Paid search is not a shortcut around doing the work.It is the channel that punishes you for skipping it.
Paid search and Google Ads review, advice and pilot campaigns. We tell you what is in your account and whether more money belongs in it.
We review, we advise, and we help your team run it. We do not take the account over. If what you need is someone to hold the keys permanently, we will tell you that early.
Two different offers, and the difference matters
What most agencies sell
Take over the account, run it monthly, report on it monthly. The incentive is to keep running it, and to keep spend going up.
Which is fine, until the honest answer is spend less.
What we do
Review the account, tell you what is actually happening in it, and say plainly whether more money belongs here at all. Your team keeps the keys.
Sometimes the finding is that paid search is not your problem.
Why paid search fails as a shortcut
The assumption worth killing first
Paid search is often used as a shortcut to avoid doing proper SEO. It does not work as one, and the reason is mechanical rather than moral.
If your landing pages are weak or your product pages are thin, your cost per click goes up and your clicks barely convert. You pay more for traffic, and less of it turns into anything. The worse the page, the worse both halves get, at the same time.
So paid search and SEO are not alternatives. Paid search quietly depends on the work people buy it to avoid. If the site is not optimised, or the landing pages are generic and thin, do not spend money on paid search. That is the advice, not a footnote to it.
Shopping and text search are not the same instrument
Shopping is bottom of funnel
These people are ready. That makes two things decisive: have the inventory, and be able to deliver what you promised. If you cannot, Google gives priority to other merchants no matter how competitive your offer is.
And products with little or no content do not convert, or convert poorly. Shopping is not a way to sell a catalog you have not finished writing.
Text search works at every stage
Top, middle or bottom of funnel, all three are available. Which one you actually get is decided by the content on the landing page, not by the campaign.
That is why two accounts with identical structures perform nothing alike. The difference was never in the account.
Treating them as one line item is where most ecommerce budgets go wrong. One needs inventory and product content before it can work at all. The other will work at any stage of the funnel you build pages for, and at none that you do not.
How to start, whatever you have been told
Start low, and listen
A small pilot budget, run to learn rather than to sell. What you are buying is insight into how people actually search and which words they really use, which is never quite the list you started with.
Keep what is relevant. Drop the rest.
Tune until it converts
Refine the terms, the negatives, the targeting and the destinations until the campaign converts at the level you agreed was worth having. Not before.
The number to beat is set in advance, not chosen afterwards.
Scale slowly, retreat fast
Increase spending gradually once it is proven. If conversion drops, stop and go back to the previous budget level.
The previous level is your control group. That is what makes this measurable rather than hopeful.
This is the same discipline we use on every other service: small batch, measure, keep what works, scale only what is proven, revert on a drop. It is slower to start and far cheaper to be wrong.
Push and pull
Paid social pushes
It puts a message in front of people who were not looking for you. The work is in the message and the audience, and success means interrupting someone well.
Paid search pulls
It draws in people who were already looking, and delivers them to a page built to turn them into a lead or an order.
A pull channel is only ever as good as what it pulls people into.
They complement each other, and they are not interchangeable. Judging a push channel by pull-channel conversion expectations is one of the most common reasons a perfectly reasonable budget gets abandoned too early.
When we will tell you not to spend
When we will tell you not to spend
- The landing pages are generic or thin. Fix them first. Spending now buys expensive clicks that were never going to convert, and teaches you nothing you can use.
- The product pages have no real content and you want to run Shopping. Bottom of funnel traffic meeting an empty page is the most expensive way to discover a content problem.
- The user experience is the bottleneck. Interface and experience heavily influence whether a visit becomes a lead or a sale. No campaign structure compensates for a checkout or a form that loses people.
- You cannot deliver what the ad promises. Stock, lead times, coverage. Shopping in particular will simply stop showing you.
- Nobody on your side knows what they are doing yet, and nobody is learning. Do not run campaigns blind. Run a pilot, or have someone run it with you.
None of these are reasons to avoid paid search permanently. They are reasons to spend the next dollar somewhere else first, and they are usually cheaper to fix than a quarter of wasted budget.
What we look at in a review
Search terms, not keywords
What people actually typed, against what you thought you were bidding on. Almost every wasted budget we have found was visible here and nowhere else, and the keyword report looked fine.
Negatives and match types
What you are excluding, what you think you are excluding, and the terms quietly blocked years ago that nobody remembers adding.
Conversion tracking
Which actions count, whether they are counted once, and whether the number in the account agrees with the number in your analytics. Often it does not, and everything downstream is then decoration.
Landing page fit
Whether each ad points somewhere that answers what was searched. This is where cost per click and conversion rate are actually decided.
Shopping feed health
Whether the feed agrees with the site, whether products carry enough content to convert, and whether disapprovals are quietly removing your best sellers.
Targeting
Geography, demographics, devices, schedule. Being specific is cheaper than being broad, and most accounts are broad because nobody revisited the defaults.
Automation you did not choose
Features enabled by default or by a recommendation, changing where your money goes. This is the most common cause of a sudden change nobody can explain.
Whether to spend at all
The question the other seven answer. Sometimes the finding is that the budget belongs in the catalog or the landing pages this quarter, and we will say so.
