Get in front of people already searching for you.

You don't just outbid people

Every time somebody searches, Google runs an auction. Position isn't decided by bid alone — it's decided by Ad Rank, which combines your bid with how relevant Google thinks you are.

That relevance is summarised as Quality Score, rated 1 to 10, built from three things:

• Expected click-through rate — will people click your ad rather than a competitor's? This carries the most weight.
• Ad relevance — does the ad text match what was actually searched?
• Landing page experience — does the page deliver what the ad promised, and load quickly?

The practical consequence: a business with a Quality Score of 9 can hold a higher position than one with a score of 4 while paying less per click. Improving relevance is cheaper than raising bids, which is where most of the management work goes.

Match types decide who sees you

A keyword isn't a fixed trigger. How loosely Google interprets it depends on the match type:

• Exact [emergency plumber] — shows for that search and very close variants. Tight control, lower volume.
• Phrase "emergency plumber" — shows for searches containing that meaning. A sensible default.
• Broad emergency plumber — shows for anything Google considers related. High volume, and expensive to run without conversion data behind it.

We start on phrase and exact for control, and only introduce broad match once the account has enough conversion history for automated bidding to steer it sensibly.

Negative keywords are where budget is saved

Just as important is what you refuse to appear for. A plumber wants nothing to do with "plumbing courses", "plumbing jobs", "how to fix a tap yourself", or "plumbing supplies wholesale" — all of which broad match will happily buy for you.

We build a negative list before launch and prune the search terms report continuously. On a poorly-managed account this is routinely where a quarter of the spend is going.

Google's automated bidding is genuinely good, but it's a learning system: it needs conversions to learn from. Switching it on before the account has any is how budgets get burned during a "learning phase" that never resolves.

So we start with manual or enhanced CPC, gather conversion data, then move to automation once there's enough of it to be reliable:

• Maximise Conversions — the first automated step, once conversions are tracking
• Target CPA — appropriate once a campaign is producing roughly 30+ conversions a month
• Target ROAS — needs conversion values and considerably more volume, so mostly relevant to e-commerce

Conversion tracking comes first

Before a single ad runs we agree what counts as a conversion — a form submission, a phone call, a booking — and set up tracking for it, usually through Google Tag and, where it exists, your analytics.

Without it, every optimisation decision is a guess, automated bidding has nothing to learn from, and the monthly report can only tell you about clicks. Any agency that launches campaigns before this is done is not optimising anything.

If your website can't support conversion tracking, we'll tell you on the first call rather than after the invoice.