PPC agency · Google Ads, Meta Ads, paid social Paid ads, on a fixed fee

Why we will not take a percentage of your ad spend

It is the standard model. Ten to fifteen per cent of whatever you spend, so the more the agency spends, the more it earns.

Think about what that rewards. Raising the ad budget: good for the agency. Cutting a campaign that is not working: bad for the agency. Telling you that £2,000 a month is enough and the rest should go on the website: financially irrational for the agency. The incentive and your interests point in opposite directions from the first invoice.

We charge a fixed monthly management fee set against the work the account needs. It does not move when your PPC spend doubles and it does not move when you cut it. That means the advice to spend less costs us exactly the same as the advice to spend more, which is the only arrangement under which the advice is worth listening to.

What “managed” should mean

Plenty of PPC management services amount to a monthly report and a bid adjustment, and plenty of PPC campaigns are left to run themselves between them. The account gets opened when the report is due. Between times it runs itself, which for a Performance Max campaign means it runs wherever Google finds it cheapest to run.

Effective PPC management is weekly at minimum. Search terms reviewed and negatives added. Bidding strategies checked against what actually converted rather than what the platform reports. Ad copy tested. Ad extensions kept current. Budgets moved between campaigns that earn and campaigns that do not, so the PPC budget follows the results rather than the plan. Landing pages changed when the data says the problem is after the click.

Ask any digital marketing agency how often somebody opens the account, who is on the PPC team, and what they do when they are in there. The answers vary more than you would expect.

Our PPC services

• Account audit and campaign setup. Structure, conversion tracking through Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics, negative keywords, and keyword research aimed at intent rather than volume.
• Google Ads. Search, Shopping, Performance Max and video ads, built around a defined offer to bring qualified traffic rather than volume. We are a Google Partner.
• Meta Ads. Paid social and PPC ads for the considered purchase somebody has to see before they enquire, aimed at potential customers who were not searching yet. Meta Business Partner.
• Microsoft Ads and LinkedIn Ads where the audience justifies it. LinkedIn far less often than LinkedIn would like, because the cost per click only makes sense at a certain deal size.
• Ad copywriting and ad creative. Written here, and for paid social filmed here. Most PPC companies can do the first and none of the second.
• Landing pages. Built or fixed by our own web team, which removes the usual argument about whose fault the conversion rate is.
• Call and form tracking, CRM connection. So an enquiry reaches your sales team immediately and closed deals can be traced back to the campaign that produced them.
• Ongoing optimisation and reporting. Weekly work, monthly reporting on spend, leads, cost per lead and sales revenue where the CRM supports it. Measurable growth or an honest explanation of why it has not arrived.

Building a PPC strategy around what the business needs

A PPC strategy is mostly a series of decisions about where not to spend. Which platforms, which audiences, which searches, and how much of the budget goes to capturing demand that already exists versus creating it.

Google search catches somebody with a problem already formed. That is the cheapest kind of intent to convert and the most competitive to buy. Paid social interrupts a targeted audience who were not looking, which costs less per click and takes longer to turn into an enquiry. Most businesses need both, and the split should follow the sales cycle rather than a rule.

Then the harder question: what are these ad campaigns for? Lead generation, online sales, or brand visibility ahead of a launch. Those need different measures. Judging a brand awareness campaign on cost per lead is how good work gets cancelled, and judging a lead generation campaign on impressions is how bad work survives.

Set the business goals and the business objectives before the campaign setup and PPC performance becomes something you can actually assess. Set them afterwards and every monthly review turns into an argument about which number matters.

We also decide what not to run. PPC platforms multiply every year and a small budget spread across five of them learns nothing on any. Two platforms run properly will beat five run occasionally, every time.

Creative is the lever nobody else can pull

Brand visibility is worth something, and on paid search the winner is usually whoever understands intent best. On paid social it is almost always whoever has the better creative, and no amount of bidding cleverness closes that gap.

This is where most PPC companies stop. They can build the campaigns and write the ads, then they ask you to send over some photos. We have videographers and a video editor employed here, so a shoot day produces the video ads, the stills and the cutdowns each placement needs, made for the format rather than cropped into it.

With Woodstock Campers a crew films on site twice a month, which is why their campaigns held up across thirteen months instead of three good weeks.

What our paid advertising has produced

All from clients’ own ad accounts and CRMs, complete months only.

