Google Ads Management London

The basics

What is Google Ads?

Google Ads is Google's advertising system. Businesses choose the searches they want to appear for, write adverts and set a budget. When someone makes one of those searches, Google runs an instant auction and shows the winning adverts above and below the normal results, marked "Sponsored". You pay only when somebody clicks, which is why it is also called pay-per-click advertising, or PPC.

The price of a click is not fixed. It depends on how many other businesses want the same search and on how relevant Google judges your advert and your page to be. A well-run account with relevant adverts and a good landing page pays less for each click than a careless one. That is where management earns its fee.

What is Google Ads management?

Google Ads management is the work of planning, building and continually improving an advertising account on a business's behalf. Setting up a campaign takes an afternoon. Making it profitable takes steady attention: reading the search terms that triggered your adverts, removing the wasteful ones, testing new wording, adjusting bids by area and time of day, and checking that every enquiry is being counted.

Google offers automatic recommendations inside every account, and many of them raise your spending without raising your enquiries. A manager who works for you, not for Google, knows which ones to accept and which to ignore.

Who Google Ads works best for

• Urgent services. Locksmiths, plumbers, drain clearance, vehicle recovery and other trades where the customer needs help today and calls the first result.
• High-value services. Builders, solicitors, dentists, removals and others where one new customer covers many clicks.
• New businesses and new websites that cannot wait months for search engine optimisation to take effect.
• Seasonal offers and events that need visitors on particular dates.
• Online shops, through Shopping adverts that show the product photo and price in the results.

It suits low-priced, low-margin products less well, because the cost of a click can exceed the profit on a sale. We will tell you honestly if we think Google Ads is unlikely to pay for your business.

The types of Google advert we manage

Search adverts

Text adverts in the Google results for the searches you choose. This is where almost every local business should begin, because the person has just typed exactly what they want.

Call adverts and call buttons

On a phone, an advert can show a call button, so the customer rings you without visiting the website at all. Ideal for urgent trades.

Google Maps adverts

Your business can appear at the top of the map results, linked to your Google Business Profile, when people nearby search for your service.

Shopping adverts

For online shops: product photo, title and price shown in the results, fed from your shop through Google Merchant Center.

Performance Max

A campaign type in which Google places your adverts across Search, Maps, YouTube, Gmail and other sites automatically. It can work well once an account has reliable conversion data, and poorly before then, so we introduce it with care.

Remarketing

Adverts shown to people who have already visited your website, to bring them back. This needs cookie consent, which we set up properly.

How much should you spend on Google Ads?

There is no minimum, and you can change or pause your budget at any time. What you need depends on what a click costs in your trade and area, which keyword research tells us before you spend anything. Clicks for competitive services in London cost several pounds each, and only a share of clicks become enquiries, so a budget that is too small cannot gather enough data to improve.

As part of your free review we estimate the likely cost per click and the budget at which a campaign becomes worthwhile. If the numbers do not add up for your business, we will say so before you commit.

Why the landing page matters as much as the advert

An advert only buys a visit. Whether that visit turns into a call depends on the page the person lands on. Sending paid traffic to a general home page is the most common and most expensive mistake in Google Ads.

A good landing page repeats the words of the search, states the offer, shows proof and makes one action obvious. Because we also design websites, we can build or improve the page your adverts point to. A dedicated landing page costs £306, and it usually pays for itself through a better conversion rate and a lower cost per click.

Google Ads and SEO together

Advertising and search engine optimisation are not rivals. Adverts bring enquiries from the first day and stop the moment you stop paying. SEO takes months to build and then brings visitors at no cost per click. Many businesses start with Google Ads, use the data to learn which searches bring customers, and invest in SEO for those same searches, reducing the advertising budget as their unpaid rankings rise.

Common problems

Why Google Ads accounts lose money, and how we fix them

When a business owner tells us "I tried Google Ads and it did not work", we nearly always find the same causes inside the account. None of them is about Google Ads being wrong for the business. All of them can be corrected.

Broad keywords. By default Google matches your keyword to anything it considers related. An advert for "emergency plumber" can appear for "plumbing courses" or "plumber salary". We use tighter match types and check the real search terms regularly.

No negative keywords. Words such as "free", "jobs", "DIY", "course" and "cheap" attract people who will never become customers. A good negative list is the quickest saving in most accounts.

Adverts shown too widely. Google's default location setting includes people who are merely interested in an area, not only those who are in it. A London roofer can end up paying for clicks from another country. We set targeting to people actually present in your service area.

Adverts running all night. If nobody answers the phone at three in the morning, call adverts at that hour are wasted. Your adverts should run when you can respond. As we are open 24 hours ourselves, we understand businesses that do take calls at night and schedule for them too.

One advert group for everything. When every service shares the same advert, none of the adverts matches the search closely. We split services into their own groups, each with its own wording and landing page.

No conversion tracking. Without it, Google cannot tell which clicks became enquiries, and neither can you. Every decision becomes a guess. Tracking is the first thing we install.

Automatic recommendations accepted without thought. Google suggests changes that often raise budgets and widen targeting. We review each one against your results.

What your monthly report shows

You do not need to understand the Google Ads screen to know whether your advertising is working. Each month we send a short report with the figures that matter to a business owner: how much was spent, how many times your adverts were shown and clicked, how many calls, forms and WhatsApp messages they produced, and the average cost of each enquiry.

We add a few lines on what we changed during the month and what we plan to do next. If the cost per enquiry is rising, we say so and explain why. You also have your own login to the account, so you can check any number for yourself at any time.

Google Ads for businesses across London

London is an expensive place to advertise if you target all of it. Few small businesses need to. A cleaner in East Ham does not want enquiries from Richmond, and a dentist in Croydon gains nothing from clicks in Enfield. We target by borough, by postcode district or by a radius around your premises, and we can bid more in the areas where you make the most money and less in the rest. That local focus is usually what turns an account that loses money into one that pays.