PPC agency · London · Google Ads, Meta Ads PPC for London businesses, measured in sales

London clicks cost more, so the counting has to be right

A click on a competitive London search term can cost more than a decent lunch. That is not a reason to avoid paid search in the capital; some of the best returns we have ever measured came out of London accounts. It is a reason to be certain that every number in the report means what it says before a penny more goes in.

Most Google Ads accounts we take over in London are counting the wrong thing. A conversion firing on every page view. A form that reports twice. Phone calls that were never tracked, so the campaign that rings the phone all day looks like the worst performer on the dashboard. Fix that first and the rest of the work has a floor to stand on.

Black Steel Doors sell steel doors and glazing to London homeowners, a purchase people research for weeks. Google Ads into the postcodes that actually buy, plus a CRM that books the design consultation and chases every quote, produced 328 appointments and 112 deals worth £1.13 million between April and August 2026. That is 70.9 times the money that went in, counted in their CRM rather than in a platform that likes to flatter itself.

Every figure is published: Google Ads management starts at £599 a month and Meta Ads management at £299 a month, and the full rate card is on our pricing page, where you can tick what you need and see the total before you speak to anybody.

What to judge a PPC agency in London on

Not the cost per click, and not even the cost per lead. Judge the agency on what happened after the click: appointments booked, quotes sent, jobs won, and whether you can see those numbers in your own systems without asking for a report.

London has more PPC agencies than any city in Europe, and most of the shortlists you will find are directories charging the agencies to appear. Three questions cut through them. Who owns the account when the contract ends? Is the fee fixed or a percentage of spend? And can they show you a client’s numbers with the period they cover attached, rather than a percentage improvement with no start date?

Our answers are on this page: you own the account, the fee is fixed and published, and the numbers below all carry their dates.

What a PPC audit finds in a London account

Almost every account we take over has been managed by somebody. The audit is not a sales exercise. It is the only way to know which of the previous decisions are worth keeping.

It looks at four things. What the account counts as a conversion, and whether that thing is actually worth money. Where the budget went by search term rather than by campaign, because a campaign that looks healthy at the top often contains one term eating a third of the spend. Whether the landing page behind the ad answers the search, or is the homepage with a different headline. And what happens to an enquiry once it arrives, which is where most London budgets are really lost.

If a previous PPC agency delivered poor results, the audit usually shows why on the first page. Sometimes the campaigns were fine and nobody was answering the phone.

Google Ads across London postcodes

London is not one market. A service area business in Bromley has nothing to gain from a click in Barnet, and a clinic in Marylebone is paying a premium for every search that comes from a tourist. The location settings in a London account are where most of the waste lives, and they are the first thing we open.

Radius targeting around a single point pays for half the city. Borough and postcode district targeting, adjusted by what the CRM says actually converts, is slower to set up and considerably cheaper to run. For Black Steel Doors the campaigns follow the postcodes where design consultations turn into orders, and the budget moves as that pattern changes through the year.

After location comes the search terms report, which in London is a monument to money spent on the wrong intent: people looking for jobs, people looking for a supplier in a different city that shares a street name, and the eternal favourite, people searching for how to do it themselves. Negative keywords are unglamorous and they are where the first month’s savings come from.

Quality Score matters more here than in a cheaper market, because the premium for a mismatch between keyword, ad and landing page is charged on every click. When the three describe the same thing, the same budget buys more visits, and the visits convert better because the page says what the ad promised.

Meta and Instagram in London: the creative is the whole job

Paid social interrupts somebody who was not looking for you, on a feed that is full of things made by people with bigger budgets. The bidding settings barely matter next to what is in the frame. This is where most London PPC agencies run out of road: they build the campaign well and then ask you to send some photos.

We film the creative ourselves. A production day in your showroom, workshop or clinic produces video ads, stills and the cutdowns each placement needs, made for the format rather than cropped to fit it. For JR Stone the job was showing the craft of stone and masonry properly, because nobody buys a worktop from a stock photograph. For Revere Clinics it was patients on camera describing what a treatment was actually like, because in aesthetics the message that lands is never the clinic’s own.

Across four Meta Ads accounts that approach has produced 4,226 leads at an average of £14.02 each, counted in the clients’ own CRMs over complete months.

