Paid Media

£500 a month is the practical floor below which Google's machine learning rarely has enough conversion volume to optimise. £500 to £1,000 a month buys you a tightly scoped Search-only campaign on three to five high-intent keywords. £1,000 to £3,000 starts unlocking PMax and broader Search ambition. £3,000 to £8,000 funds a competitive vertical (plumbers, dentists, solicitors) with proper retargeting. Anything below £500 a month should go to Local Service Ads if eligible, or back into review velocity and Local SEO instead.

For high-intent local services where buyers actively search (plumbers, locksmiths, dental, solicitors): Google first, Meta second. The intent gap is too wide to run Meta-led for these. For visual or impulse categories (hospitality, beauty, lifestyle retail, gyms): Meta usually wins on cost per acquisition until volume justifies adding Search. For B2B services with longer consideration windows: LinkedIn for the offer, Google for the brand search the LinkedIn campaign generates. The right answer is almost always both, in order, not at the same time on day one.

Search campaigns built on a working tracking spine usually hit a defensible cost per booking within 21 to 35 days. PMax takes 35 to 60 days because Google's learning phase needs 30 to 50 conversions to settle. Meta runs profitable inside 14 to 28 days for clients with strong creative and a clear offer, slower if creative is generic. The ones that take longer almost always have broken conversion tracking, an under-built landing page, or a budget too thin to feed the algorithm. We diagnose those in week one before spend ramps.

Selectively. PMax works for ecommerce with a healthy product feed, retailers with strong creative assets, and lead-gen accounts with clean conversion data above 30 a month. It fails for service businesses with thin creative, weak lead quality scoring, or mixed-margin product lines because the algorithm cannot distinguish a £50 enquiry from a £5,000 one without you telling it. When it is the right call we ringfence the budget so it cannot cannibalise branded search, and feed it offline conversion data to bias toward genuinely profitable conversions.