PPC Management Services

It answers the one question single-channel management structurally cannot: where the next thousand dollars should go. A specialist optimising search will improve search metrics, and a specialist optimising social will improve social metrics, and both can succeed while the portfolio underperforms because budget stays allocated the way it was set a year ago. Portfolio management makes allocation an active monthly decision informed by comparable numbers, which requires two things most multi-channel setups lack — a single conversion definition applied everywhere, and deduplicated attribution so leads touching multiple channels are not counted twice. The uncomfortable part is that it sometimes means moving budget away from a channel that is genuinely performing well, toward one performing better, and channel specialists are rarely incentivised to recommend that. It also means occasionally recommending that a channel be reduced or stopped, which is easier to do when nobody's scope depends on the answer.

Because branded search reports the most flattering numbers in almost every account and a substantial share of it is usually buying traffic you already had. Someone searching your company name has already decided to find you; if your organic listing occupies the top of that page, the paid click frequently replaces a free one, and the conversion gets attributed to the ad regardless. This is why branded campaigns show implausibly low cost per acquisition and why they are rarely questioned. There is a legitimate defensive case — when competitors bid on your name, ceding the top of the page can genuinely cost you customers — so the answer is not to switch it off, it is to measure it. A holdout test, pausing branded bidding in some geographies while maintaining it in others and comparing total conversions rather than paid conversions, resolves it within a few weeks. Sometimes the defensive value is real and we keep it; often a meaningful portion of that budget produces more elsewhere.

Partly by standardising what can be standardised, and partly by being explicit that a single number cannot settle it. The standardisable part is real and matters: one conversion definition, one attribution window, deduplicated across channels, reported as cost per qualified lead everywhere. That removes most of the false comparisons, which usually stem from each platform counting something different and each being believed. What cannot be resolved by a shared metric is that search captures existing demand while social generates new demand, so a last-click comparison systematically favours search and will recommend cutting the channel that feeds it. We handle that with incrementality testing where budget allows, and where it does not, by reading branded search volume and direct traffic as indicators of demand generation rather than judging upper-funnel channels purely on last-click conversions. Being honest that this is partly judgment is better than presenting a spuriously precise ranking.

Pacing is distributing budget across time according to when demand exists rather than dividing it evenly by month, and in seasonal categories the difference is substantial. If your category has a peak where search volume triples, spending the same amount in that month as in your quietest one means capping yourself precisely when the same dollar buys the most qualified traffic, and over-spending when it buys the least. The other half of pacing is within-period: an account that exhausts its daily budget by mid-morning is systematically missing whatever demand arrives in the afternoon, and in many service categories the afternoon converts better. We establish your category's demand shape from historical search volume and your own conversion data, then plan spend against it — which frequently means asking for a budget that varies month to month, and that is often the harder conversation internally than the media strategy itself.

Diagnose before reacting, because the three plausible causes call for opposite responses. If a competitor has entered the auction or increased budget, auction insights will show it, and the correct question is whether the new market rate still supports your close rate — sometimes the answer is to concede specific keywords rather than to match bids, which is a legitimate strategic choice rather than a defeat. If it is seasonal, costs will follow a pattern visible in your own history and it usually corrects without intervention. If it is a quality score decline, that is your own account degrading — relevance drift between keywords, ads and landing pages — and raising bids treats the symptom while the cause worsens. The response we would push back on is the reflexive one of increasing bids to hold position, because in two of these three cases it makes things worse, and it is what happens by default when nobody is monitoring the auction.

It depends on your time horizon and how expensive your category's auctions are, and the honest framing is that they solve different problems rather than sitting on a single scale. Paid media produces leads immediately, can be scaled or stopped instantly, and tells you within weeks which messages convert — so it should carry more weight when you need pipeline now, are launching something, or genuinely do not yet know what your market responds to. SEO takes months to establish and then produces traffic with no per-click cost, so its cost per lead falls over time while paid costs rise with auction pressure. In practice the two feed each other, which is the argument for running both: the keywords that convert in a paid campaign tell you exactly what your organic content should target, and that knowledge transfer is worth more than either channel alone. Where auctions are expensive enough that paid cannot work at your close rate, we will say so and recommend weighting toward organic rather than selling you management on a campaign that cannot succeed.