Working is not the same as safe
And if it is already working
Do not sit back. Google Ads keeps introducing new features and functionality, and some of them can sink a successful campaign within days. A campaign that has performed for a year is not a campaign that is safe.
Do not put all your eggs in the paid search basket either. Paid search is genuinely useful because it can start converting overnight, which nothing else does. It cannot be your only strategy.
Paid search is short term. SEO is long term. Anyone selling you one as a replacement for the other is selling their own convenience.
Who this is for, and who it is not
It fits businesses already spending who cannot fully explain the results, teams who inherited an account, ecommerce operations weighing Shopping against catalog work, B2B companies with long cycles and thin conversion data, and anyone who wants a second opinion without changing agency.
We will say no when:
- You want us to run the account month to month. That is not our model and pretending otherwise would suit neither of us.
- You want spend increased without the diagnosis. We would rather lose the work than recommend scaling something we cannot explain.
- The site is the problem. Then the budget belongs in the pages this quarter, and we will say so even though it is the smaller engagement.
- You want a guaranteed cost per lead before anyone has seen the account. Nobody can give you that honestly.
Where this sits beside the rest
The landing pages that decide your cost per click are on-page SEO, the product content that decides whether Shopping converts is ecommerce SEO, and whether any of the numbers agree with each other is analytics and reporting.
The long-term half of the strategy is SEO, and if you are replatforming, your ad destinations and shopping feeds have to move with the site, which is website migration SEO.
Questions we get asked
Q. Who can review our Google Ads account without taking it over?
That is the main thing we do here. You keep the account, the access and the control, and we tell you what is in it: where the money actually goes, which terms are converting, what the tracking is really counting, and what we would change in what order. You can hand the findings to whoever runs it, in house or an agency. We are not trying to become your agency, and the review is more useful precisely because we are not.
Q. How do I audit a Google Ads account I inherited?
Start with the search terms report, not the keyword report. The keyword view shows what you bid on; the search terms view shows what people typed, and the gap between them is where most wasted budget lives. Then check conversion tracking before you believe any performance number, look at what has been added as a negative over the years, and check which automated features are switched on. Only then look at performance, because until those four are settled you are interpreting numbers that may not mean what they appear to mean.
Q. Why did our Google Ads conversions drop after switching to Performance Max?
Usually one of three things, and they need different fixes. The campaign may genuinely be performing worse. Traffic may have been reallocated away from campaigns that were converting, so the account total moved while nothing broke. Or conversion tracking changed at the same time and you are comparing two different measurements. Before concluding anything, we check campaign start dates, what changed in tracking, and whether the drop is on all conversion actions or only one. The first coherent explanation is usually not the right one.
Q. How much should a B2B company spend on Google Ads to see results?
Less than you think, to begin with. Start low, run a pilot built to gather insight rather than to hit a revenue number, keep the terms that prove relevant and drop the rest. Increase spending only once it converts at a level you agreed in advance was worth having, and go back to the previous level if conversion falls. For B2B specifically, expect the sample to build slowly, because low conversion volume means most weekly movements are noise rather than signal.
Q. What is PPC management, and is that what you do?
PPC management normally means an agency runs your campaigns month to month for a fee. That is not our model. We review, diagnose and advise, and we help your team run it properly, which usually costs less and leaves you with something you keep. If what you want is someone to hold the account permanently, we are the wrong choice and we will say so early rather than late.
Q. How much does it cost?
It depends on the size of the account and what you want from it, and we agree it before anything starts. A review is a fixed, bounded piece of work with a defined output, not a retainer and not a percentage of your spend. Percentage-of-spend pricing rewards the agency for spending more of your money, which is the wrong incentive for the advice you are buying.
Q. Do we need SEO as well?
Yes, and not as an upsell. The two are linked mechanically. Weak landing pages and thin product pages raise what you pay per click and lower what converts, so poor organic foundations make paid search more expensive at exactly the moment you are relying on it. Paid search starts converting quickly, which nothing else does. It is a short-term instrument, and it cannot be the whole strategy.
Q. Should we run Shopping campaigns?
Only if two things are true. You can deliver what you promise, including stock, because Google gives priority to merchants who can and will simply stop showing you if you cannot. And your product pages carry real content, because Shopping is bottom of funnel traffic and products with little or no content convert poorly or not at all. When both are true, Shopping is often the strongest thing in the account.
Q. How is paid search different from paid social?
Paid social pushes a message in front of people who were not looking for you. Paid search pulls in people who were already looking and delivers them to a page meant to convert them. They complement each other and they are not interchangeable, and judging a push channel by pull-channel conversion expectations is one of the most common ways budget gets abandoned too early.
Q. Our campaigns are working. Why would we need you?
Because that is the state that ends most abruptly. Google keeps shipping features and defaults that can sink a well-performing campaign in days, and the first sign is usually a change nobody can explain. A periodic review catches the automation that switched itself on, the feed that started getting disapproved, and the slow drift in search terms. It is also the right moment to reduce the dependency, while you can afford to.
Start with a conversation
Thirty minutes on what you are spending, what you think it is doing, and whether those two agree. Bring read access to the account if you can. Most of what matters is visible in the search terms within the first ten minutes.