Paid ads
Every paid platform will spend your budget and report a number that looks like success. On one Meta account measured here, 2,631 leads arrived at £2.68 each. On a Google Ads account, £4.66K of spend returned £31.4K of tracked sales. Neither number meant anything until somebody checked that a lead was a person the business would take. That check is the job.
What we report on
Certified across the platforms we buy on. 150+ businesses, 7 years.
Paid ads: pay for a lead, not for a month.
1First, we fix the tracking.
If the account cannot see a lead, it cannot find you more of them.
Tap a step to see it again.
Fit
Worth reading before the rest of the page. If the right-hand column describes you, the honest answer is that this is not the service to buy.
This is for you if
This is not for you if
If you are on the right-hand side, say so in the form anyway. We will tell you what we would do in your position, which costs you nothing and costs us fifteen minutes.
Industries with their own page, each with what goes wrong in search, paid and email for that trade.
If the conversion the account is trained on is a page view, a phone tap that never connected, or a form start, the algorithm goes and finds more of exactly those. Smart bidding is only ever as good as the definition of success it was given.
A high click-through rate on a search campaign usually means the match is wider than you think and the ad is agreeing with a search you cannot serve. The account looks busy and buys unqualified traffic all day.
When Google and Meta are managed by different people, or bought as separate products, money stays where it was allocated instead of moving to whichever platform is producing cheaper qualified leads this month.
Who is this actually reaching? Not the audience you selected. The searches and placements it genuinely matched. The search terms report is the most useful screen in Google Ads and the least often opened.
What happens after the click? The landing page is half the conversion rate and it sits outside the ad account, which is exactly why it gets ignored. No campaign outperforms the page it points at.
What is the account being told to optimise for? Smart bidding does precisely what you ask. If a form start counts as a conversion, you will get a great many form starts.
Answer those three and the platform is on your side. Leave any one of them and it is spending your money against you, efficiently.
The instinct when leads are expensive is to raise the budget. In a neglected account the opposite works better.
There is nearly always a set of searches, placements or audiences that have never converted and never will, and they consume real money every day. Cutting those first does two things at once. It lowers cost per lead immediately, and it gives the bidding algorithm cleaner data to learn from, which lowers it again over the following weeks.
One Meta account measured here shows the shape of it: 2,631 leads at £2.68 each on average, with the best-performing ad set reaching £0.77 per lead. Another moved cost per add-to-cart from £25.67 to £1.33 across 1,181 add-to-carts. Those are not bidding tricks. They are what happens when the wrong audiences stop getting the budget.
Only after that is there a case for spending more.
Google Ads, including search, shopping and Performance Max where the account supports it. Microsoft Ads where the audience is there, which in some B2B and older demographics it genuinely is. Meta, meaning Facebook and Instagram. Paid social beyond Meta where the case is made rather than by default.
Not programmatic display, not TikTok, not out-of-home. That is not a judgement on any of them. Buying a channel occasionally is how a client pays for somebody else’s lesson.
No account runs here without conversion tracking that can be trusted. Cost per conversion is never reported as though it were cost per customer. And no cost per lead gets quoted before the account has been seen, because the honest answer depends on your market and your page, and a number invented on a sales call is a number invented on a sales call.
If the question is only about search, Google Ads covers when that platform is the right answer and what a click costs in your category. This is the page for buying across more than one platform, and for the decision about how a single budget gets split between them.
Buy customers, not clicks. Everything else on the invoice is a detail.
Not a list of capabilities. This is what gets planned, bought and reported across Google, Meta and TikTok each month, and the invoice can be held against each line.
Structure, match types, audiences, search terms, negatives, bidding, budgets, creative, landing pages and conversion setup. You get the findings and the priority order, and you keep the document whether or not you hire us.
Form submissions, calls that connected and lasted, booked appointments, and where it makes sense the value attached to each, so the account can optimise toward revenue rather than event count.
Google and Meta run as one programme against one cost-per-qualified-lead target. Money moves to whichever is working this month rather than sitting where it was assigned in month one.
Split by intent and by margin rather than by how your business is organised internally. High-value work does not share a budget with the cheap enquiries that would otherwise consume it.
Search terms and placements reviewed on a schedule rather than once at setup. On a neglected account this is normally the fastest cost-per-lead improvement available.
Written against what the buyer is deciding between, then tested properly. Not three near-identical headlines rotating and being called a test.
The page matches the ad, which matches the query or the audience. Where an existing page cannot be made to do that, the case gets made for one that can.
Not cost per conversion. Qualified means it was work you would take. That is the only number that says whether the channel pays for itself.
