We are a Google Ads agency in Toronto, running campaigns since 2004

Yes, when three things are in place. The campaign is structured around intent, with the right keywords, sensible match types and a negative keyword list that keeps the wrong searches out. The landing page converts, because traffic sent to a slow or unconvincing page wastes every dollar regardless of how well the account is run. And conversion tracking works, so you know what the ads produced rather than how many clicks you bought. Get all three right and paid search is one of the most efficient ways to win customers, because it reaches people at the moment they are looking for exactly what you sell. Miss one and it becomes expensive fast. There are situations where it is the wrong tool, and we say so. If nobody searches for what you do, if your margin cannot carry the cost of a click in your category, or if your phone goes unanswered during business hours, the money belongs somewhere else first. The other honest warning is about scale. A budget too small to gather data takes months to learn anything, so a campaign at a few hundred dollars a month in a competitive category is usually not a fair test of the channel. We would rather concentrate a modest budget on two or three genuinely commercial searches than spread it thinly across a category.

There are two costs. Ad spend is what you pay Google, and it varies enormously by category: a click for a personal injury lawyer in a major US city can cost $80, while a click for a local gym might cost $2. Most small and mid-sized businesses run monthly budgets between $1,500 and $15,000. Management fees typically run between 10 and 20 per cent of ad spend, or a flat retainer, and a flat fee usually suits a smaller account better because a percentage rewards the agency for spending more. The useful way to set a budget is backwards from the maths. Work out what a customer is worth, what share of enquiries you close, and therefore what you can afford to pay for an enquiry. Multiply that by the number of extra customers you want a month and you have a budget with a reason behind it. Then check that number against the cost of a click in your category, because if it only buys twenty clicks a month, search is not the right first channel. The comparison that matters is not what Google Ads costs but whether the cost per acquisition beats your next best alternative, and whether the account is being managed to that number rather than to a click volume.

Google Ads puts you at the top of the results immediately and for as long as you keep paying. SEO builds an organic position over months and then delivers traffic with no cost per click. The obvious difference is timing, but there are two more that decide how they should be used together. Ads give you data quickly, and that data is useful well beyond the ad account: the searches that convert tell you which pages to build, and the ad copy that wins tells you what your headline should say. Running ads first and SEO second is often the cheaper way to learn what your market actually responds to. The second difference is control. Ads can be turned up for a season, a launch or a quiet month. Organic rankings cannot be summoned on demand, but they also do not disappear when the budget does. For most businesses the right sequence is to run paid search properly while the organic work builds underneath it, then reduce spend on the terms where organic has taken over and redeploy it to the searches organic will never win. What we would not recommend is treating them as alternatives. The businesses that do best run both and let each one do the job it is actually good at.

Management fees typically run between 10 and 20 per cent of monthly ad spend, or a flat retainer of $1,000 to $5,000 a month for most business sizes. Which structure suits you depends on the account. A percentage works reasonably at higher spend, but on a small budget it produces a fee too low for anyone to do real work, and it quietly rewards the agency for recommending a bigger budget. A flat retainer avoids that and makes the cost predictable. What matters more than the structure is what the agency is accountable for. Ask three questions before signing anything. Who owns the account, since an agency that keeps ownership takes your history with them when you leave, and that history is worth real money. What happens each month, in specific terms rather than optimisation. And which number the work is judged on, agreed in advance. We managed Google Ads on a performance basis for most of our twenty-year history, buying traffic with our own money and earning when it converted. That is why we talk about cost per acquisition before we talk about clicks, why we will tell you when a budget increase is the wrong recommendation, and why the account stays in your name from the first day. If an agency will not agree to that, the fee is not the thing to negotiate.

A proper audit examines seven areas. Account structure: are campaigns and ad groups organised around intent rather than thrown together by keyword? Keyword strategy: are you bidding on terms with commercial intent, at match types that do not invite everything adjacent? Negative keywords: are the searches that will never convert being filtered out, or are you paying for job seekers, students and free? Ad copy: is it specific, honest and consistent with the page it leads to? Landing pages: do they convert the traffic being sent, or is the campaign carrying a page it cannot fix? Conversion tracking: is it measuring real outcomes rather than page views counted as conversions, which is the single most common fault we find? Budget allocation: is money going to what produces the best return, or is it spread evenly out of habit? The first thing we look at is actually the search terms report, because it shows what people really typed rather than what the account intended to buy, and in a neglected account a large share of spend is usually going somewhere obviously wrong. We offer a free audit covering all seven, and we tell you honestly what we find, including when the account is in good shape.

By connecting spend to outcomes rather than to clicks. The starting point is conversion tracking done properly in Google Ads and Google Analytics, with every meaningful action, a form submission, a phone call, a purchase, attributed back to the campaign and the search that produced it. Phone calls are where most local accounts lose the thread, since a business whose customers ring rather than fill in forms is often flying blind unless call tracking is in place. From there, cost per lead and cost per acquisition tell you whether the campaign is profitable at the current spend. Two refinements matter. Not all conversions are equal, so a quote request and a newsletter signup should not sit in the same column, and where you can tell us what a lead is worth we can bid toward value rather than volume. And attribution windows matter in considered purchases, because a click that converts three weeks later still belongs to the campaign that produced it. We report cost per acquisition and return on ad spend monthly, connected to revenue wherever the data allows, and we will say when the numbers are uncertain rather than presenting a confident chart built on tracking we do not trust. Where the tracking itself is the weak point, fixing it comes before any change to bids or budgets.

