Paid search and social, run for revenue.
Google, Meta, LinkedIn — managed as part of one strategic system with SEO. The keyword data from one informs the spend on the other. No silos. No contradictory insights.
What's included in ppc management
Six deliverables. No mystery, no theater.
Every engagement ships these. Some scope to your situation, but the discipline doesn't change.
Paid channel strategy
Which platforms get budget, which don't, and the explicit thing that would have to be true for the spend to be wrong.
Campaign architecture
Account structure, audience definition, conversion goals — built for pipeline, not impressions.
Ad creative + landing pages
Ad copy, creative, and dedicated landing pages designed for the offer (we build them too).
Spend-to-pipeline reporting
What every dollar bought. CPA, CAC, payback period — not just CTR.
Weekly optimization
Real human review, not "AI-managed" auto-pilot.
Integrated with SEO
Paid data feeds organic targeting, organic data informs paid spend.
How we deliver ppc management
Same four steps. Strategist on every one.
Audit
Real audit by a strategist. Revenue leak map, not a template scan.
Strategy
Signed strategy doc. Named bets with explicit kill criteria.
Execute
Weekly shipping cadence. Real artifacts, not a roadmap Gantt.
Iterate
Monthly business review. Revenue, pipeline, what changes next month.
Pipeline-focused PPC vs. clicks-and-impressions agencies
Most agencies don't run this service this way. We do.
Want a strategist running Pay Per Click Management for you?
Ppc management reviews
What people actually say on Google.
Verified, attributed, public — pulled live from our Google Business Profile.
Related ppc management & SEO services
One funnel. Four services.
Runs as one strategic system. Every service feeds the others.
Compare your ppc management options
Honest trade-offs. No sales spin.
Weighing your options before you commit? These decision guides lay out the real trade-offs.
Strategy insight · PPC Management
Pay Per Click Management
Why most PPC accounts quietly hemorrhage budget.
Most PPC management is a slow-motion budget extraction with reporting designed to obscure the leak. Google’s defaults are tuned to spend more, Smart Bidding is tuned to spend more, broad-match is tuned to spend more — and the average agency PPC manager is incentivized to manage to the budget rather than against it. The result: accounts that “perform” by Google’s definition while losing operator margin month after month.
What’s actually broken in most PPC accounts
- Broad-match defaults. Google now nudges every new account toward broad-match keywords plus Smart Bidding. The result is search-term reports filled with queries you would never have selected — irrelevant traffic dressed in confident reports. Most agencies don’t audit search terms weekly. The waste compounds.
- Account-bot management. “Performance Max” sounded great. In practice it’s a black box that buys the cheapest impressions Google can find — junk display, irrelevant YouTube placements, mobile-game inventory. Operators bid against themselves with no visibility into where the spend went.
- Brand-bidding extraction. Most agency PPC reports lead with branded conversions — searches that would have come anyway. Strip out branded performance and the real picture emerges: high CPCs, low conversion rate, weak attribution. The branded layer hides the rot.
Questions operators actually ask about PPC
What should I expect a PPC manager to charge?
For real management of a $5,000-$50,000/month ad spend account: $1,500-$5,000/month management fee, or 12-18% of spend (whichever is higher). Below that floor, you’re getting account-bot management — automated tools and minimal human review. The math doesn’t work for hands-on optimization below the floor.
Why is my CPL going up every quarter?
Three usual culprits. (1) Account drift — broad-match expansion adding irrelevant queries. (2) Auction inflation — competitors entering or bidding aggressively. (3) Landing-page decay — the conversion rate fell and CPL math made up the difference. Most agencies blame “the auction” because the other two are their fault. A real PPC manager owns all three.
Should I be running Performance Max?
Usually no — at least not as a primary strategy. PMax is opaque, Google-favorable, and tends to buy cheap garbage impressions while consuming budget that would perform better in search. The exceptions: e-commerce with strong product feeds and clear conversion data, or supplementary brand-defense campaigns with strict exclusion lists. For most B2B and service businesses, classic Search + carefully-built Display deliver more accountable results.
How do I tell if my PPC is actually working?
Look at three numbers your agency probably isn’t reporting prominently. (1) Non-branded conversion rate — strip out search traffic for your company name. (2) Cost per qualified lead (QL), not raw lead count — your sales team’s filter. (3) Pipeline contribution from PPC versus other channels — the CFO’s view. If your agency reports “leads up 32%” without those three numbers behind it, the report is theater.
Should PPC and SEO be managed together?
Yes — and rarely are. PPC search-term data is the best keyword research signal SEO can have. SEO data shows where you don’t need to pay for traffic. Running them in separate silos with separate agencies wastes both budgets. Integrated funnel management — PPC defending what SEO doesn’t yet rank for, both feeding into the same conversion architecture — outperforms siloed accounts in nearly every account we audit.
What integrated PPC management actually involves
- Weekly search-term audits. Negative keyword discipline, broad-match containment, query-mining for new opportunities. Not a quarterly cleanup — a weekly habit.
- Conversion-tracking that actually tracks conversions. Server-side tagging, offline conversion imports, attribution beyond last-click. Most accounts we audit have tracking bugs the agency never caught.
- Manual bidding where it matters. Smart Bidding has its place. Real money decisions don’t always belong to an algorithm tuned to Google’s interests.
- Landing-page integration. PPC traffic deserves landing pages engineered for the ad it followed. Most PPC managers don’t touch landing pages. We do.
- SEO + PPC funnel coordination. No spending on terms organic already wins. No leaving paid coverage off terms organic can’t compete on yet.
- CFO-grade reporting. Cost per qualified lead, pipeline contribution, non-branded performance. Numbers your finance team can use.
- Account ownership stays with you. You own the account, the data, and the history. Always. No agency holding tactics.
Who PPC management is a bad fit for
If you want a “set it and forget it” PPC arrangement, expect 12% of spend to also include creative production and landing-page builds, or insist on running broad-match Smart Bidding without weekly oversight — we’re not your team. We’re built for operators who treat PPC as a serious revenue channel and want a manager who acts like one.
What a strategy call looks like
30 minutes with a PPC strategist. Live audit of your current account, the three biggest leaks we’d plug in the first 30 days, and an honest assessment of whether your account is being managed or just billed. No proposal-shopping handoff.
Done with agency theater?
Book a 30-minute strategy call with an experienced strategist — not a sales rep. Honest assessment, no obligation, no slide deck. If we're not the right fit, we'll tell you who is.
- Experienced strategist on the first call — every time
- No contracts. No "let it work." No theater.
- Real audit + opinion within 5 business days
- If the fit is wrong, we'll say so plainly
Tell us which path you're on.
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