Ad spend has a way of rising faster than anyone’s confidence in what it returns. Click costs go up each year. Platform automation spends first and explains later. The monthly report fills with impressions and clicks while the figures a finance director would recognise, cost per lead and revenue, are nowhere on the page.
Paid search should be the most accountable channel you buy. Every click has a cost and every conversion a source, so return can be measured and improved rather than asserted. As a PPC agency, we manage paid search and paid social across Google, Microsoft and Meta: account structure, keyword and audience targeting, ad copy testing, bid strategy and conversion tracking, all judged on what the spend brings back. BIG is an integrated PR, marketing and digital agency, so the search data in your account informs the content and PR working beside it, while the demand that work creates shows up in your search terms. Paid search here starts with the outcome you need to change, then builds the account back from it. The plan is built and run by the same experienced heads, so the judgement you hire in month one is still in the account in month twelve. For Morris Homes, that approach cut cost per lead by 79% while enquiries rose 464%.
Paid search clients on our current work pages include Morris Homes, Scottish Building Society and Positive Planet.
Our PPC services group around three situations rather than a platform list.
An account that has grown campaign by campaign usually carries waste nobody has looked for.
New products, new markets or a step change in budget need structure before spend.
Most accounts lean on Google Search alone; the mix is usually worth testing.
The Scottish Building Society needed awareness and conversions for its Fixed Rate E-ISA, a product bought on rate and timing. The insight: interest in a savings product has to be built before it can be captured, so Meta carried the awareness work while Google Search caught the high-intent queries it created. The campaign delivered a 56% increase in conversion rate, an 80% increase in ad CTR and a 33% decrease in CPA. For any financial product sold in a fixed window, pairing demand creation with demand capture is the model worth copying.
Morris Homes needed more leads from digital without the cost of each one climbing in step. Buying a home is a long, considered decision, so the approach mapped real sales data back into keyword targeting: budget follows the searches that produce buyers, not just visitors. Across paid search, paid social and display advertising, the programme produced a 464% increase in enquiries, a 656% increase in website sessions and a 79% decrease in cost per lead. If your product carries a long consideration cycle and a high value per sale, this is what feeding sales data into the account is worth.
Before touching a campaign we ask what the spend is meant to change: leads, sales, cost per acquisition. The account structure follows that answer, so budget lands where the outcome is, not where habit puts it.
The people who set the strategy are in it week to week. Judgement about where your money goes doesn’t get handed to whoever is free.
Measurement is agreed at the outset in commercial terms: cost per lead, conversion rate, revenue. The figures above are published because they’re the kind clients answer for internally.
We run Google, Microsoft and Meta campaigns for clients and recommend the mix on evidence from your account. Paid search also sits alongside our SEO and content marketing teams, so budget is never asked to do a job organic search already does.
An hour in the account is usually enough to see where return is leaking. Get in touch for a plain reading of what your budget can deliver.
There’s no universal minimum: the workable floor depends on what a click costs in your market and what a lead or sale is worth to you. A budget needs to buy enough clicks each month to produce conversions you can learn from; below that point, the account never gathers the data that makes optimisation possible. If a budget is too small for its market, we say so before spending it.
It usually starts with an audit of the existing account, then a restructure where the audit justifies one, then ongoing management: bid and budget adjustments, search term reviews, ad testing and reporting against measures agreed at the start. You keep ownership of the ad accounts and the data throughout; the agency works inside them. If you ever leave, the account history leaves with you.
Start where buying intent is highest, which for most organisations is Google Search. Microsoft Ads is often worth running alongside it: campaigns can be largely mirrored from Google, so a second search audience comes at little extra management effort. Meta and display do a different job, building demand that search then captures. The right mix depends on where your buyers spend their time and how they research.
Not always, but the two do different jobs. Paid search captures demand that already exists; paid social creates it. For products people don’t search for until something prompts them, a savings rate or a new housing development, social builds the awareness that search later converts. If search volume in your category is deep enough on its own, a search-only programme can be the right call.
Follow the marginal return. Budget goes first to the campaigns producing conversions at or below your target cost, then expands outwards as those campaigns reach the point where extra spend buys less. Platform splits are an output of that process, not a starting rule; a fixed 80/20 set in January is stale by March. Expect the split to move as the account learns.
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OR go home
