See Where Your Ad Budget Goes
Most accounts cannot show what a customer costs, because the tracking underneath was never set up properly.
- What each conversion costs today
- Which searches waste your budget
- Whether the tracking is honest
Start with your Free Google Ads Review.
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Google Ads Agency: Quick Answer
SEO Optimizers is a Google Ads agency that builds and manages paid search accounts covering Search, Performance Max, Demand Gen, and Microsoft Advertising. We set up conversion tracking, cut wasted spend, test ad copy, and report against cost per conversion. Paid search delivers traffic the day it switches on, so most accounts show movement within the first month.
What a Google Ads Agency Actually Does
A Google Ads agency owns the whole account, not just the ads inside it. That covers the campaign structure, the keyword and negative lists, the conversion tracking, the landing pages the ads point at, and the weekly decisions about where budget should move.
Most of the value is unglamorous. Far more money is saved by cutting searches that never convert than is ever won by clever bidding.
The single most common thing we find in a new account is conversion tracking that records the wrong action, which quietly teaches Google to buy the wrong customers.
“His company designs highly effective campaigns on Google Ads, our numbers grew tremendously in weeks.”
★★★★★ Daniel Walz, verified Google review
Where Your Ads Run
Google carries the overwhelming majority of paid search in the United States, so that is where most budgets belong.
Microsoft Advertising, which covers Bing and its partner network, is worth adding once Google is profitable. It usually costs less per click and reaches an older, higher-income audience on desktop. It rarely deserves the first dollar, but it often deserves the fifth.
Google Ads Campaign Types Explained
Google runs seven distinct campaign types and they are not interchangeable. Choosing wrongly here is the most expensive mistake in a new account, because a budget spent on the wrong type looks like proof that paid search does not work.
- Search ads. Text ads against what someone typed. Highest intent, easiest to measure, and where most service businesses should start.
- Shopping ads. Product listings with image, price, and store name, pulled from your Merchant Center feed. For retailers this usually carries more revenue than text ads, and the feed matters more than the campaign settings.
- Performance Max. One campaign placing ads across Search, Shopping, Display, YouTube, Gmail, Maps, and Discover. Powerful for stores and remarketing, but it needs clean conversion data or it spends into the cheapest inventory it can find.
- Demand Gen. Visual and video ads across YouTube, Discover, and Gmail, aimed at people who do not know you yet. Cheaper traffic, longer path to a sale.
- Video ads. YouTube placements including skippable in-stream, in-feed, and short bumper ads. Best for explaining a product or staying visible to an audience that already knows you.
- Display ads. Banner placements across roughly two million partner sites. Weak for finding new customers cold, strong for following up with people who already visited, which is Google retargeting ads.
- App campaigns. Install and in-app action campaigns running across Search, Play, YouTube, and Display. Relevant only if you actually have an app to promote.
Most accounts should not run all seven. A service business often needs Search and retargeting only, while a store usually needs Shopping and Performance Max before anything else.
| Campaign type | Best for | Intent level | What decides results |
|---|---|---|---|
| Search | Service businesses, explicit demand | Highest | Keyword and negative lists |
| Shopping | Retailers with a product catalog | High | Feed quality and margins |
| Performance Max | Stores and remarketing at scale | Mixed | Conversion data quality |
| Video (YouTube) | Products that need explaining | Low to medium | First five seconds of the creative |
| Demand Gen | Unfamiliar products and brands | Low | Creative and offer strength |
| Display | Following up with past visitors | Low alone, high retargeting | Audience recency |
| App | Businesses promoting an app | Varies | In-app event tracking |
What Google Ads Management Includes
Every account we run covers the same core work, whether it is a new build or a rescue.
- Conversion tracking first. If calls, forms and sales are not recorded correctly, every other number is fiction. This is the most common thing we find broken.
- Keyword and negative keyword lists. The negatives matter more. Cutting searches that never convert is usually the fastest saving available. The free software we use to find those searches sits in our Google Ads tools list.
- Ad copy and assets. Written against the offer, then tested. Not rotated for the sake of it.
