Paid advertising
Ads measured on booked jobs, not on clicks and impressions.
Search advertising is the fastest way to buy demand and the fastest way to waste money. The difference is almost entirely in what happens after the click — and in whether anyone is counting the right thing.
Fixed fee, never a percentage of spend · Your ad accounts, your data, your conversion history
What one click has to survive
The click
You paid for it
The only part most agencies report on.
2 seconds
The page loads, or does not
A slow landing page wastes the click you already bought.
30 seconds
They call or leave
The page has one job and this is it.
Under a minute
Somebody answers
Voicemail here turns a paid click into nothing.
That week
The job is booked
This is the event the bidding should be optimised against.
- Monthly ad budget managed
- $400KAcross 10+ platforms
- Average cost per lead
- $146Across the trades
- Cost per issued appointment
- $423Tracked, not estimated
- Cost of net sales
- 15%Held, not a best month
Figures from campaigns Mathew Brown has personally managed, not client results delivered by MAT under contract. We keep that line explicit because the industry usually does not.The full breakdown is here.
What is pay-per-click advertising, and when is it worth it?
PPC means paying for a placement in search results and being charged when someone clicks. It is worth it when there is existing demand for your service, your average job value is high enough to absorb the click cost, and the page people land on converts. Fail the third condition and the first two do not matter.
The economics are unforgiving and easy to check. If a click costs $12 and one in twenty visitors enquires, a lead costs $240. If one in three enquiries books and your average job is worth $900, the maths works. If your landing page converts at one in fifty instead, the same campaign produces a $600 lead and you conclude, wrongly, that Google Ads does not work in your industry.
That is why the first thing we look at in an advertising engagement is not the account. It is the page. There is a full write-up of exactly what to check:what to fix on your website before spending more on Google Ads.
What we actually optimise against
Improving- Cost per click
- a diagnostic
- Cost per lead
- a checkpoint
- Cost per booked job
- the number
Where the money goes
Four ways a local ad account leaks
Search terms you never wanted
Broad match quietly buying "plumber salary", "how to fix a tap yourself", and jobs three cities outside your area. Reviewing the search-term report weekly usually recovers a meaningful slice of budget in the first month.
Conversions that are not conversions
Counting page views, 8-second calls and duplicate form submissions. The account then optimises toward producing more of them, which is worse than not tracking at all because it actively steers the budget wrong.
The homepage as a landing page
Someone searches a specific job, lands on a page listing everything you do, and leaves. You paid for that click at full price.
Bidding on form fills instead of revenue
Without closed-won values pushed back into the platform, the algorithm optimises for cheap enquiries — which are frequently the worst ones. Fixing this changes which jobs the account chases.
What's included
What management actually covers
Account structure that can be read
Campaigns split by service and margin so budget can be moved toward what actually books. A single catch-all campaign makes it impossible to tell which service is subsidising which.
Negative keyword discipline
Search-term reports reviewed weekly, not quarterly. Most wasted spend in a service-business account is jobs you do not do, areas you do not cover, and people looking for work.
Conversion tracking that is correct
Calls over 60 seconds, real form submissions, and booked appointments — deduplicated. Counting every page view of a thank-you page as a conversion is why so many accounts look fine and produce nothing.
Offline conversion import
Closed-won job values pushed back into Google Ads so bidding optimises toward revenue rather than form fills. This is the single biggest lever most local accounts have never pulled.
Landing pages, not the homepage
Ads point at a page about the thing that was searched for. Sending furnace-repair traffic to a homepage listing eleven services is the most common and most expensive mistake in local PPC.
Local Services Ads where they apply
Google Guaranteed setup and management for the trades it covers, which often produces cheaper booked jobs than search — and runs on a different auction with different rules.
Meta where the maths supports it
Paid social for demand generation and remarketing on jobs with a long consideration window. Not on everything by default — most trades earn more from search intent than from interruption.
A report a busy owner can read
One page, three numbers at the top, what changed this month, what changes next and why. Platform screenshots go underneath for anyone who wants them.
