Intent Before Volume
Focus campaigns on people searching for the services you sell.
Google Ads Managed to a Cost Per Booked Job
Google is very good at spending your budget. It is much less interested in whether the money produced work.
Book a Strategy CallThe Default Settings Are Not On Your Side
A new Google Ads account arrives pre-configured to spend. Broad match is on, automated recommendations are set to auto-apply, search partners are included, and the campaign will happily show your plumbing ad to someone researching how to fix a tap themselves.
None of that is a conspiracy. Google's defaults are built for advertisers with huge budgets and wide margins, where volume smooths everything out. A local business spending two or three thousand a month has no such cushion, and those defaults quietly eat a third of it.
The work is mostly subtraction. A tight account with fewer keywords, aggressive negatives and honest conversion tracking will out-earn a large sprawling one almost every time.
Talk About Your Project →What This Makes Possible
A Clear Destination
Connect each campaign to a relevant page and a clear next step.
Track What Matters
Review calls, forms, and lead quality rather than clicks alone.
Explore Our Client Work
See the business context, work completed, and reported outcomes behind these projects.
Victor Auto Body Works: 400+ Lead Conversions
423 tracked lead conversions at $2.71 each through focused digital advertising.
Read the case study →
Start with the Opportunity, Then Build the Plan
Tell us what you want to improve. We’ll look at your website, search visibility, and next steps together.
Book a Strategy CallWhere Local Ad Budgets Actually Go
Almost never on the thing the owner thinks.
These four account for the bulk of the waste we find when we take over an existing account. None of them show up as a problem in Google's own interface, which is the point.
Broad Match Drift
Ads served against searches that merely resemble yours — DIY guides, job seekers, and towns you do not cover.
Auto-Applied Changes
Google's recommendations applying themselves, quietly widening targeting nobody agreed to widen.
Paying for Your Own Name
Brand terms bought at full price from people who were already typing your company name.
Conversions That Are Not
Page views, button presses and unanswered calls counted as wins, so the optimisation aims at the wrong target.
Local Services Ads Are a Different Product
For a lot of trades, Local Services Ads sit above everything else on the page and charge per lead rather than per click. That changes the economics enough that it deserves its own decision, not a line item inside a search campaign.
It also comes with real obligations: licence and insurance verification, a background check, and a review profile that directly affects how often you are shown. Those are operational tasks, not marketing ones, and they are where most applications stall.
We will tell you honestly whether it suits your trade and your area. For some it becomes the best channel in the account. For others the lead quality does not justify the admin, and we would rather say that before you spend three weeks on verification.
What we handle
Eligibility and setup – whether your trade and service area qualify, and getting through verification without the usual stalls.
Lead disputes – wrong-number and out-of-area leads challenged properly rather than written off as a cost of doing business.
Budget balance – how spend is split between Local Services, search and remarketing, revisited as the numbers move.
Review pace – the profile signal that affects placement, kept moving by your team rather than by us.
Working Together
Your Account, Your Data, Your Decision
The oldest trick in agency paid media is running your ads inside an account you do not own, so leaving means starting from zero and losing years of conversion history. We do not do that, and you should be wary of anyone who does.
Everything runs in your own Google Ads account, with you as owner and us as a user you can remove in thirty seconds. The history stays yours because it is yours.
01
You See the Raw Search Terms
Not a summary. The actual list of what people typed, including the embarrassing ones we have not excluded yet. It is the fastest way for you to tell whether we are paying attention.
02
Your Team Grades the Leads
Whoever answers the phone knows within ten seconds whether a call was worth having. We build that judgement back into the account, because no algorithm can see it from the outside.
03
We Will Recommend Spending Less
When you are at capacity, or when a campaign has stopped paying, the advice is to cut it. If your agency's fee is a percentage of spend, ask yourself when they last suggested that.
How We Think About This
A smaller account you understand beats a larger one that optimises itself toward numbers nobody checks.
Fewer keywords, more negatives
Most local accounts would perform better with half the keywords and ten times the negatives. Breadth feels like opportunity and behaves like leakage, particularly on a budget with no room to average out the misses.
A conversion has to be a real event
If the account counts things that are not leads, Google's bidding will faithfully buy you more of them. Half the accounts we inherit are being optimised, very efficiently, toward something worthless.
The landing page is part of the media buy
Sending paid traffic to a generic homepage wastes a share of every click. Sometimes the highest-return change in a campaign is not in the account at all — it is the page the click lands on.
Some businesses should not run search ads
If your average job is small, your margin is thin and your competitors are bidding hard, the maths may never work. We would rather run that calculation with you in week one than take a retainer to find out slowly.
What We Report On
Cost per booked job, by campaign.
Impressions, click-through rate and quality score are diagnostics we use internally. They are not results and they do not lead a report.
Cost Per Booked Job
Spend against work that actually reached the schedule, not against leads or clicks.
Lead Quality
Graded by the people who answer the phone, then fed back into the account as real signal.
Wasted Spend Removed
What the weekly search-term review excluded, so the subtraction work is visible rather than assumed.
Share by Channel
How search, Local Services Ads and remarketing each contribute, so budget can move to what is working.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much should we spend?
Enough to get a meaningful number of clicks on your most valuable searches, which depends entirely on your market and click prices. We would rather start deliberately small, prove the maths works on a narrow set of searches, and scale what pays than open wide and hope. A budget spread too thin across too many keywords learns nothing and buys nothing.
Do you charge a percentage of ad spend?
No. A percentage fee quietly rewards us for recommending bigger budgets, which is exactly the wrong incentive when the honest advice is often to spend less. Our fee covers the management work, and your ad spend goes to Google from your own account where you can see every penny of it.
Who owns the ad account?
You do, always, and we would encourage you to insist on that with any agency. We work inside your account as a user you can remove at any time. Agencies that run clients inside their own account are holding your conversion history hostage, and that history is worth real money once it has built up.
Should we use Performance Max?
Sometimes, with care and rarely as a first move. It is largely automated and gives you limited visibility into where money went, which is a difficult trade for a local business on a modest budget. We tend to establish results on search first, where the feedback is legible, before handing control to automation.
How long before it works?
Search ads can produce calls within days because you are routing demand that already exists rather than creating it. The first few weeks are mostly spent learning which searches convert and excluding the ones that do not, so early cost per lead is usually the worst it will be. If you are starting from nothing and the opportunity has a deadline, rapid deployment is how we get the campaign, the page and the tracking live together rather than in sequence.
What if we are already at capacity?
Then we would pause or narrow the campaign rather than take your money to generate work you cannot deliver. Ads that produce leads you have to apologise to damage the reviews and reputation that make everything else cheaper. It is a genuinely bad trade and we will say so.
Let Us Read Your Search Terms Report
Give us access for an hour and we will show you what you are actually paying for. It is usually the most uncomfortable and most useful hour of the whole engagement.
Book a Strategy CallYour account. Your data. No percentage-of-spend fee.