Paid Ads Judged on Cost Per Booked Job
A click is not a lead and a lead is not a job. Every page in this index deals with one market or one sector and the number that actually matters in it: what you pay to get a customer through the door, and which parts of the funnel are quietly inflating it.
Book a Free CallThe Auction Is Different Everywhere
A click for a personal injury term and a click for a tutoring term are not remotely the same purchase, and the same keyword costs different money in Denver than it does in Manchester. What a sensible cost per lead looks like, how much you must spend before the data means anything, and whether the term is worth entering at all are all local questions.
Each page below answers them for one situation instead of quoting an industry average nobody’s account matches.
Spending Before Anything Is Being Measured
The most common way an ad budget disappears is running it into a site that cannot tell you which clicks became customers. Without conversion tracking wired to real outcomes, every optimisation decision is a guess dressed as data, and the account quietly optimises toward cheap clicks rather than profitable ones.
Measurement comes before spend on every engagement here, because the alternative is paying to learn nothing.
The Parts That Decide the Number
Most accounts are lost outside the ad platform.
The keyword list matters, and it matters less than where the click lands and whether anyone picks up the phone.
Tracking wired first
Calls and forms tied to real outcomes before spend begins, so decisions rest on evidence rather than click counts.
A landing page per campaign
Traffic sent to a page written for that ad rather than to a homepage that makes the visitor search again.
Intent, and the negatives
The terms worth entering, and an actively maintained negative list, which is where most wasted spend actually hides.
Judged on cost per job
Optimised toward booked work rather than cheap clicks, because those two goals frequently pull in opposite directions.
Timing and geography
Budget weighted to the hours and areas that convert, instead of spread flat across a week and a region.
Your account, your data
Everything runs in accounts you own, so the history stays with you regardless of who manages it next.
Every Market and Sector We Run Ads In
City pages cover what the auction looks like in that market.
Sector pages cover the terms, the landing page and the realistic cost per lead in that line of work.
By city
Local competition, and what a click genuinely costs in that market.
Medical and aesthetic
High-value procedures where the consultation, not the click, is the conversion.
Home services
Urgency-driven terms where call handling decides whether the spend pays.
Professional and financial
Expensive clicks and long consideration, so qualification matters more than volume.
What a realistic starting budget looks like
The honest floor is whatever it takes to collect enough conversions to make a decision, and that number comes from your sector rather than your ambition. In a market where a click costs a few pounds, a modest monthly budget produces signal within weeks. In personal injury or cosmetic surgery, where a single click can cost more than a week of a cheaper account, the same budget produces noise and an expensive shrug. This is the question to settle before anything is switched on, because underfunding a campaign is not a cautious version of running one. It is paying for the learning phase and stopping before the learning arrives.
Cheap clicks: signal in weeks on a modest budget
Expensive clicks: fund the learning phase or do not start
Either way, tracking goes in before spend does
Why the landing page is usually the problem
When an account underperforms, the instinct is to rewrite the ads. More often the ads are doing their job and the page is losing the visitor: it loads slowly on the phone the click came from, it opens with a company history instead of the thing that was searched for, or it hides the next step behind a header menu. Sending paid traffic to a homepage is the clearest version of this, because a homepage is written for someone who already knows who you are. Every engagement here includes the page the ad points at, since optimising bids toward a page that cannot convert is an expensive way to be busy.
How paid and organic fit together
Paid search buys the top of the results immediately and stops the day the budget does. Organic search takes months and then keeps working. Treating them as rivals wastes both, because the research overlaps almost entirely: the terms that convert in an ad account are precisely the ones worth building pages around, and the ad data tells you which within weeks instead of quarters. The usual sensible pattern is paid carrying the enquiries while the organic structure is built, then rebalancing the budget as free traffic starts arriving. Our SEO index covers the other half of that.
We Optimise Toward Revenue
Cheap clicks and profitable customers are different goals, and an account left to its own devices will chase the first one.
Measurement before spend
Conversion tracking tied to real outcomes, wired up before the first pound goes out.
The page is part of the job
Ads point at a page written for that campaign, not at a homepage.
Negatives maintained
The wasted-spend list is worked on continuously, because that is where budgets quietly leak.
Accounts stay yours
You own the ad account and the data, whoever manages it next.
What our clients say
216 pages live on one visual system, four content types each with its own template. We can publish at scale without the site turning into a pile that gets harder to search every month.
Four segments, each with its own route and copy, on one brand and one hiring process. 167 pages that still sort buyers at the first click.
An open-ended service business became two priced tiers on the page. Publishing the price filters the enquiries before they reach a human, which is worth more than the few it loses.
PPC Management: Your Questions Answered
How much should I budget to start?
How quickly will I see leads?
Do I need a separate landing page?
Who owns the ad account?
Should I run ads and SEO at once?
My sector is not in the list. Can you still run it?
What happens if it is not working?
Want to Know What a Lead Costs in Your Market?
Tell us your sector and your town and we will give you a straight read on what clicks cost there and what budget is needed before the data means anything.
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