Paid Advertising
Google Ads Management
The retainer covering the whole account. If search is the only campaign type you run, that is a narrower service and it should cost you less.
Google Ads management is the ongoing retainer across every campaign type you run — search, shopping, Performance Max, display and video. The Nexclick builds it in your own account, judges it on cost per customer rather than clicks, and reviews the search terms report weekly.
Is this you?
What usually prompts the call
- You are spending monthly and cannot say what a customer costs to acquire.
- Nobody has ever shown you the search terms report.
- Performance Max has quietly become most of the budget.
- The account was built by somebody who left, and nothing has been restructured since.
What we do
The actual deliverables
Things that appear on an invoice, not adjectives.
- Audit before changing anything
- Structure, search terms, conversion setup, wasted spend and which platform defaults have been left switched on. It almost always finds budget going somewhere nobody chose.
- Rebuild conversion tracking first
- Correct actions, correct values, deduplicated, with offline import where the real sale happens later. Automated bidding optimises towards whatever you nominate, so it has to be right before anything else is touched.
- Separate brand from everything else
- So the platform stops claiming credit for people who already knew your name, and so you can finally see what the account produces from strangers.
- Structure on intent and margin
- Campaigns grouped by what a conversion is worth rather than by a template. Two services with very different margins should never share a bid strategy.
- Search terms reviewed weekly
- Negatives added every week rather than every quarter. This single habit accounts for most of the recoverable waste in the accounts we inherit.
- Constrain the automated campaign types
- Performance Max and broad match are useful supervised and expensive left alone. Brand exclusions, audience signals and asset group discipline applied deliberately rather than accepted as defaults.
- Test one thing at a time
- Ad copy, landing pages and bid strategies changed individually with enough time to read the result. An account edited constantly cannot be learned from, however busy the activity report looks.
- Report on cost per outcome
- Cost per enquiry and per customer against real margin, with an explicit note wherever the platform-reported figure and your CRM disagree — which they will.
Checklist
The account health check you can run yourself
Open your own Google Ads account and work through this. If you pay an agency and cannot answer several of these, that is the conversation to have at the next call rather than a reason to commission anything.
- 01Is brand traffic in its own campaign, separated from everything else?
- 02When did somebody last actually open the search terms report?
- 03Have any negative keywords been added in the last month?
- 04Does Performance Max have brand exclusions applied to it?
- 05Is new customer acquisition configured where repeat purchase matters?
- 06Are display and search in separate campaigns, or is the display network switched on inside search?
- 07Is audience expansion or optimised targeting enabled where nobody chose it?
- 08Does every conversion action have a value, and is that value correct?
- 09Are two conversion actions counting the same event?
- 10Is anything counted "every" where it should be counted "one"?
- 11Does the account import offline conversions if your sale completes on the phone?
- 12Are auto-applied recommendations switched off?
- 13Do ad schedules match the hours somebody actually answers the phone?
- 14Is location targeting set to presence rather than presence-or-interest?
- 15Has anything been deliberately tested this quarter, or has the account simply run?
- 16Is the account in your own name, with your own billing details on it?
How it works
Step by step, with timeframes
Timeframes are typical rather than guaranteed, and they assume we get account access and approvals when we ask.
- 01Week 1
Audit and access
A full review inside your own accounts. Ends with a list separating what is actively wasting money from what is merely untidy.
- 02Week 1–3
Tracking rebuild
Conversions, values, deduplication and offline import. Nothing else changes until this is right, because every later decision is made from these numbers.
- 03Week 3–5
Restructure
Brand separated, structure rebuilt on intent and margin, negatives applied and the automated campaign types constrained.
- 04Ongoing, monthly
Manage
Weekly search terms and negatives, testing on a schedule, and monthly reporting against cost per outcome rather than platform vanity metrics.
What you get
Reporting and ownership
- Everything built in your own ad account on your own billing, so the data stays with you.
- The search terms report every month, including the terms we are still paying for.
- Conversion tracking rebuilt and verified before any spend decision is made from it.
- Reporting on cost per customer against margin, not on clicks or impressions.
- A written account structure document, so any agency could pick it up tomorrow.
Tools and platforms
- Google Ads and Google Ads Editor
- Google Merchant Center where shopping runs
- GA4 and offline conversion import
- Search terms and auction insights reporting
- CRM revenue data for margin reporting
Timeline
How long this actually takes
Four to five weeks before the account is restructured and stable, then it runs monthly. Meaningful performance change usually appears in the second month, because automated bidding needs a fortnight of clean conversion data before it does anything sensible. Two honest notes. If your total budget is a few hundred pounds a month, management fees take too large a share of it to be fair, and you would do better running it yourself with an hour a week and the checklist below. And we will tell you when the problem is the landing page rather than the campaign, even though sending more traffic is billable and telling you to fix the page is not.
Pricing model
Monthly retainer
Monthly management retainer, scoped by account complexity and the number of campaign types. Ad spend goes on your own billing account and never through us, so you see the real figure and keep the history.
Questions
Google Ads Management questions
How is this different from Google Search Ads management?
This covers the whole account — search, shopping, Performance Max, display, video and how they interact. Search ads management is one campaign type. If search is all you run, buy the narrower service and pay less. If you run three campaign types, managing them separately is how PMax ends up cannibalising your search campaigns unnoticed.
Should ad spend go through the agency?
No, and we will not do it. Spend on your own billing account means you see the real figure with no margin added, you keep the account history and its learning, and you can leave without losing either. Agencies holding client billing are creating a switching cost, whatever reason is given.
How much budget do we need for this to be worth doing?
Enough that the management fee is a sensible proportion of it. Below a few hundred pounds a month the fee dominates and you are better off running it yourself — the checklist on this page covers most of what a small account needs. We would rather say that than take a retainer that cannot pay for itself.
Why does conversion tracking come before anything else?
Because automated bidding optimises towards whatever you tell it is a conversion. Point it at a soft action, or one counted twice, and it will pursue that with impressive efficiency. Restructuring an account on top of broken tracking produces a tidier account making the same wrong decisions faster.
Are auto-applied recommendations worth leaving on?
No. They add keywords, adjust match types and change assets without approval, and several of them exist to increase spend rather than efficiency. Read the recommendations tab by all means — some suggestions are good — but apply them deliberately rather than waking up to an account somebody else edited.
Should we bid on our own brand name?
Usually yes, at a small budget, because competitors bidding on you will otherwise appear above your own listing. But it must sit in its own campaign. Mixed into general campaigns it inflates the whole account’s apparent performance with people who already intended to buy from you.
What happens to the account if we stop working together?
It stays exactly where it is, in your name, with all its history and everything the bidding algorithms have learned. We remove our access. You keep the structure document, and the next agency starts from a working account rather than rebuilding from scratch.
Last reviewed 28 July 2026.
Tell us what you are trying to fix
A 20-minute call, no pitch deck. The Nexclick will tell you what we would do, roughly what it costs, and whether we are the right people for it.