Google and Meta ads
Your ads run in an account with your name on it. Your card pays the platform directly, I take nothing off the media, and the number I ask to be judged on is what one enquiry costs you.
Whose account
When somebody runs your advertising inside their own ad account, the part you never see is the part that matters most later. The tracking learns in their account, the list of people who visited your website and did nothing sits in their account, and so does the record of which advert produced which job. On the day you stop paying them, all of it stays behind and whoever comes next starts you from a blank page.
So I do it the other way round. Your business gets its own ad account, your own card funds the spend at a budget you set, and I am given access to build inside it. Media is never marked up, so what the platform charges is what you pay, and you can open the account on your phone and read the same figures I am reading.
The only number
What an enquiry costs you, and whether those enquiries turn into the kind of work you wanted more of. Reach and impressions are easy to make look busy on a screenshot, and neither of them has ever paid a wage.
One account
Everything I know about this came out of one account. Alejandro runs Lor.Ca & Sons, luxury residential and commercial interior renovations. The ad account was his, every enquiry arrived somewhere he could count himself, and these are the figures that came out of it.
That is one client and one ad account, which is the whole of my advertising record so far, and you should hear that from me rather than work it out. What was run, how it was counted and what I will not promise about your trade all sit on their own page.
The first fourteen days
19 June to 2 July · 14 days
10leads
£20.26each
Learning. Expensive, and it was meant to be.
The next fourteen days
3 July to 16 July · 14 days
20leads
£9.13each
Twice the leads on less money.
Since then
17 July to 3 August · 18 days
40leads
£6.63each
Twice again, and cheaper again.
Where it stands today
19 June to 3 August · 46 days in
70leads
£9.29each
£650.18 spent
Counted in Alejandro’s own ad account. He saw every number before you did.
Alejandro’s review
Rated 5 out of 5 stars.
At the beginning I was very sceptical… However he was very honest since the first moment, he didn’t promise nothing fancy, just the truth. Maybe we’ve been lucky, receiving so many leads, but one thing is for sure, Cameron does a great work, consistently showing results, communicating and clarifying every step of the way.
Alejandro L.C
Luke’s advertising
L.C Plumbing is one man out of Sawtry covering Huntingdon, Peterborough, St Neots, St Ives, Ramsey and Cambridge, with his own Gas Safe registration and ten years behind him. I built the website first, with six of his customers writing in their own words and a map of the patch he really drives. He liked it enough to hand me his advertising afterwards, which is the order I would want for you.
If it does not work
Paid advertising can fail, and pretending otherwise would be the easiest lie on this page. If enquiries are costing more than a job is worth to you, that goes in the monthly report in plain figures, and my first suggestion will be to stop the spend while I work out whether the problem is the offer, the targeting or the page people are landing on.
Because the account is yours, you never have to wait for me to agree with any of that. You can pause the whole thing from your phone at midnight without my permission, and I would rather you could.
Not ads yet
A strong campaign pointed at a weak site is the most expensive mistake in this trade, because the money leaves at full price and lands somewhere that gives a stranger no reason to ring. When Kye came to me the work went into his detailing site first: before-and-after sequences on vehicles he genuinely worked on, an Audi Q2, a Suzuki motorcycle, a Nissan Navara.
If your website is not at that point, I will say so and tell you to spend there first, even when ads are the thing you rang about.
Start a project
Send me the name of your business and where you take work from, and the first thing I will do is look at what a stranger already sees, because that decides whether paying to send more of them is worth doing.