Ads that pay their way, not just spend your budget

Most UK agencies charge small businesses somewhere between £800 and £1,500 a month to manage ads, and London agencies add 30 to 45 percent on top. We are an agency outside London, so you get hands-on management without the London markup. We price it as a growth add-on on top of your website, and you get a clear figure before anything starts. The exact number depends on how many channels you run and how much management they need.

No, and be wary of anyone who blurs the two. There is the management fee, which is what you pay us to run the ads well, and the ad spend, which is the money that goes to Google and Meta and lands in your account, not ours. You set the budget, you own the ad accounts, and you can see exactly where the spend goes.

It depends on whether people are already looking for what you sell. If they are, Google search ads usually bring the warmest enquiries, because you are catching demand that already exists. If they are not searching yet, Meta is better for putting you in front of the right people and building demand. Plenty of businesses run both. We will tell you straight which to start with rather than selling you everything.

Faster than SEO. Ads can start bringing enquiries within days of going live, which is the whole point of paid. The first few weeks are about learning what works, so it gets more efficient over the first month or two as we cut what is not converting and put more behind what is.

Not as well as they should. Paying to send people to a site that does not convert is filling a leaky bucket. That is why we like ads as an add-on on top of a website we have already built to win enquiries, with the conversion work running underneath. Get the site right first, then the ads pay their way much harder.

Yes, but only after verification, and this is where most regulated firms stall. Google has required verification for financial services advertisers targeting the UK since 6 September 2021, and it applies to every ad format, including services that are not FCA regulated. You need your FRN, your business details and your domains, plus a warranty that you will comply with the financial-promotion rules. Two things fail applications: your Google Ads account must include a contact on the same email domain as the FCA-registered firm, and your details must match the FCA register exactly. We handle the application.

You do, always. We work inside your Google Ads and Meta accounts, not a shared agency account that holds your history hostage. If we part ways you keep the account, the data and the learning. Agencies that insist on running your ads through their own account are protecting themselves, not you.

For most local service businesses, somewhere around £500 a month in ad spend is where Google Ads starts producing enough data to optimise on. Below that you can still get enquiries, but you are guessing for longer because there are not enough clicks to learn from. We would rather tell you that up front than take a management fee on a budget too small to work.

Conversion tracking, set up properly before anything goes live. Form submissions, phone calls and, where relevant, purchases, all tied back to the click that caused them. If an agency cannot show you which keyword produced which enquiry, they are reporting on clicks and impressions because those are the numbers that always look fine.

The enquiries stop, more or less immediately. That is the honest trade-off with paid: it works fast and it stops fast. SEO is the opposite, slow to build and slow to fade. Which is why we would usually rather you did both, with ads buying you time while the search work compounds.

Yes, and we have. If your margins cannot carry the cost per click in your market, or your website converts so badly that paid traffic would be pouring money away, we will say so before you spend anything. A client who wastes three months on the wrong channel does not stay a client.