Google, Bing, Shopping and YouTube ads managed by an in-house UK team — measurable results, transparent reporting, your account stays yours.
No lock-in · Transparent reporting · Cancel anytime · We reply within 1 business day
Real projects, real numbers — work we can point to:
Pay per click is the fastest way to put your business in front of customers who are actively searching for what you sell. Done well, every pound spent is tracked, attributed and judged against the revenue or leads it generated. Done badly, it is the easiest place in marketing to set fire to a budget without realising it.
Auditing accounts handed over from previous agencies, we see the same patterns repeatedly: broad match keywords burning budget on irrelevant searches, no negative keyword list, conversion tracking either missing or double-counting, ad copy that has not been refreshed in eighteen months, and a single landing page being asked to convert traffic for ten different audiences.
Whether you are a startup launching your first campaign, an established business looking to scale a working account, or a company switching agencies after a bad experience, our process is the same. Audit, fix, build, launch, optimise, report. No magic, just disciplined work.
We run integrated campaigns across the platforms that matter most. You get one team, one strategy and one weekly report that shows performance across every channel side by side, instead of six different dashboards that never agree with each other.
We build campaigns inside your own ad accounts, verify tracking before a pound goes live, and report against pipeline rather than vanity clicks. You stay in control of the budget, the data and the account itself.
Every account follows the same disciplined four-stage approach. Predictable, measurable, transparent.
We audit your existing account, study your offer and competitors, and map the keyword landscape using actual search volumes. You leave the call with a clear strategy document and fixed-fee proposal — even if we never work together.
We build campaigns inside your own Google Ads, Microsoft Advertising and Merchant Center accounts so you keep full ownership. Conversion tracking is verified end-to-end before a single pound of spend goes live.
Campaigns go live with conservative bids and tight budgets while we gather data. Daily search-term reviews, aggressive negative keywords, and weekly optimisation reviews continue for the life of the account.
Monthly written reports tied to commercial KPIs — spend, ROAS, cost per conversion broken down by campaign and channel. Live Looker Studio dashboard you check any time, plus a monthly call to walk through results.
Send us your existing Google Ads or Bing account and we'll send a written audit with the three biggest opportunities — within 5 working days. No commitment, no sales call required, and yours to keep whether or not you ever work with us.
Or email info@cambriadigital.co.uk
We have managed Google Ads and Bing Ads accounts across a wide range of industries. Each sector has its own quirks, from average cost per click to typical conversion rates to compliance restrictions on ad copy. Here is a snapshot of the industries we work with most often.
There is no shortage of agencies offering Google Ads management. Here is what makes our approach different, and why our clients tend to stay with us for years rather than months.
We work primarily with UK businesses targeting British customers. That means we understand local buyer behaviour, regional cost-per-click patterns, VAT-inclusive vs exclusive pricing in ad copy, ICO consent requirements for tracking, and the seasonal rhythms of the market from Black Friday through January sales to summer slowdowns. Generic global advice does not work here.
You see everything. Real-time Looker Studio dashboard, raw access to your Google Ads and Bing accounts at any time (we never lock clients out of their own data), monthly written reports that explain in plain English what changed and why, and direct visibility into what your ad spend is actually buying. No black boxes, no proprietary metrics that mean nothing outside our agency.
The person you sign with is the person managing your account. No outsourcing, no offshore teams pulled together at the last minute, no junior account executive juggling 30 client accounts. You communicate directly with the strategist building and optimising your campaigns, by email, phone or video call, all within business hours.
We will not run a pound of ad spend until conversion tracking is verified end to end. That means proper Google Tag Manager setup, server-side tracking where appropriate, deduplication of conversions across Google Analytics 4 and Google Ads, call tracking integration if relevant, and full ICO consent compliance. Bad tracking is the single biggest reason PPC accounts underperform, and we treat it as non-negotiable.
Fixed monthly retainers with no minimum contract length. If we are not delivering value, you can stop at any time with 30 days written notice. We never take commission from Google or Microsoft, so our channel recommendations are not biased. We never mark up your ad spend — you pay Google directly into your own account that you keep if you ever leave. After a thirty-minute discovery call we send a fixed-fee proposal mapped to your pipeline targets, not an hourly rate.
Every client agreement includes a clause allowing us to publish anonymised case studies after 90 days of performance data. We share specific numbers, what worked, what did not, and what we changed mid-campaign. See our portfolio for live examples. We will never claim results we cannot prove with screenshots from the actual ad accounts involved.
PPC and SEO are not competitors, they are complementary. Most successful businesses run both, with PPC delivering immediate pipeline while SEO builds long-term organic traffic that compounds over years. Here is how the two disciplines compare side by side.
| Factor | PPC (Pay Per Click) | SEO (Organic Search) |
|---|---|---|
| Time to first results | 24-48 hours | 3-9 months |
| Cost model | Pay per click, ongoing | Investment upfront, then compounds |
| What happens when you stop paying | Traffic stops the same day | Traffic continues for months or years |
| Best for | Instant pipeline, testing offers, scaling fast | Long-term authority, compounding traffic |
| Measurability | ROAS measurable per click, per keyword | Harder to attribute single keyword to revenue |
| Click-through rate (avg) | ~6-8% on top paid position | ~25-35% on top organic position |
| Cost per click (avg) | Varies by industry & competition | Effectively zero once ranked |
| Best paired with | SEO, conversion rate optimisation | PPC, content marketing |
The honest answer for most SMBs is "do both, but in the right order". If you have a brand new website with no organic visibility, PPC fills the gap while SEO catches up. If you already rank well organically, PPC adds another row on the search results page so a competitor cannot squeeze you out. Take a look at our SEO page for how we approach the long game.
