Show up. Sell. And know exactly why.

The cost varies by industry, competition and how aggressively you want to compete on category terms. For our managed accounts we generally see real commercial value start around $3–10k a month in media, plus a fixed retainer for senior strategy and management. We build the budget around the unit economics, not the other way around.

Google Ads is rented intent, you pay per click, you stop, the traffic stops. SEO is owned intent, slower to land, harder to dislodge once it's there. They work best as one program: paid covers you while organic compounds, then organic takes back the share that paid was renting. We've written more on our SEO page.

Start from buyer intent, not search volume. Map your audience, your category and the searches a customer makes when they're 90% ready to buy. We use keyword research tools to pressure-test the list, then layer negative keywords aggressively to strip out the noise. Strategy gets reviewed monthly, the SERP doesn't stand still.

Quality Score is Google's 1–10 measure of how relevant your ad and landing page are to the search query. A higher Quality Score lowers your cost per click and lifts your ad position. We work on ad copy, expected click-through-rate and landing page experience together, they're connected, and chasing one without the others is wasted effort.

Depends on the campaign type and industry. As a rough benchmark: Search CTR around 3–6% is healthy, branded terms can run 15%+, Display typically lands below 1%. The number that matters more than CTR is the cost per qualified lead, high CTR with bad conversion is just expensive clicks.

Search terms you explicitly don't want to show ads for. They're the single most under-used cost lever in most accounts we audit. Tight negative keyword hygiene keeps your budget on intent that converts and stops Google from spending it on tyre-kickers, job seekers, students and lookalikes.

Extra detail you can attach to your ad, sitelinks, call buttons, location info, structured snippets, product images. They take up more SERP real estate, lift CTR, and they're free. Most accounts we audit are leaving impression share on the table by under-using them.

Traffic and clicks land within days. Quality Score and conversion data stabilise over 4–6 weeks. Real CAC and ROAS optimisation needs 8–12 weeks of data to make decisions on. Anyone promising you scale in week one is either selling you brand search you'd have won anyway or burning cash to inflate the dashboard.

Yes, agents do the repetitive work (bid management, creative variants, negative keyword discovery, reporting briefs). A senior human still does the judgement: what to test, what to kill, what your number tells us next. We've written about how this works on our AI services page.