How it works
Narrow, measured, then widened
Check the page before the ad
Week 1We look at where the traffic would land first. Turning on spend into a page that does not convert is the fastest way to conclude that "Google Ads does not work for us".
Build tracking, then campaigns
Weeks 1–2Call tracking, form events and conversion definitions agreed and tested. Then a deliberately narrow launch on the two or three services with the best margin.
Learn on real money
Weeks 3–8Search terms, call recordings and close rates reviewed weekly. The account is deliberately small at this stage — the point is to find the cost per booked job before scaling it.
Scale what converts
Month 3+Widen the services, the geography or the platforms, in that order, only where the numbers hold. Feeding budget into a channel because the dashboard looks busy is how accounts get expensive.
Fit
When paid advertising is the right spend
Paid search fits if
- People actively search for what you sell — an emergency plumber, a roof replacement, a clinic appointment.
- Your average job is worth roughly $500 or more, so a lead can carry a real cost.
- You can answer enquiries within the hour during working days.
- You have or will build a landing page for each service you advertise.
- You are willing to run for at least three months before judging it.
Spend it elsewhere if
- Nobody searches for your service — then you need demand generation, not search advertising.
- The budget is a few hundred dollars a month. It will not gather enough data to optimise on.
- Enquiries currently go unanswered. Advertising into that multiplies the problem.
- You want to be judged on impressions or clicks. We report on booked jobs and the numbers can be uncomfortable.
- You need the agency to front the ad spend. We do not bill spend through us — it stays on your card, visible.
Related
What paid advertising needs around it
Website design & build
Fast sites built to turn a click into a phone call, with the tracking wired in before launch, not after.
Lead response & follow-up
Enquiries answered in minutes at any hour, quotes chased for a month, reviews requested automatically. Email sequences included.
Business phone & call tracking
Calls that reach a person, missed calls counted, and every call attributed to the campaign that produced it.
Questions about paid advertising
How much should I spend on Google Ads?
Enough to get roughly 30 clicks a day on your core service, or the test takes months to reach significance. For most trades in Ontario that means a starting budget in the low thousands per month. Below that, the honest advice is usually to fix conversion and local SEO first.
How do you charge for ad management?
A fixed monthly fee inside the published range, not a percentage of spend. Percentage-of-spend pricing quietly rewards an agency for increasing your budget, which is the opposite of the incentive you want. Ad spend is paid by you, directly to the platforms.
Who owns the ad account?
You do. We work inside your Google Ads and Meta accounts, not a reseller account we control. If we part ways you keep the account, the history and the conversion data — which is the asset, and losing it sets a business back months.
How quickly will I see leads?
A correctly built search campaign can produce enquiries in the first week. Whether they are good enquiries at a workable cost takes four to eight weeks to establish, because that is how long it takes to accumulate enough closed jobs to trust the number.
Should I run Performance Max?
Sometimes, with care. It can find volume that search alone will not, and it is opaque about where the money goes. We generally start on search where the intent and the reporting are clear, and add Performance Max once there is a reliable conversion signal to feed it.
What about Local Services Ads?
Worth running for the trades Google covers. They sit above search ads, charge per lead rather than per click, and require a background check and licence verification. Where they are available they often produce a cheaper booked job than search, so we check first.
My ads used to work and now they do not. What changed?
Usually one of four things: a competitor raised bids, conversion tracking broke and the algorithm lost its signal, the account was migrated to an automated bidding strategy without enough data, or the landing page got slower. An audit tells you which within a day or two.
Can you work with my existing agency?
Yes, in the sense that we will audit the account and hand you a written second opinion, including when it says the account is well run. What we will not do is run a parallel campaign against the same keywords — you would be bidding against yourself.
Get your ad account audited before you increase the budget.
We go through the search terms, the conversion setup, the bidding strategy and the landing pages, and tell you what is producing jobs and what is producing noise. Free, written, and yours to keep.
You talk to Mathew.Not an account manager, and not a sales team.