PPC management add-on

PPC for trades and local services. From £500/mo, no setup fee.

PPC puts your business at the top of Google for the keywords you choose. You pay only when someone clicks. For trades and local services this is the only marketing channel that delivers paying customers from day one. No waiting for organic SEO to compound, no algorithm volatility to weather.

The trick is making every pound of spend efficient. Half-built campaigns, the wrong keywords, missing negatives, untested ad copy. Any of these burns spend. The work below is what makes a PPC account worth running. PPC pairs well with organic local SEO - paid placements for keywords where ranking hasn't compounded yet, organic for everything else. The Technical SEO Foundation also helps here: a fast landing page with proper schema markup converts at a meaningfully higher rate than a slow one without it, so PPC spend goes further.

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What's in the PPC management

Setup, monitoring, and weekly optimisation. Done properly

✓

Initial account audit + restructure if needed (ad groups, match types, negatives)

✓

Keyword research clustered into tight ad groups using commercial-intent, competition, and volume data

✓

Ad copy: 3+ variants per ad group for Responsive Search Ads to test from day one

✓

Location + schedule targeting informed by your actual service area

✓

Call tracking wired from day one (essential for trades)

✓

Negative keyword lists generated upfront from your service type (not reactively)

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Conversion tracking: calls, forms, store visits, value-per-conversion

✓

Weekly performance review with optimisation actions surfaced in your dashboard

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Bid strategy tuned to your account's stage. Manual bidding early, automated strategies once conversion data supports them

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Monthly written summary in your dashboard. No spreadsheet decoding

You see every action in the dashboard. "Reviewed and applied" means no approval wait, not invisible.

How I run PPC

Setup, weekly tuning, monthly review

Step 1. Establish measurement. Call tracking wired in from day one. For trades businesses, phone calls are the real conversion, and a PPC account without call tracking is optimising blind. Conversion tracking on forms, calls, and store-visit signals. Every campaign built from the start knows what it costs per real lead.
Step 2. Build the campaign. Keyword research and clustering using industry-standard tools. High commercial-intent only, grouped into tight ad groups. Negative keyword lists generated upfront, not reactively (the single biggest lever for stopping wasted spend). Multiple ad copy variants per group for Responsive Search Ads to test from day one.
Step 3. Optimise weekly. Low-risk actions (pausing under-performers, adding negatives, raising bids on winners) are reviewed and applied in the same week. Higher-stakes decisions (budget, bid strategy, new campaigns) sit in your approval queue until you sign off. Weekly review surfaces both. Monthly written summary in your dashboard.

Questions

Answers to the things people ask before signing

PPC (Pay-Per-Click) means paying Google to show your business at the top of the search results for keywords you choose. For trades and local services it runs alongside organic SEO, while SEO compounds over months, PPC gives you predictable "found today, paying you tomorrow" placements on the most commercial terms. It's the only marketing channel where you pay only when someone clicks through to your site.

Management fee only. You pay Google directly for ad spend using your own Google Ads account and your own card, agency never touches the spend. Agency charges a flat monthly fee on top: Standard £400-450 or Advanced £600-800. No markup on ad spend, no commission on what Google bills you.

Standard handles the essentials well: keyword research, account structure, ad copy, basic bid management, monthly optimisation. Advanced is for accounts with enough spend (£2k+/month) that the difference between a 5% and 15% improvement in conversion rate is meaningful money. Deeper landing-page experimentation, audience layering, advanced bid strategies once the data supports them.

£1,000/month as a starting point. Below that the data is statistically too thin to make informed optimisation decisions. I won't take on PPC at very low spend because I can't honestly tell you whether the work is working.

Low-risk optimisations (pausing under-performing keywords, tightening match types, adding negatives) are reviewed and applied as I see them, usually in the same week. Higher-stakes decisions (budget changes, bid strategy switches, new campaigns) require my sign-off before any change goes live. Every action, applied or queued, is visible in the dashboard.

PPC delivers clicks immediately once campaigns go live. But meaningful performance (cost-per-lead stabilising, conversion tracking confident, ROAS positive) usually takes 4-8 weeks of data and at least one optimisation cycle. Expect the first month to be learning, the second month to be tuning, and full return from month 3.

I review landing pages for relevance and conversion friction and I'll request specific changes, but custom landing-page design is a separate project. If your current pages convert well, no changes needed. If they don't, PPC will burn spend until they're fixed.

Yes. You always own the Google Ads account. I access it with your permission to manage campaigns, but the account is yours. Your name, your billing card, your agreement with Google. If we part ways, you revoke my access and the account stays.

Ready to see what you're working with?

PPC is the easiest place to waste money. These answers help you understand exactly what I\'m doing before you commit.

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Related services

PPC management results

Founder-managed Google Ads outcomes. Anonymised, real numbers, real weeks.

Three accounts, three trades, three cities. The work in common: a real audit of where spend was leaking, a written list of changes, weekly review for the first 90 days, monthly check-ins after that. Your numbers will depend on your trade, your area, your offer, your landing page — I'll give you a realistic range in the audit, not a promise.

Emergency plumbing · Birmingham

−47% wasted spend in the first 60 days

Before: £3,200/month ad spend, broad match across 200+ keywords, no negative list, conversion tracking only firing on form submits (not calls).

What I changed: rebuilt the account into 6 themed ad groups with phrase + exact match, added 380 negative keywords from the search-terms report, set up call tracking via Google's website call conversion.

After 60 days: wasted spend down 47%, qualified leads up 22%, cost-per-qualified-lead down 41%. Account still profitable on a 4.1× ROAS.

−47%

wasted ad spend

+22%

qualified leads

4.1×

return on ad spend

Electrical contracting · Leeds

Cost-per-lead from £84 to £31 over 90 days

Before: single ad group targeting "electrician Leeds" and 12 variations, landing page was the homepage, conversions tracked as form submits only.

What I changed: split out emergency vs. planned-work campaigns, wrote 8 new responsive search ads against intent-specific landing pages (one per service), turned on Maximize Conversions with a target CPA once we had 30 conversions to learn from.

After 90 days: cost-per-lead down from £84 to £31, lead-to-quote conversion up from 18% to 34% (better-qualified leads, not just more), Quality Score improved from 5/10 to 8/10.

£84 → £31

cost per lead

5 → 8

Quality Score

18% → 34%

lead-to-quote

Dental practice · Glasgow

3.2× return-on-ad-spend within 4 months

Before: £1,800/month, manual bidding, no remarketing, single landing page for all services.

What I changed: introduced audience layering (in-market + custom-intent + remarketing lists for service-page visitors), set up conversion-based smart bidding once data supported it, separated treatment-vs-cosmetic funnels.

After 4 months: ROAS climbed from 1.4× to 3.2× on a 60% larger spend. Bookings are now 70% cosmetic (the higher-margin work) vs. 30% before.

1.4× → 3.2×

return on ad spend

+60%

ad spend

70%

cosmetic bookings (was 30%)

Numbers reflect the period when the account was under founder-managed PPC. Account performance depends on trade, area, season, offer quality, and landing page — these case studies are illustrative, not a guarantee of your outcome.

A quick honest note.

Fees cover the work we do, not outcomes we don't control. Once a fee is paid, it's not refundable. The work begins immediately. Search engine rankings, third-party platform decisions, audience reception: those are outside anyone's control. What we control is doing the work, reviewing it personally, and showing you every step in the dashboard. Full terms.