Paid ads
Ad spend you can trace to revenue
Paid advertising is buying placement in search results and social feeds — on Google, on Meta — and paying by the click or the impression. The platforms will happily sell you traffic; we build campaigns that buy customers instead, with the right searches, the right audiences, and a landing page that finishes what the ad started.
You know what a good customer is worth. Paid ads should be how you buy more of them.
The platforms optimize toward whatever you tell them to count.
Point them at clicks and you get clicks; point them at qualified inquiries and closed jobs and the same budget behaves completely differently. So we start at the end — what a lead is worth to you, and what you can afford to pay for one — then build the account backward from that number: campaigns, keywords, audiences, creative, and the tracking that proves which of them actually paid.
What's included in an ad program
Account and campaign build
Google Search, Performance Max (Google's automated format that spans Search, YouTube, Gmail, and Maps), and Meta ads on Facebook and Instagram — structured so you can tell what each dollar is doing.
Keyword and audience research
The searches your buyers actually type, the ones that only look relevant, and the negative keywords that keep your budget away from tire-kickers and job seekers.
Ad copy and creative
Headlines, descriptions, and images written per campaign and tested against each other, so the strongest version earns the impressions rather than the first one we wrote.
Landing pages that match the ad
A click on a specific promise should land on a page that repeats that promise and asks for one thing. We build those pages, or fix the ones you already send traffic to. The FTC’s report Bringing Dark Patterns to Light (2022) catalogues the countdown timers, fake scarcity, and pre-checked boxes that get advertisers into trouble. We don’t build any of them, on your ads or your landing pages.
Conversion tracking, done properly
Form fills, calls, and booked appointments wired back into Google and Meta — that is what lets the platforms optimize for real inquiries instead of cheap traffic.
Ongoing management and reporting
Budget pacing, bid and audience adjustments, new tests, and a plain-English report showing spend in, leads out, and cost per lead — no screenshots of a dashboard you have to interpret.
Intent data
How intent data decides who sees your ads
Most targeting starts with who somebody is — an industry, a company size, a postcode. Intent targeting starts with what a business is doing right now: the research it does before it buys. Here is that sequence end to end, and what we do at each step.
A business goes looking
A company starts researching the thing you sell — searching for it, reading up on it, comparing the options against each other. That burst of research is what the industry calls a buying-intent signal.
It reaches us as an audience
The signal comes back to us grouped by topic: businesses currently interested in a subject, rather than a static list bought once and left to age. We narrow it to the kind of customer you told us you want, and leave the rest out.
The ads match what they were reading
That audience goes into the campaigns as targeting, so your budget follows companies already looking into the subject instead of a broad guess — and the ad talks about the thing they were looking into, not about us.
They convert, and we can see which signal did it
When one of them fills in the form, calls, or books, that conversion is wired back to the campaign and the audience it came from. That is what tells us which intent signals were worth buying and where the next dollar should go.
Two things this deliberately does not do. It never tells us that one named person is about to buy, and it never puts a number on how many of them will. What it does is narrow who your budget is spent on, and then show which of those signals turned into real enquiries — so the next round of spending is an informed decision rather than a hopeful one.
How an ad program runs
- 1
Baseline
We agree on what counts as a win, what one is worth, and what you can spend to get it. If there is account history, we mine it first.
- 2
Build
Campaigns, keywords, audiences, creative, tracking, and landing pages get built and checked end to end before a dollar goes out the door.
- 3
Launch and learn
We start deliberately, watch the search terms and placements daily in the early weeks, and cut what is not earning while feeding what is.
- 4
Scale
Once cost per lead is steady and predictable, we widen — more budget, more geography, more campaign types — one change at a time so we always know what moved the number.
The same way we run every engagement — how we work →
A good fit if
- You have capacity to take on more work
- Your buyers search for what you sell
- You are opening a new market or service line
- You want reporting that ties spend to closed business
- SEO is working and you want results sooner too
Questions we get about ad spend
Tell us what a new customer is worth.
A few quick questions — about two minutes.