Here is a ratio-based worked example using realistic SMB benchmarks for a typical service business. Your actual numbers will depend on industry, offer quality and landing page conversion rate, but the underlying funnel maths is the same and gives you a realistic starting point.
Cambria-managed accounts average 7.2x ROAS once optimised, typically by month three. Brand new accounts almost always deliver lower ROAS in month one before the account has gathered enough data to optimise properly. If a competitor agency promises 10x ROAS in your first month, ask them to put it in writing with a money-back guarantee. They will not.
The biggest lever in this calculation is not the cost per click, it is the landing page conversion rate. Doubling your conversion rate from 4% to 8% doubles your ROAS without spending another pound on ads. That is why every PPC engagement we run includes landing page recommendations, and why we work closely with our website design team on conversion-focused page builds.
The questions we get asked most often by businesses considering Google Ads or Bing Ads. If your question is not covered here, please get in touch and we will be happy to help.
Pay per click is a paid advertising model where you only pay when someone clicks your ad. On Google Ads, advertisers bid on keywords that potential customers search for. When a search happens, Google runs a real-time auction that combines your bid with a Quality Score (a 1-10 rating of how relevant your ad and landing page are to the search). The winning ad appears at the top of the search results. You only pay when a user clicks through to your website. Cost per click varies significantly by industry, with competitive sectors like legal, insurance and finance commanding far higher rates than local trades and services.
Every project is scoped individually because no two PPC accounts have the same budget, channel mix, competitive environment or commercial goals. After a 30-minute discovery call we send a fixed-fee proposal mapped to your commercial outcomes — not an hourly rate. Most engagements sit somewhere between focused single-platform Google Ads management and fully managed multi-channel accounts spanning Search, Shopping, Display, YouTube and Bing. For larger accounts we move to a percentage-of-ad-spend model that scales more fairly. The discovery call is free and you get a written proposal regardless of whether we move forward together.
Google should be your starting point because it carries roughly 92% of search traffic, which means more reach and faster data to optimise against. Bing (Microsoft Advertising) covers around 4 to 5% of search but has a few interesting characteristics: cost per click is often 30 to 50% lower than Google, the audience skews slightly older and more affluent, and competition is much lighter in many categories. We typically recommend launching on Google first to validate your offer and landing page, then layering Bing on once Google is profitable to capture extra volume cheaply. For B2B campaigns targeting Microsoft 365 corporate users, Bing can occasionally outperform Google.
Return on ad spend (ROAS) measures revenue generated per pound of ad spend. The honest answer is that ROAS varies enormously by industry, average order value, profit margin and how mature the account is. As a rough benchmark, e-commerce shopping campaigns typically run at 3x to 6x ROAS once optimised, lead generation campaigns at 4x to 8x revenue from booked work, and high-margin service businesses can hit 10x or more. Brand new accounts almost always lose money for the first 30 to 60 days while the algorithm gathers data and we test creative, keywords and landing pages. Anyone promising specific ROAS numbers in month one is being dishonest. Our average across active client accounts sits around 7.2x ROAS, but individual results depend heavily on your offer, landing page and product economics.
PPC and SEO solve different problems. PPC works better when you need traffic immediately, when you are launching a new product or location, when you want to test offers and landing pages quickly, when you are targeting commercial high-intent keywords that big brands dominate organically, or when you need predictable lead flow that you can scale by increasing budget. SEO works better when you have time to invest, when you want compounding traffic that does not stop the moment you stop paying, when you are building topical authority for the long term, or when target keywords have low commercial competition. Most successful businesses run both: PPC for instant pipeline and SEO for the asset that keeps producing for years.
We recommend a sensible minimum monthly ad spend that depends on your industry and geography. Hyperlocal service businesses targeting a single town can start lower than businesses covering a region or the whole country. Below a certain threshold, Google's machine learning simply does not get enough data to optimise effectively, and you end up paying for clicks without ever reaching the conversion threshold needed to learn what is working. E-commerce and shopping campaigns require higher minimums because product feeds need volume to spread across the catalogue. We will turn down clients who want us to run accounts below these thresholds because we do not want to take fees for campaigns that are statistically unlikely to succeed.
There are three common pricing models in the PPC industry. First, fixed monthly retainer which gives clients budget certainty regardless of ad spend. Second, percentage of ad spend which scales naturally with bigger accounts but can incentivise agencies to push spend rather than efficiency. Third, performance-based or commission models where the agency takes a cut of revenue or leads generated, which sounds appealing but often leads to misaligned incentives and short-term thinking. We use fixed retainers for smaller accounts and switch to a percentage-of-ad-spend model for larger accounts where it scales more fairly. We never take commission from Google or Bing, so our recommendations are not biased toward any specific platform.
PPC produces visible traffic within 24 to 48 hours of launch. Producing profitable results takes longer. Week one and two are about gathering data, fixing tracking issues, and pruning obvious waste. Weeks three and four are about optimising bids, testing ad copy variations, and tightening keyword match types. By weeks five to eight we typically have a clear picture of cost per lead or cost per sale, and the account starts trending toward profitability. Most accounts hit a stable, profitable state somewhere between 60 and 90 days after launch. We commit to no minimum contract length so you can pause at any time, but we are upfront that asking us to deliver positive ROAS in the first 30 days is not realistic for most industries.
PPC works best alongside the rest of your digital marketing. Conversion-focused landing pages, organic SEO, fresh content and active social all multiply the return on every paid click. Here is what else we offer.