- Landing pages. We check the page the ad points at. Sending paid traffic to a weak page is the most expensive way to discover the page is weak.
- Bids and budget. Adjusted against cost per conversion, not clicks or impressions.
- Reporting you can read. What you spent, what it produced, what changed and why.
If the landing page is the problem rather than the ads, we will say so. That work is conversion rate optimization, and it usually returns more than raising the budget.
What the Numbers Look Like in a Live Account
This is what conversion reporting should tell you. Two campaigns from our own Google Ads account, promoting our free SEO workshops.
Figures are lifetime totals since each campaign launched, exactly as Google Ads reports them. We use our own account rather than a client account, so nothing is anonymized and the numbers can be taken at face value.
| Campaign | Clicks | Conversions | Conv. rate (as reported) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Performance Max, remarketing | 6,314 | 980 | 4.15% |
| Demand Gen, custom audience | 18,469 | 2,282 | 11.54% |
| Combined | 24,783 | 3,262 |
Google reports conversion rate against interactions rather than clicks on these campaign types, which is why that column reads lower than conversions divided by clicks. Both figures are shown so the math is checkable.
In your own account the number to hold everything against is cost per conversion, because clicks and impressions can rise while sales stay flat.
Conversion Tracking That Reports Reality
Tracking is where most accounts quietly break. A conversion that fires on every page view, or on a thank you page nobody reaches, teaches Google to optimize toward the wrong thing and inflates every report you read afterward.
We set conversions against real business outcomes, separate the ones worth bidding on from the soft ones worth watching, and confirm a test lead or sale registers before spending scales.
Offline conversion imports matter for anyone with a sales cycle. If half your leads never become customers, Google needs to know which half, or it will keep buying more of the wrong ones.
Google Ads for Local and Service Businesses
Service businesses usually win on Search rather than the visual campaign types, because the intent is explicit and the geography is small. Call tracking matters more here than anywhere else, since most inquiries arrive by phone rather than form.
Speed of follow-up decides the return. A lead answered within minutes converts far better than the same lead called back tomorrow, which is why the ads are only half the job.
Paid search also works best alongside organic visibility, which is what local SEO services build over time.
Google Ads for Ecommerce Stores
For stores, Shopping and Performance Max carry most of the volume, and the product feed does more work than the campaign settings. Titles, images, and attributes decide which searches you appear for, so feed quality is the real lever.
Judge results on contribution after cost of goods and shipping rather than on return on ad spend in the dashboard. Plenty of stores scale a campaign that looks healthy and loses money on every order.
Getting more revenue from the traffic you already pay for is the job of ecommerce SEO.
Google Ads vs Facebook Ads
The two channels answer different questions. Google captures people already looking for what you sell, while Meta creates demand among people who were not searching at all.
That makes Google the safer first channel for an established need like emergency plumbing or legal help. Social is stronger for products people did not know existed, and that side is handled by our Facebook ads agency work.
How We Run Your Account
Brandon Leibowitz has run paid search and SEO since 2007, and works on accounts directly rather than handing them to a junior media buyer.
The method is deliberately unexciting. Track properly, cut waste, test what remains, and report honestly on what it cost. Most accounts improve from removing things, not adding them.
We manage accounts for businesses across Los Angeles and nationally, and we will tell you when your budget is better spent on organic search instead. SEO Optimizers would rather keep a client for years than bill for a campaign that was never going to pay.
“In the last two months, my e-commerce store went from 31 keywords to 130, with 3.5K estimated monthly clicks and an estimated monthly click value of $2.3K.”
★★★★★ Chris Arvan, verified Google review
When Google Ads Are the Wrong Spend
Paid search is not right for every business, and it is cheaper to hear that now than after three months of spend.
Skip it if your margin per sale is smaller than your likely cost per conversion. Skip it if nobody is searching for what you sell, because ads capture existing demand rather than create it, and a genuinely new category needs awareness first.
Wait if your site does not convert the traffic it already gets, since paying for more visitors to a leaking page multiplies the leak. Before hiring anyone, the fastest savings usually come from negative keywords, bid caps and pausing the worst ad groups, the same steps we use to cut PPC costs.
