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The plan gets written before a pound of budget moves.
Most Google Ads accounts launch first and let the data teach them what should have been decided on paper. At £50,000 a month that is a workable way to learn. At £1,000 to £7,500 a month there is no spare budget to buy those lessons with. The strategy is the written plan for where every pound goes, agreed before the account spends its first one.
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Most accounts spend first and hope the data teaches them
A rebuilt account with no written plan behind it just gambles faster. The strategy exists so that before the first click, there is already a written answer for where every pound is meant to go, and why.
If an account is already live, the plan's first input is not a projection. It is the 12-Point Wasted-Spend Audit, run read-only against the account exactly as Google is running it today — search-term waste, negative coverage, tracking accuracy, Quality Score, and the rest of the twelve checks. A strategy built on an account nobody has actually looked at is a guess wearing a plan's clothing.
Starting from nothing is different, not easier. With no account and no search-term history to read, the plan leans harder on the next two steps — market pricing and the search-intent audit — because there is no report yet to say which searches were ever going to buy.
What a click actually costs, before anyone promises what it buys
Before a figure goes anywhere near a forecast, the plan states what these searches cost to click on in the UK right now, because a budget only buys what today's auction allows, not what a projection wants it to.
That figure comes from live UK click-cost data against the account's own keywords, not a rate card or last year's number. The benchmarks page carries the same data trade by trade, so the maths behind a plan's numbers is checkable rather than asserted.
The forecast stops at enquiries, always. A plan can state how many enquiries a given budget should produce at a given cost per click and conversion rate, because those are numbers the account controls. It cannot state how many of those enquiries become clients — close rate is decided at the phone and the quote, somewhere the account has no visibility at all. LocaliQ's 2026 cross-industry search benchmarks put average cost per lead near £50 at an 8.18% conversion rate; figures like these set the frame a plan works from, never a promise it makes.
Not every click that looks like a buyer is one
Some searches are typed by someone ready to book. Others use the same words for a different reason entirely — a researcher, a DIYer, a jobseeker — and the plan has to tell them apart before launch, not after the first invoice.
Two searches can share the same three words and mean nothing alike. "Boiler service cost Leeds" and "how much does a boiler service cost" look identical in a keyword list and diverge completely in intent — one is close to booking, the other is filling in a spreadsheet. The plan reads the actual search terms an account like this pulls in, sorts them into buyer and look-alike, and writes the look-alikes into the negative list before the account has spent a pound on them.
Cutting a search before it has cost anything looks over-cautious on paper. Leaving it in and discovering three months later, from the account's own numbers, that it never once converted is the same lesson learned the expensive way — and it is the one most accounts pay for in month one, because nobody wrote the cut list down first.
The mechanics, written down before launch
Four decisions get made on paper, not live in the account, because changing them after launch means throwing away the very data the plan was trying to collect.
- One home for every search. Campaign and ad-group structure is mapped so each search term has exactly one place to land — no two campaigns bidding against each other for the same click, no conversion data split three ways before it can teach the account anything.
- Negatives fenced before the first impression. Every search rejected in the intent audit becomes a negative keyword before launch, not a note added after a bad fortnight of spend.
- Measurement defined before bidding starts. Which actions count as a real enquiry — a form, a call above a set duration, never a page tap — is fixed before Smart Bidding has anything to learn from. Full detail on the conversion tracking page.
- A bidding progression, with its own trigger conditions. Launch runs on manual CPC with a cap, while the account gathers real conversions no automated model can borrow. The move to target CPA is written down in advance — how many conversions, over what window, before the switch — rather than decided on a feeling once the account is live.
A 90-day arc, checked against itself in writing
The plan states what should be visible by which point, so "is this working yet" has an answer sitting next to the account instead of a debate on a call.
Day 30 — waste visible and cutThe negatives fenced before launch, plus any the search terms report has confirmed since, are logged. The account has enough real conversions for a first honest read on cost per enquiry.
Day 60 — the bidding decisionManual CPC has either produced enough conversions to meet the trigger conditions written into the plan for a move to target CPA, or it has not — and the plan already says what happens either way.
Day 90 — a verdict against the plan's own numbersNot a general impression of how things feel, but the account's actual figures set against what the plan said should be true by now.
Reviewed in writing every month from launch, not just at day 90 — the 90-day mark is the first fair verdict, not the first check-in.
What a strategy is not
The document earns its keep as much for what it leaves out.
Not a guarantee
No number in the plan is promised as a floor. Auction prices move and competitors change their bids. An honest plan says what it expects, sourced and dated — not what it is willing to be held to regardless of the market.
Not a proprietary framework
The document describes ordinary decisions in plain language — structure, negatives, measurement, bidding — not a named methodology dressed up to sound owned. Anyone competent could read it and know exactly what it means.
Not ten campaigns for a small budget
Splitting a tight budget across many campaigns splits its conversion data the same number of ways, and automated bidding needs volume in one place to learn anything. A tight budget gets a tight structure, not an org chart.
And no forecast of clients, ever — only enquiries, for the reason given above: close rate belongs to the phone and the quote, not to an ad account.
The conversation starts with the free audit
If there is an account to read, the 12-Point Wasted-Spend Audit is where the plan's first numbers come from — read-only access, findings in writing within 48 hours, yours either way.
Read-only access · in writing within 48 hours