The fastest way to get enquiries while SEO builds underneath. Managed against cost per lead — the only number that tells you whether the spend is working.
The usual causes are dull and consistent. Broad match keywords bringing traffic for adjacent things you don’t sell. No negative keyword list, so you’re paying for “free”, “cheap”, “jobs” and “DIY”. Conversion tracking either missing or firing on the wrong action, which means every optimisation decision since setup has been made on bad data. Traffic pointed at a homepage instead of a page built to convert it. And phone calls — often the majority of enquiries — not tracked at all, so the campaigns producing them look like failures.
If you can’t say what a lead costs you, the account isn’t being managed. It’s being maintained.
This is the calculation almost nobody does before starting, and it’s the one that determines whether ads are viable at all.
Not the first order. The total gross profit over the relationship. A £400 job with 40% margin and one repeat is worth £320, not £400.
Most businesses can sustainably spend 10–20% of gross profit on acquiring a customer. On £320, that’s £32–£64.
If you win one in four enquiries, four leads produce one customer.
£32–£64 to acquire a customer, divided by four leads per customer, means £8–£16 per lead in this example. If Google Ads in your sector costs £45 a lead, ads don’t work at your current numbers — and no amount of management changes that.
The £8–£16 figure above is what the example numbers produce, not a benchmark. Run it with your own.
Three options, in order of usefulness: increase what a customer is worth (higher-value services, retainers, repeat purchase), improve your close rate on the leads you already get, or improve conversion rate so fewer clicks produce more leads. All three change the answer. Bidding differently doesn’t.
Our position: we’d rather run this calculation with you on the first call and tell you not to spend, than take a management fee for a campaign that can’t be profitable. It happens often enough that it’s worth saying upfront.
Wasted spend, tracking accuracy, keyword quality and where the leaks are.
We work out your maximum sustainable cost per lead before touching the account.
Conversion and call tracking fixed before any optimisation, so decisions use real data.
Campaigns rebuilt around intent, with negative keyword lists that stop the bleeding.
Traffic sent to pages built to convert it, not to your homepage.
Monthly or fortnightly adjustment, reported on leads and cost per lead.
It probably isn’t right if your margins can’t support the cost per lead in your sector, if your website converts poorly, or if you can only spend a few hundred pounds a month. Below roughly £1,000 in spend there isn’t enough data to optimise on.
They also make the strongest case for phase three. Paid enquiries are expensive by definition, which makes losing one to slow follow-up more costly than losing an organic enquiry. Call tracking and automated follow-up are what protect the spend.
And the search data from ads tells us which terms are worth targeting organically — so ads make SEO smarter, not just faster.
| Feature | Essential | Most Popular Growth | Advanced | Custom |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Price | £395/mo | £750/mo | £1,350/mo | 12%of spend |
| Ad spend covered | Up to £2,000 | Up to £7,500 | Up to £20,000 | £20,000+ |
| Campaigns | Search | Search + Performance Max | Full mix + Shopping | Full |
| Optimisation | Monthly | Fortnightly | Weekly | Weekly |
Setup: £350 one-off. Ad spend is paid directly to Google from your own account — we never bill it through us or mark it up.
Get a free Google Ads audit. We’ll check wasted spend, tracking accuracy and keyword quality — and run the viability calculation with you, including when the answer is that ads aren’t right yet.
We reply within one working day.
No spam, no pitch deck.