Pay Per Click Agency: Google Ads That Actually Make You Money

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 in the UK varies by industry, with the average UK Google Ads CPC sitting around £3.50 across all sectors. Competitive industries like legal, insurance and finance can pay £15 to £40 per click, while local trades and services often pay £1 to £4.

PPC has two costs that need to be budgeted separately. First, the ad spend itself which goes directly to Google or Microsoft, and second, the management fee paid to an agency to plan, build and optimise the campaigns. At Cambria Digital, our Starter plan begins from £499 per month for management, ideal for businesses spending £500 to £2,000 per month on ads. Our Growth plan begins from £999 per month for management, suiting £2,000 to £8,000 ad budgets. Our Performance plan begins from £1,999 per month for management for multi-channel accounts. For ad budgets above £10,000 per month we typically move to a percentage of ad spend model at 10 to 15 percent. All management fees exclude VAT. As a rule of thumb, most UK SMBs should plan for a combined monthly spend (ads plus management) of £1,500 to £3,000 to see meaningful results.

Google should be your starting point because it carries roughly 92% of UK search traffic, which means more reach and faster data to optimise against. Bing (Microsoft Advertising) covers around 4 to 5% of UK 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 UK 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 minimum monthly ad spend of £500 to £750 for hyperlocal service businesses targeting a single town or postcode area, and £1,000 to £1,500 for most UK SMBs covering a region or the whole country. Below £500 per month, 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. For e-commerce and shopping campaigns we suggest £1,500 minimum 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 UK PPC industry. First, fixed monthly retainer (what we use for our Starter, Growth and Performance plans) which gives clients budget certainty regardless of ad spend. Second, percentage of ad spend (typically 10 to 20%) 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 up to £10,000 monthly ad spend, then switch to a 10 to 15% percentage model for larger accounts. 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.