work it genuinely requires: the number of campaigns and markets, whether feeds are involved, and how much landing page and tracking work is ongoing. It does not vary with your advertising budget.
- Your media spend is paid by you directly to the platform, on accounts in your name that you keep. We never take a margin on media, and we never run your spend through our own account, which is an arrangement that makes the true cost per click impossible for you to verify.
- Initial work (the economic assessment, the tracking build and the first landing pages) is usually quoted as a separate fixed piece, because it is front-loaded and because it should be able to conclude that you ought not to proceed without that being awkward.
How to engage us
Three ways to work with us on this, chosen to fit the problem, not our margin.
- Dedicated team A standing team that works only on your product, in your rituals and your tooling. Best when the roadmap outlives the project. Ongoing product development
- Staff augmentation Named senior engineers embedded into your existing team, reporting into your leads. Best when you know what to build and need capacity. Filling a capability gap
- Software outsourcing A defined outcome delivered end-to-end by an accountable team. Best when you want the result owned, not just the hours filled. Outcome-owned delivery
Related services
Part of Digital Marketing. Other work we do alongside this.
Common questions
Do you charge a percentage of our ad spend?
No. We charge a flat fee for the work. A percentage model means the supplier earns more when you spend more and less when the right advice is to cut back, which compromises exactly the judgements you are paying for. Your budget goes directly to the advertising platform on accounts you own, and we never take a margin on media.
Who owns the advertising account?
You do, always. Campaigns are built in your account, the historical performance data stays with you, and if the engagement ends you keep everything including the learning the account has accumulated. Agencies that run client campaigns inside their own accounts make it impossible for you to verify your real costs and difficult to leave, and we do not work that way.
What if paid advertising is not viable for us?
Then we will say so, ideally before much money has been spent. If a customer is worth two hundred pounds to you and the auction in your market prices a converting click at three hundred, no amount of optimisation fixes that. Establishing it early with a small test budget is the most valuable thing this engagement can produce, even though it means the engagement ends.
How much should we budget?
It depends on the click prices in your market and what you can afford to pay for a customer, so any figure quoted before looking at those is invented. What we can say is that the initial period should be budgeted as the cost of learning which queries and audiences convert, not as an expected return, and that scaling before that is known is the most common way accounts get expensive.
Do you work on Google Ads only?
Mostly search and shopping, because that is where purchase intent is highest and where the return is easiest to establish. We will run paid social and retargeting where the audience justifies it, with an openly sceptical view of the attribution, since retargeting in particular tends to claim credit for people who would have come back anyway.
Can you fix our landing pages as well?
Yes, and it is usually where the largest improvement is available. Doubling a landing page conversion rate halves your cost per customer just as effectively as halving the click price, and it is far more achievable. Because we build the pages rather than recommending changes to someone else, that lever is actually usable within the engagement.
Thinking about PPC & Paid Advertising?
Tell us the problem in your own words, not in requirements. A senior engineer reads it and comes back with a straight view on whether PPC & Paid Advertising is the right answer here, or what would be.
- 01A senior engineer reads it. Not a form queue, and not an account manager.
- 02We reply either with questions or with a straight answer that we are not the right fit.
- 03If it looks like a fit, a technical call with the person who would actually run the delivery.
- 04Then scope, effort and risk in writing, before anyone signs anything.