• 4,226 leads at an average £14.02 across four Meta Ads accounts.
• Black Steel Doors: £1.13 million won in five months from Google Ads and a CRM that books the appointment, a 70.9 times return on ad spend.
• Woodstock Campers: 2,215 leads at £12.50 each over thirteen months.
• Escape Campers: 1,293 leads and £285,000 closed, from 4.13 million impressions and 1.75 million video views.
• Fern Campervans: 367 leads at £4.18 each on a product costing £46,500 and up.
• Cotswold Gloss: 157 leads at £4.59 each in the first two months.

Read them properly. A return on ad spend is measured against advertising rather than profit, high quality leads vary by industry and by month, and these are other people’s results rather than a forecast for yours.

What PPC costs, and what a sensible starting budget looks like

Two numbers, always separate. Your monthly ad spend goes to Google or Meta and never touches us. Our management fee is fixed at proposal.

On the ad budget itself, the honest answer depends on your cost per click and how much data a campaign needs before decisions stop being guesses. A £300 monthly budget in a market with £20 clicks buys fifteen clicks and no information at all. There is a minimum below which PPC advertising is not a test, it is a donation, and the audit works out what that number is for you.

If it turns out to be more than you can commit, we will say so rather than take the fee and run a campaign that cannot learn. Business growth from paid advertising is real and it is not free, and pretending otherwise wastes a quarter.

Every figure is published: Google Ads management starts at £599 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.

Specialist, full service, or run it yourself

There are three ways to run paid advertising campaigns, and the right one depends on how much you spend and how much you want to think about it.

A specialist PPC agency does one thing. Deep platform knowledge, usually no creative team, so your Google Ads campaign gets sharp targeting and whatever assets you can supply.

A performance marketing agency spans search and social and judges everything on cost per acquisition. That suits ecommerce brands, where the arithmetic is clean and the product is the advert.

A full service marketing agency, which is what we are, runs the campaigns and makes the creative. That matters more than it sounds, because ad creative is the biggest single lever on performance and the slowest thing to get out of a third party.

You can also run your own campaigns, and plenty of businesses do it competently. The point where that stops making sense is usually when the account is big enough that a two per cent improvement is worth more than the fee.

Ignore anybody describing themselves as a leading PPC agency, whether they are a PPC agency London based or working from anywhere else in the country. Ask what they did last quarter and who for.

On platforms we run Google, Microsoft, Meta and LinkedIn as standard, plus Apple Search Ads where an app is the product. What we will not do is spread a small budget across five of them so the report looks busy.

A successful campaign is not the one with the best click through rate. It is the one generating leads your sales team actually wants, at a cost that leaves profitable growth after delivery. Where the goal is to build brand awareness rather than enquiries we will say so and measure it differently, because brand messaging and direct response are two different jobs pretending to be one.

Choosing the right PPC agency

Five questions that separate them quickly. They work equally well on a specialist shop and on a full marketing agency.

How are you paid, and what happens to your fee if my spend halves? Percentage models will not enjoy this one.

Who owns the ad account? It should be you, with the data and the history, so that leaving costs you nothing but notice.

How often is the account worked on, and by whom? A named PPC specialist beats an account manager relaying messages to somebody you never meet.

What would you refuse to run? Any agency that will take any brief has no opinion, and the opinion is what you are buying.

Can you show campaign performance with a client name, a number and a date range? Screenshots without context are decoration.

For the record: we are a Google Partner and Meta Business Partner with a 5.0 rating from 30 Google reviews, and we are not a Google Premier Partner. That tier depends on managed spend thresholds rather than on quality, and plenty of good agencies sit outside it.

If you are in Buckinghamshire, our PPC agency Milton Keynes page starts one step earlier than the five questions above. Before anyone touches a bid, we check what the account is actually counting, because in most accounts we inherit the cost per lead in the report is fiction.

For the capital, our PPC agency London page covers why a mismatch between keyword, ad and landing page costs more in a market where the clicks are dearer.

Where paid fits with everything else

Paid media buys attention today and stops the moment the card does. Website traffic from ads disappears the day the budget does, which is the honest trade against search. SEO compounds slowly and keeps working. Most businesses need both, weighted differently at different times, and the right ratio changes as the organic work matures.

The campaigns also depend on what happens after the click, which is why our web design and content production sit in the same team. Buying traffic to a page that cannot convert it is the most expensive habit in digital marketing.

Services run month to month with 30 days’ notice.

Start with an audit of the account you already have

If campaigns are running, the free audit tells you what the tracking is actually measuring, where the spend is going and whether the structure is holding you back. Most of the first month’s value is usually already sitting in the account.

If you have never advertised, it tells you what clicks cost in your market and what a realistic starting budget looks like. Either way it costs nothing and carries no obligation.