Google & Meta Ads

Search ads and social ads solve two different problems, and the difference matters more than which platform you pick. A search ad shows up because someone typed a question that your business answers — they are already looking, and the ad puts you in front of them a moment sooner than waiting for them to scroll down to the organic results. A social ad interrupts someone who was not looking for anything, on the chance that what you show them catches their attention anyway.

Most small businesses I talk to have a problem search ads solve — people searching for what they sell, right now, in their area — and get sold a campaign built around the second kind. Awareness is a real thing to want, but it is a slower, harder sell than capturing a search that already exists. If you only have budget for one, start with the one that meets existing demand.

When ads are worth it, and when they are not

Paid ads work well when you already convert visitors reasonably well and you want more of them, faster than SEO or word of mouth would bring them. They also work when a season, a launch, or a one-time event needs visibility on a deadline that organic growth cannot meet.

They are the wrong first move if your budget is small and your margins are thin. Every dollar spent on a click is a dollar you do not get back if that click does not convert, and a site or an offer that is not ready yet turns ad spend into a fast way to learn that lesson. If that describes where you are, I will tell you to put the money into local SEO first and come back to ads once there is a foundation for them to point at. That is not a pitch for one thing over the other — it is just the order that actually works.

What running ads well actually involves

A campaign is not "turn it on and wait." It starts with keyword research — figuring out what your customers actually type, not what you assume they type — and just as much work on negative keywords, the searches you deliberately exclude so you are not paying for clicks from people who were never going to buy. It continues with conversion tracking set up correctly, so a call, a form submission or a purchase is recorded as what it is, not guessed at. And it means looking at that data regularly and adjusting — pausing what is not working, putting more behind what is — rather than setting a budget once and leaving it alone.

Anyone who sets up a campaign and never touches it again afterward is not managing it, they are running it on autopilot with your money.

The landing page carries half the weight

An ad is only the first half of the transaction. If it sends someone to a slow page, a vague page, or your homepage when the ad promised something specific, you have paid for a visit and then lost it anyway. The page has to load fast and say, immediately, the thing the ad said — not a general overview of everything your business does.

This is why ad management and web design are not separate conversations for me. A hand-built landing page that matches the ad and loads quickly is worth more than an extra week of tweaking the ad copy itself. If your current site cannot do that, fixing the page comes before turning on a campaign, not after.

What I do and how it is billed

I set up the campaign, build or adjust the landing page it points to, put conversion tracking in place, and manage it on an ongoing basis — watching performance and adjusting rather than leaving it running unattended. Your ad spend goes directly to Google or Meta; what you pay me is separate from that and depends on the size and complexity of the campaign.

I do not have a flat rate to quote here, because "a single local campaign for one service" and "ongoing search and social management across multiple products" are different amounts of work. Tell me what you are trying to advertise and I will give you an honest number.

Start with a conversation

Tell me what you sell and who you are trying to reach. If ads are not the right next step yet, I will say so — same as I did above — and we will figure out what should come first instead.

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