How long it takes
Nobody can tell you in advance what your account will do. What can be said in advance is what will have happened by when.
Every account audited in full, and tracking fixed or rebuilt before anything else changes. Optimising an account whose conversion data is wrong makes it worse, faster, and most accounts opened here have had at least one conversion counting something that was not an enquiry.
Structure rebuilt around intent, negatives applied against the real search term history, budgets reallocated, and the worst landing page problems fixed. This is usually where cost per lead moves most sharply.
Bidding tuned against clean conversion data, creative tested, search terms reviewed weekly, and budget moved toward whatever is producing work you would take. Lead quality becomes the thing being managed, not only lead cost.
Once a campaign reliably returns more than it costs, it gets scaled and adjacent intent gets tested. No expansion into a new campaign type because it is new.
Reach is what the platforms sell. These are the things that should be different in the business once the buying is right, each one measurable in the accounts or the CRM.
No retainer. You pay for leads that meet the criteria agreed in writing before launch, and a lead that misses the bar is not billed. Fifty qualified leads in a month, or the next month is free.
Google and Meta are run as one programme by one team. Some months one produces cheaper qualified leads and some months the other, and moving the money is somebody's job here.
Spend is billed by the platform to your own card on your own account. Ownership never moves and spend is never billed through this agency.
The number of qualified leads, at a price agreed against your criteria before launch. A roofing estimate, a legal consultation, a property viewing and a software demo are worth different amounts, and the price per lead reflects that. Ad spend is separate and goes to the platforms directly.
Month to month, no lock-in. Structure and negative keyword work usually shows a different cost per lead inside the first month.
A lead that misses the agreed criteria is not billed. Fall short of the agreed monthly volume and the following month is free. Both terms are in writing before launch.
Google Ads
2,410
conversions at £19.21 each
£46.3K spend at a £0.57 average cost per click.
Google Ads
6.74x
return on ad spend
£31.4K conversion value from £4.66K spend, at £15.87 per conversion.
Google Ads
6.45x
return on ad spend
787.59 conversions at $4.77 each.
Meta
2,631
leads at £2.68 each
The best-performing ad set reached £0.77 per lead.
Meta
£25.67 → £1.33
cost per add-to-cart
1,181 add-to-carts from 138,529 people reached.
Google Ads
188K
clicks from 14.4M impressions
£59.7K spend at £16.11 per conversion.
Real accounts, anonymised by client agreement. Currency as recorded in the account. Movement varies by market, budget and starting position.
Proof
Every figure below is legible in the screenshot beside it, and every card says what the numbers do not establish.
Meta, lead generationMedia buying
£2.68cost per lead
A 50% increase in organic traffic, keyword rankings or direct enquiries within 90 days of the engagement starting.
On camera
Four clients, four industries, one thing in common: the number moved and they said so on camera.
It is the best long-term investment we have made in the company, full stop.
Ahmed · Business owner · SEO
The cost per lead from organic is a fraction of what we pay on ads, and that math gets better every month.
Sandra · Founder · SEO
People can book a table without calling during the dinner rush. My host actually thanked me.
Aaliyah · Restaurant owner · Website
These tech geeks know the Facebook analytics and the data and the pixels and all that stuff that makes a musician’s head explode.
David · The Wankers · Social ads
Reviews
4.9 out of 5 from 22 published reviews
I have been in business long enough to know that every agency has a presentation about why they are different. That part doesn't interest me. What mattered to us was whether they understood our market and whether they would actually do the work after the meeting was over. So far, they've been practical, responsive and consistent. We discuss priorities, the team works on them, and we review what was done. I prefer that kind of relationship.
I am probably not the easiest person to build a landing page for because I change my mind constantly. First I wanted it minimal. Then more colour. Then less colour. Then I hated the headline. Then I wanted the old headline back. 😂 What I liked was that the team didn't get irritated or disappear every time I asked for another round of changes. We kept working through it until it finally felt like us.
My son said we needed SEO. I said fine, but I didn't want to hear about it every week. Mavix sorted the important stuff and kept it simple.
Photos are illustrative. Every quote is the client's own words.
Questions
SEO for businesses that want calls, not a traffic chart. We find the searches with money behind them, fix the pages that should win them, and report enquiries.
You already paid for the lead. Follow-up, quote chasers, win-backs and repeat orders stop you paying for the same customer twice. Results guaranteed in writing.
Starting or rebuilding Google Ads? A straight answer on whether the searches exist, what a click costs you, and an account aimed at enquiries you would take.
Work it out yourself
Do it yourself first
Run the checks
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A 50% increase in 90 days, or you get a refund plus $1,000. Yours to keep whether you hire us or not.
