The sprint: targeted advertising with direct results and crystal-clear insights, optimized every 72 hours.
Every other channel asks for patience. SEO takes months, content takes quarters, and brand building takes years. Google Ads takes an afternoon. That speed is worth something beyond the leads themselves: within two weeks of launching a campaign you know which propositions people respond to, which words they use, what a lead genuinely costs and whether the market is as big as you assumed.
We routinely use paid search as the research budget for everything else. The search terms that convert in Ads become the pages we build for SEO. The headline that wins the A/B test becomes the headline on the website. The objections that show up in the resulting sales calls become the FAQ.
None of that changes the fact that Ads is also a channel that stops the moment you stop paying. It is the sprint, not the marathon — which is exactly why we rarely recommend running it alone.
Most underperforming accounts are not badly intentioned; they are simply left on defaults. Broad match with automated bidding will happily spend your budget on searches that share a word with your product and nothing else. Conversion tracking that counts a page view as a conversion will report success while your calendar stays empty. And campaigns that send every click to the homepage waste the most expensive part of the funnel.
So we start with the plumbing: proper conversion tracking that records a real lead rather than a click, negative keyword lists that grow every week, geographic targeting that matches where you can actually deliver, and a landing page per campaign theme instead of one generic destination.
Then we watch the search terms report obsessively. It is the single most revealing document in any account — the list of what people actually typed, as opposed to what you told Google you wanted. Almost every meaningful saving we find comes from there.
Accounts drift. Competitors change bids, Google adjusts its own algorithms, seasonality shifts what people search for. An account reviewed once a month is an account that spent three weeks slightly wrong.
Every 72 hours we check click-through rates and campaign health, so anything broken is caught within days rather than at the end of the month. Weekly we work through bids, search terms and geographic performance, adding negatives and reallocating budget towards what is converting. Every 90 days we step back for a full strategic review: are the landing pages still the best version we can build, is the offer still competitive, should budget move between campaigns or channels entirely.
The results of that rhythm are usually visible in cost per conversion. One client went from €84.79 to €8.00 per conversion and from 9 to 98 conversions per month; another moved from €43.66 to €5.19 per lead. Those are not typical starting points for every account, but the direction is consistent: paid search rewards attention far more than it rewards budget.
It depends entirely on what a click costs in your market, which varies enormously. As a rough guide, a campaign needs enough volume to gather meaningful data — usually at least 30 to 50 conversions a month before optimisation becomes reliable. In the first call we look up the actual costs for your keywords and tell you what that implies, including whether we think the numbers work at all.
You do, always. We work in your account, under your billing, and you keep full access and complete history if we ever stop working together. Agencies that run clients inside their own account are protecting themselves, not you.
Ads can be live within a week of the first call, and the first leads often arrive in the same week. Reliable optimisation takes longer — expect four to six weeks before the account has enough conversion data to be tuned properly, and roughly three months before cost per lead settles at its realistic level.
Yes, and we usually insist on it. Sending paid traffic to a general homepage is the most common reason a campaign underperforms. A dedicated page per campaign theme, with the same promise as the ad and one clear action, routinely doubles conversion rate on identical traffic.
In most cases, both — but starting with Ads. Paid search tells you within weeks which keywords actually produce customers, and that knowledge makes the SEO investment far more precise. Over time the ratio shifts: Ads covers the immediate demand while SEO and GEO lower your average cost per lead in the background.
Altrady went from 9 to 98 conversions per month. Esther's Cookery: from €43,66 to €5,19 per lead.
Get these results too →
Book your free strategy call — 30 min, no strings attached