Paid Search and Google Ads Management
For when you need qualified enquiries this quarter, not next year.
Paid search is the fastest way to find out whether people are looking for what you sell, and the fastest way to waste money if the account is built badly. In B2B the clicks are expensive and the volume is thin, which means the margin for error is small — most of the work is not bidding, it is making sure the budget only reaches people who could actually become customers.
Who this is for.
Paid search suits some situations very well and others badly. We would rather say which at the start.
Businesses that need enquiries now
A quiet quarter, a new product, a plant with capacity to fill. Paid search produces results in days where SEO produces them in months.
Companies testing a new market or service
Before committing to months of content, buy the traffic and find out whether the demand and the language are what you assumed. The data is worth the spend even if the campaign does not continue.
Local service businesses competing in the map pack
Where Local Services Ads and the Google Guaranteed badge apply, they often outperform standard search ads for a lower cost per lead.
Manufacturers with a defined, searchable product
Where buyers search a part, a process or a specification, intent is unusually clear and paid search can reach it directly.
Anyone currently running ads without knowing what works
An inherited account, an agency that reports clicks, a campaign somebody set up two years ago. An audit usually finds a meaningful share of spend going somewhere useless.
Four things we already know about B2B paid search.
The consumer playbook transfers badly, and that is where most wasted budget comes from.
Most wasted spend is bad matching, not bad bidding
Broad match with no negative keywords will find you students, job seekers, competitors and people in the wrong country. Disciplined match types and a negative list that is actually maintained usually save more than any bid strategy.
The platform optimises for what you tell it
If the account counts form submissions, it will find you form submissions — including worthless ones. Feeding it qualified leads instead of raw conversions is the single highest-leverage change in most B2B accounts.
The landing page decides the cost per lead
You can halve a cost per enquiry by fixing where the click lands, without touching a bid. Sending paid traffic to a generic homepage is the most common and most expensive mistake we inherit.
Low volume needs patience, not more keywords
B2B campaigns often run on a few dozen clicks a week. That is too little data for aggressive automation and too little for weekly overhauls. Reading thin data correctly is most of the skill.
How a paid search engagement runs.
Deliberately slow to start and quick to react once there is enough data to react to.
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01
Audit and baseline
If an account exists, we go through it — wasted spend, match types, negatives, tracking accuracy, what has actually produced revenue. This is usually uncomfortable reading and worth doing.
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02
Fix the tracking first
Before spending anything we make sure conversions are measured correctly and tied to outcomes. Optimising against bad data is worse than not optimising.
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03
Build the account and the landing pages together
Structure, keywords, negatives, ads and the pages the clicks land on, designed as one thing rather than handed between teams.
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04
Launch deliberately
Tight match types and a controlled budget first, widening only where the data earns it. Starting broad in B2B is how the first month's budget disappears.
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05
Feed qualification back in
Which enquiries became opportunities, which were junk. That signal goes back into the account and is what separates a campaign that improves from one that plateaus.
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06
Report against pipeline
Monthly, on cost per qualified lead, with what changed and what changes next. Plus an honest view on whether the spend should continue at all.
Where paid search stops being the right answer.
It is easy to sell more ad budget. These are the cases where we will tell you not to spend it.
It stops the day you stop paying
Paid search rents attention. It is the right tool for speed and testing, and a poor substitute for the organic presence that keeps working after the invoice. Most clients should be doing both, weighted to the situation.
Some markets have no searchable demand
If nobody searches for what you sell, no account structure fixes that. Where the baseline shows it, we will say so rather than spend a year proving it slowly.
A bad site caps the result
If the landing page cannot convert, the campaign cannot either. Where the constraint is the site, that is the honest recommendation even though it is not the thing you asked to buy.
Very small budgets do not work well
Below a certain spend there is not enough data to optimise and not enough presence to compete. We would rather tell you the floor than take a retainer that cannot succeed.
We do not report on impressions
Impressions and click-through rate are diagnostics. A report built on them is usually a report avoiding the cost per qualified lead.
The account stays yours
Your Google Ads account, your billing, your data, your history. If we part ways you keep everything, including the negative keyword list that took months to build.
Who we run paid search for.
Manufacturers, contractors, financial and professional firms — businesses where a single enquiry is worth enough to justify an expensive click.
Questions about paid search.
What should we budget?
It depends on what a customer is worth and what a click costs in your market, which we can establish quickly. The more useful answer is that there is a floor below which a campaign cannot gather enough data to improve — and if your budget is under it, we will tell you rather than take it.
How is this different from what we are doing now?
Usually three things: the tracking measures qualified enquiries rather than raw form fills, the negative keyword list is actually maintained, and the clicks land on pages built for them instead of the homepage. Those three account for most of the difference we find in inherited accounts.
Should we do SEO or paid search?
Both, weighted to your situation. Paid search answers "is there demand and what does it cost" in weeks; SEO builds something that keeps working without spend. Starting with paid to learn the language and prove the demand, then investing in organic, is a sound sequence for most businesses.
Do you charge a percentage of ad spend?
We would rather not, because it rewards us for spending more of your money. Our preference is a management fee based on the work the account actually needs, which keeps the incentive pointed at cost per qualified lead.
Who owns the account?
You do — your account, your billing, your data, your history. We work inside it. If we part ways you keep all of it, including the negative keyword list, which is often the most valuable thing in there.
Can you work with our existing sales process?
That is the point. The value of the feedback loop is that your team tells us which enquiries were worth having, and the account learns from it. If that means a CRM integration or simply a monthly conversation, either works — the loop matters more than the mechanism.