The numbers, with the periods they cover

• Black Steel Doors, London: 328 appointments, 112 deals, £1.13 million won from Google Ads and a CRM that books the consultation, April to August 2026. A 70.9 times return on ad spend.
• 4,226 Meta Ads leads at £14.02 each across four accounts, complete months only.
• Woodstock Campers: 2,215 leads at £12.50 each over thirteen months.
• Cotswold Gloss: 157 leads at £4.59 each in the first two months, with the website, booking calendar and CRM built alongside.

Every one of those is measured in the client’s own account and CRM. If a number on this page cannot be found in a system the client controls, it does not go on the page.

What PPC management with us includes

• Account audit and rebuild. Conversion tracking checked and repaired first, then structure, negative keywords and keyword research aimed at buying intent rather than volume.
• Location strategy. Borough and postcode targeting built from where your customers actually come from, reviewed monthly against the CRM.
• Landing pages. Built or improved so the page matches the ad, with the form, the phone number and the tracking working before the campaign goes live. Our web design team does this in house.
• Creative production. Filmed and photographed on your premises for Meta, Instagram and YouTube placements, with new material scheduled before the old material tires.
• Weekly optimisation. Search terms, bids, budgets and audiences, with the changes listed in plain English in the monthly report.
• CRM follow up. Every enquiry lands in a pipeline with automated follow up, so the leads the campaign generates are chased rather than counted. Our CRM and automation service sets this up.

What it costs, and how we charge

Google Ads management is £599 a month. Meta Ads management is £299 a month. Both are on the pricing page with everything else we sell, and both are fixed fees rather than a percentage of your advertising budget, which is paid by you directly to Google or Meta and never passes through us.

Agreements run month to month with 30 days’ notice either way. The work has to keep earning its place, which is the only arrangement we would accept if we were the client.

What a London business should budget for the advertising itself depends on the sector and the borough, and anybody who quotes you a figure before looking at your account is guessing. The audit produces a number with reasoning behind it, and sometimes the honest recommendation is a smaller budget than you planned, spent on one campaign done properly.

Google Search first, then the rest of the paid media

Google Search carries the buying intent, so it takes the first budget in almost every London account we run. Performance Max goes on where there is a product feed and enough conversion data to teach it, rather than as a default, because it hides the search terms and will spend happily on your own brand name.

Microsoft Ads is worth switching on once Search is working. The volume is a fraction of Google’s, the competition is thinner and the clicks are often cheaper for the same query. Importing the campaigns takes an afternoon.

YouTube ads and display campaigns are a different job. They do not close, they create the demand that paid search later captures, and they are only worth running when there is creative good enough to put in them. That is the part most agencies cannot do in house, which is why it rarely comes up. Our video production team films ours.

Remarketing campaigns sit underneath all of it. A London buyer comparing four suppliers takes days over it, and the campaign that stays visible across those days wins more than the one that spent the same money chasing new clicks.

Where paid search stops and everything else starts

PPC buys attention. It does not, on its own, turn attention into a sale. The landing page, the speed of the first reply and the follow up sequence decide that, and they are the reason two London businesses with identical campaigns can get completely different results.

That is why the paid media work here sits next to SEO, content production and CRM automation in the same team. A search term that is too expensive to buy can often be earned instead. A campaign that produces enquiries at 9pm needs a system that replies at 9pm. The London agency page sets out how the whole thing fits together for four very different London businesses.

Reporting you can actually check

The monthly report is built from your Google Ads account, your Meta account and your CRM, all of which you own and can open on any day of the month. It shows what was spent, what came in, what it cost per enquiry and per appointment, what changed in the account and why, and what we intend to do next. No vanity metrics, no impressions dressed up as reach.

If the numbers are poor, the report says so and says what we are doing about it. A report that only ever contains good news is describing the agency, not the campaign.

Start with an audit of the account you already have

Send us access to your Google Ads or Meta account, or tell us you have neither and we will start from the website. The audit is free and takes a few days. You get a written read on what is being counted, where the budget is leaking, what we would fix first and what it would cost, with no obligation and nothing to sign. If PPC is not the right first spend for your business, the audit will say that too.