Capability · Paid Media

Paid Media

UK SMBs lose roughly 30 to 50 percent of their paid spend before it touches a buyer — broken conversion tracking, mis-attributed PMax budgets, audience layering that leaks impressions to existing customers. We rebuild the tracking spine, name the cost per booking that pays you back inside 90 days, and run accounts with a stop-loss the moment a campaign stops earning its keep.

See Revenue Engineering →Start a Single Project →

What you get

The work, not the deck.

Tracking spine before any spend lifts

GA4, GTM, and offline conversion uploads engineered before we touch budgets. Google's Enhanced Conversions and Meta's CAPI installed correctly, not the half-broken pixel-only setup most agencies leave behind. If the numbers are wrong, the campaign decisions are wrong.

Account architecture for SMB budgets

Search and PMax budgets ringfenced so PMax cannot eat your branded search at higher CPCs. Negative keyword lists tuned weekly. Audience signals that respect the buyer journey instead of remarketing the same prospect 47 times.

Cost per booking, not cost per click

Every campaign reports against the metric that pays your bills — cost per qualified booking, cost per quote request, cost per appointment kept. Click costs are diagnostic, not the headline. Most clients see CPB drop 30 to 60 percent within 60 days of takeover.

A clear stop-loss per campaign

Every campaign launches with a named cost per booking ceiling and a 14 to 21 day learning window. If it misses, we kill it. No agencies-keeping-spend-alive-because-the-retainer-pays-them-anyway. The honest answer beats the polite one.

Field notes

Writing on this topic.

Pound coins, a small calculator and an open laptop on a wooden desk under soft daylight, set up for a UK budget review.

paid-media

How Much Do Google Ads Cost in the UK? Real 2026 Benchmarks

Real 2026 Google Ads benchmarks for UK SMBs, with average CPC and CPL by sector, monthly budget tiers, LSA costs and where 500 pounds a month falls short.

6 May 2026 · 12 min read

UK small business owner reviewing a Google Ads dashboard on a laptop at a wooden desk in soft daylight.

paid-media

The UK Small Business Guide to Google Ads in 2026

A practical 2026 Google Ads guide for UK small businesses, covering account structure, campaign types, tracking, GDPR, budgets and bidding strategies that work.

6 May 2026 · 18 min read

Frequently asked

The questions buyers ask first.

How much should a UK small business spend on Google Ads?+

£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.

Should I run Google Ads or Meta Ads first?+

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.

How long until paid ads become profitable for a UK SMB?+

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.

Do you do Performance Max?+

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.

Bundle this in

Paid Media is bundled inside Revenue Engineering.

Hire it as a single capability, or run it alongside the rest of the funnel under one accountable team. Revenue Engineering bundles website, booking, SEO, AI search, reviews and reporting from $1,450 a month.

See Revenue Engineering →

Paid Media