Under media buying
One retail account measured here turned £4.66K of spend into £31.4K of tracked conversion value in eight days. The change that made the difference was made in week one and had nothing to do with bidding: the account had been optimising toward an event that was not a sale. Underperforming accounts are rarely badly optimised. They are aimed at the wrong searches and reporting the wrong number.
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.
A high click-through rate on a search campaign usually means the keyword is matching wider than intended, and the ad is agreeing with a search you cannot actually serve. The account looks engaged and buys unqualified traffic all day.
Someone searches for a specific job, clicks an ad about that job, and lands on a homepage about the company. The mismatch gets blamed on the campaign and is almost always the page. It shows up as a good click-through rate and a terrible conversion rate.
If the conversion the account is trained on is a page view, a phone-number tap that never connected, or a form start, Google will go and find more of those. Smart bidding is only as good as the definition of success it was given.
Google Ads works on one thing: somebody typing what you sell. If that search happens, you can be there within the hour. If it does not, no budget creates it.
It works when a customer is worth more than a few hundred pounds, when somebody answers an enquiry the same day, and when the budget can run ninety days rather than four weeks. It fails when nobody searches for the category yet, when the margin cannot carry a click price competitors have already bid up, or when enquiries land in an inbox nobody opens until Monday.
That last one costs more accounts than any bidding mistake. A fast lead handled slowly is a lead you paid for and gave away.
Four things, in the order they matter.
Who else is bidding. A click price is set by an auction rather than a rate card. Where a customer is worth thousands, clicks are expensive, because they are worth it to somebody.
How well the page answers the ad. Google charges less for an ad that sends people somewhere relevant. It is also the lever nobody pulls, because the page sits outside the ads account and no one owns it.
Which searches you allow. Broad matching to save setup time is how an account ends up paying for searches the business cannot serve. Every one of those is a click bought and thrown away.
What you have told the account to optimise for. Smart bidding is obedient. Ask for form starts and it buys form starts, including from people who will never answer the phone.
So the audit reads the search terms report before it reads anything else. It is the most useful screen in Google Ads and the least often opened.
Two Google Ads accounts measured here, side by side. One produced 2,410 conversions at £19.21 each from £46.3K of spend. The other produced £31.4K of conversion value from £4.66K of spend, a 6.74x return, in an eight-day window.
The second number is the one people quote and the first is the one worth studying. Eight days is a snapshot, and the page for that account says so. What both have in common is that the tracking was fixed before the bidding was touched, so the platform was told what a real sale or a real enquiry looked like and went to find more of them. That is the order every account here runs in.
Search advertising captures demand. It cannot create it, and if the search volume for what you sell in your area is not there, that gets said on the free review and no budget is taken.
A lower cost per click is not the goal. That number can always be improved by buying worse traffic. The set reported here is cost per qualified enquiry, the share of enquiries the sales team judged worth having, and the cost per customer that falls out of the two. Those three move together or something is wrong.
And nothing is billed for a lead that misses the criteria you agreed. The risk of a bad lead sits on this side, which is the point of pricing it this way.
Google Ads sits inside media buying, which is where the same budget is run across Meta and paid social when that makes sense. Buy the search, not the click.
Not a list of capabilities. This is the work that happens inside the ad account every week, and the invoice and the report can both be held against it.
Before anything else: the monthly search volume for what you actually sell, in your actual area. If it is not there, you find out in the free review rather than in month three.
Real auction data for your terms rather than an industry average, so the arithmetic you do afterwards is about your market.
The spend below which the numbers are noise, worked out from your click price and your conversion rate rather than quoted as a round figure.
Cost per qualified enquiry, the share of enquiries worth having, and the cost per customer those two produce. Agreed before launch, not chosen afterwards.
Forms that submitted, calls that connected and lasted, appointments that were booked. Rebuilt in week one, because every optimisation after it depends on the definition being right.
High-value work does not share a budget with the cheap enquiries that would otherwise drain it. Negatives applied against the real search term history, then reviewed weekly rather than once at setup.
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.
The account is audited in full and tracking is fixed or rebuilt before anything else changes. Optimising an account whose conversion data is wrong makes it worse, faster.
Campaign 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, ad copy tested, search terms reviewed weekly, and budget moved toward the campaigns 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.
Impressions and clicks are what the platform sells. These are the things that should be different in the business afterwards, each one measurable in the account 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.
The landing page is half the conversion rate and it sits outside the ad account, which is why nobody owns it. Here it is owned. No campaign outperforms the page it points at.
Spend is billed by Google to your own card on your own account. Ownership never moves and spend is never billed through this agency, so the history is yours if the relationship ends.
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 Google 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. If the month falls short of the agreed volume, the following month is free. And if the searches do not exist in your category, that gets said on the free review and the engagement does not start.
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.
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.
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
Google, Meta and Microsoft ads run as one budget against one cost per qualified lead. No retainer: you pay for leads that meet a definition agreed in writing.
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.
Work it out yourself
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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.