Yes, and the two are more connected than they look. Someone who has seen your business named in a ChatGPT or Perplexity answer and then searches for you is a warmer prospect than someone meeting your ad cold, and that shows up in the account as rising branded search volume and a better conversion rate on those clicks. Branded searches are also among the cheapest clicks you can buy, so an assistant recommending you tends to lower the average cost of the account rather than replace it. The practical way to use them together is to watch the questions. AI answers reveal how people frame a category before they know what to search for, and those framings often make good ad copy and better landing page headings. In the other direction, the search terms report tells you which questions to write content for, which is where the GEO work starts. What we would not claim is a clean causal line between the two, because attribution across an assistant is not something anyone can measure honestly today. What we can do is track branded search volume, direct traffic and citation frequency alongside each other, and show you how they are moving. We manage both, so those numbers sit in the same report.

A profitable campaign needs the targeting, the ad copy, the landing page and the offer all working at once, and a weakness in any one of them shows up as a campaign that spends without producing. Keyword targeting has to match real buying intent rather than searches that are merely related to what you do, which usually means fewer terms rather than more. Ad copy has to be specific and honest, including the things that disqualify people, because an ad that sets accurate expectations buys fewer clicks and better ones. The landing page has to convert: fast, clear, one obvious next action, and matched to the promise in the ad rather than a homepage that makes the visitor start again. And the offer has to make somebody want to respond, because no amount of account expertise compensates for a proposition the market does not want. There is a fifth thing that sits outside the account and decides more than people expect: what happens after the enquiry. A campaign producing enquiries that wait four hours for a reply will look unprofitable in the reporting when the problem is the response, not the ads. We look at all five before touching campaign settings, and when the constraint is one of the last two we will say so rather than quietly optimising bids around a problem we cannot fix from inside the account.

The first week is research. We audit the account if there is one, or the market if there is not: which searches your customers actually use, what competitors are paying for them, what each lead or sale is worth to you, and what the current cost per lead is if anyone has measured it. By the end of that week you have a plain written summary of where the budget is going and what we would change first. Weeks two and three are the rebuild. Campaigns and ad groups organised around intent, the searches that will never buy filtered out, an ad written for each search, a landing page built or fixed for each campaign, and conversion tracking set up so that every form, call and purchase reports back to the keyword that produced it. Nothing new spends until the tracking works, because an account that cannot see its results cannot be improved. Week four is the first live period. We watch it daily, not to react to every click but to catch anything structurally wrong early. At the end of the month you get the first report in plain language: what was spent, what a lead cost, which campaigns produced them, and what we are adjusting next. From there the rhythm is monthly, with a conversation each time about what the numbers mean for your business.

You need a landing page, and the reason is simple. A homepage is written for everyone who might arrive for any reason. A person who clicks an ad arrived for one reason, the thing they searched for, and the page they land on has to be about that and nothing else. When it is not, they go back and click the next result, and you have paid for the click either way. A landing page built for a campaign says the same thing the ad said, answers the question the search implied, shows the proof, states the offer, and gives one obvious next step: call, book, buy or enquire. It loads fast, works on a phone, and carries nothing that leads away from that step. In our experience the page decides more of the result than the bidding does. The same campaign sending traffic to a built-for-purpose page instead of the homepage can double the conversion rate, which halves what a lead costs without changing a single bid. That is why we build and design the pages ourselves rather than send traffic to whatever exists. If your site cannot take a new page, we can host the landing page separately and track it the same way. What we will not do is run a campaign to the homepage and hope.

With a tracking number that forwards to your real line. Every call is recorded as a conversion in the account, attributed back to the campaign and the keyword that produced it, and logged with its duration so that a twenty-second wrong number does not count the same as a six-minute enquiry. Google provides forwarding numbers for calls made straight from an ad on a phone, and we add call tracking on the landing page itself, which is where most calls actually come from. For businesses where the phone is the main way people get in touch, trades, clinics, practices and restaurants among them, this is the difference between an account that looks expensive and one that is clearly working, because without it every call is invisible and the campaign appears to produce only the handful of form fills. We set a minimum duration for a call to count, usually around a minute, so that the number you see is enquiries rather than every ring. Where the business has a receptionist or a booking system, we can also connect the call outcome, booked or not booked, so the report shows appointments rather than conversations. Call tracking is part of every account we run. It is usually the first thing missing in the accounts we take over.

Sometimes, and not as the first campaign. Performance Max is Google's automated campaign type. You give it assets, a budget and a conversion goal, and it decides where the ads run, across search, Shopping, YouTube, Gmail, Maps and the display network, using its own machine learning. For a store with a product feed and plenty of conversion history, it can work well. For a small business with a handful of leads a month, it has two problems. It needs conversion data to learn from, and a new account has little, so it spends the first weeks guessing. And it reports very little about where the money went, which means you cannot see which searches produced the leads and which produced nothing. That is what the automated campaign types ask of you: trust the system, and accept that you will not know what is working. Our approach is to start with search campaigns built around intent, where every keyword and every ad can be seen and judged, build up a few months of real conversion data, and then test Performance Max alongside with a clear goal and a budget it can't run away with. If it beats the search campaigns on cost per lead, it earns a bigger share. If it does not, it goes. The account stays accountable either way.