How the Options Compare
| Campaign type | Best fit | What decides the result |
|---|---|---|
| Search | Explicit demand, service businesses | Keyword and negative lists |
| Performance Max | Stores and remarketing | Feed and conversion data quality |
| Demand Gen | Unfamiliar products | Creative and offer strength |
| Microsoft Advertising | Adding reach once Google pays | Desktop and older audience fit |
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What Google Ads Management Costs
There are two separate costs, and confusing them is where most budget arguments start. There is what you pay Google for the media, and there is what you pay for the work of running it.
Management is billed separately from ad spend, so you always know what you pay for the media versus the work. Pricing varies with the complexity and scope of the account rather than following a fixed rate card.
What moves the number is how many campaigns and networks run, how competitive your keywords are, whether creative and landing pages are produced for you, and whether conversion tracking already works or has to be rebuilt from scratch.
A rescue on a neglected account is a different job from maintaining one that is already clean, and the price should reflect that. For a figure specific to your account, the free review below is the fastest route.
Why Choose SEO Optimizers
Accounts are managed directly rather than passed to a junior team, reporting says what the spend produced rather than how many impressions it bought, and there are no long lock-in contracts.
You keep ownership of your Google Ads account, your conversion history, and your audience lists, whatever happens to the relationship.
“Brandon’s SEO and Google Ads class was incredibly informative and well-structured. I walked away feeling more confident about running effective Google Ads.”
★★★★★ uju uzuegbunam, verified Google review
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Frequently Asked Questions
How much does it cost to hire a Google Ads agency?
The cost to hire a Google Ads agency varies with the complexity and scope of the account rather than following a fixed rate card. Agencies bill either a flat monthly fee or a share of ad spend, and that fee sits on top of what you pay Google for the media.
What moves it is how many campaigns run, how competitive your keywords are, and whether tracking has to be rebuilt. Rescuing a neglected account is a bigger job than maintaining a clean one.
What is a good monthly budget for Google Ads?
A good monthly budget for Google Ads is one that buys enough conversions for the campaign to learn, which usually means at least thirty to fifty clicks a week per campaign. Work backwards from your cost per click and your conversion rate rather than picking a round number.
In an expensive niche that floor is far higher than in a cheap one, so the same figure can be generous or pointless depending on the keywords.
Is $500 a month enough for Google Ads?
Five hundred dollars a month is enough for Google Ads in a low cost niche with a tight keyword set, and nowhere near enough in a competitive one. At a five dollar cost per click it buys roughly a hundred clicks, too few to judge anything reliably if your conversion rate is modest.
Narrow the campaign to your single best service and smallest viable area rather than spreading it thin.
Are Google Ads worth it for small businesses?
Google Ads are worth it for small businesses when the margin on a sale comfortably exceeds the cost of winning it and people are actively searching for what you sell. Service businesses with high value jobs tend to do well, because a single customer can cover a month of spend.
It works badly for very low value products, or for something nobody is searching for yet.
Do I keep the Google Ads account if we stop working together?
You keep the Google Ads account if we stop working together, along with the conversion history and audience lists inside it. We build in an account you own and take access as a manager rather than running you inside ours.
That history is what makes future campaigns cheaper to run, so losing it would set you back months. It is worth asking any agency this before signing anything.
What is the difference between Google Ads and Google Ad Manager?
The difference between Google Ads and Google Ad Manager is which side of the transaction you are on. Google Ads is for advertisers buying traffic, and it is what almost every business means when they say Google Ads.
Google Ad Manager is a publisher tool for sites selling space on their own pages. If you are paying to appear in search results, Google Ads is the product you want.
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Related Services
Google is one channel inside a wider paid program run under PPC management. The visitors it sends who leave without buying are recovered through retargeting ads. Paid social sits alongside it and is handled by our Facebook ads agency service. Turning the traffic you already pay for into customers is conversion rate optimization. The organic half of search is covered by our SEO services. Video inventory bought from the same Google account is covered by our YouTube ads service. Shopping campaigns compete for the same buyers as the marketplace, which is covered under Amazon ads.