No sales pitch on this page
How it works, and what is normal
Most anxiety about advertising is not really about advertising. It is about not knowing what should be happening yet. So here is the shape of the first ninety days, what every number on your dashboard actually means, and the answers to the questions people rarely ask out loud. Our clients see this same page inside their portal, drawn from the same file.
The first ninety days
If what you are seeing matches the row you are in, nothing is wrong
| Window | What we are doing | Judge us on | What is normal |
|---|---|---|---|
| Days 1–14 | Access, tracking rebuilt and verified, baseline recorded, campaigns structured. | Whether the plan arrived on time and tracking is provably correct. | Little or no spend, and no lead numbers worth reading. This is on purpose — we do not spend against tracking we have not verified. |
| Days 15–30 | Live spend at a deliberate pace. The platforms are learning your account. | Whether leads exist at all and whether they are the right kind of enquiry. | Cost per lead swings wildly. It is being calculated on a handful of leads, so one extra lead moves it enormously. Ignore the number, read the enquiries. |
| Days 31–60 | The obvious waste is cut, the winners get the budget, creative starts rotating. | Direction of travel on cost per lead, and quality feedback from your own sales calls. | The first genuinely readable trend appears. Expect one or two things we tried to have plainly failed — that is the method working, not the account struggling. |
| Days 61–90 | Compounding: channels start feeding each other and the account has real history. | Cost per lead against your close rate. Now the maths is worth doing. | This is the first month where a verdict is fair. Anyone who asked you for one earlier was managing your emotions, not your account. |
The numbers, in plain words
Every metric, and the wrong conclusion people draw from it
The third column is the useful one. A number you can read but not interpret is worse than no number at all, because it feels like information.
Impressions
The number of times your ad was put in front of someone.
It is a measure of reach, not of interest. It is the denominator for almost everything else, so it moves first when anything changes.
Commonly misread
High impressions are not a good month and low ones are not a bad one. An ad shown to the wrong 100,000 people is worse than one shown to the right 2,000.
Clicks
How many people saw the ad and chose to visit you.
This is the first moment a stranger spends something — attention — on your business.
Commonly misread
A click is not a customer and you should not be pleased by clicks alone. What happens after the click is where your money is won or lost.
Click-through rate
The share of people who saw the ad and clicked it.
It tells you whether the message matches what the person was looking for. It is the cleanest signal that the ad is aimed correctly.
Commonly misread
A very high rate is not automatically good — it can mean the ad is attracting curiosity rather than intent. We read it next to cost per lead, never alone.
Total spend
What was paid to the ad platforms in this window. It is not our fee.
This is the only number here you control directly. Everything else is a consequence of it.
Commonly misread
Spend rising is not a problem by itself. Spend rising while cost per lead holds steady is the platform finding more of the same people, which is exactly what you want.
Leads
People who gave you their details, having come from this work.
This is the handover point. Up to here is our job; from here it is your sales process.
Commonly misread
Leads are not sales, and a flat lead count with rising quality is a better month than the reverse. If lead quality changed, tell us — we cannot see what happens on your phone.
Cost per lead
Total spend divided by leads. What one interested person costs you.
This is the number to judge us on, provided your close rate is steady. It is the price of growth in your market, discovered rather than guessed.
Commonly misread
It is meaningless in week one and unstable in week two. Early cost per lead is measured on a handful of leads, and small numbers swing hard — a single extra lead can move it 30%.
Attributed revenue
Money you told us closed, traced back to a lead this work produced.
It is the only number that answers whether any of this was worth doing.
Commonly misread
It is always an undercount. Some customers do not get traced back, phone calls get missed, and long sales cycles land in a later month than the ad that started them.
Return on ad spend
Attributed revenue divided by ad spend. Four means four dollars back for one spent.
It is the fastest way to know whether to put more money in. Judged over a quarter, not a week.
Commonly misread
Return on ad spend is not profit. It ignores your cost of delivery, our fee, and refunds. A business with thin margins can go broke at a return most people would call excellent.
Cost per click
What one visit costs, set by what your competitors are willing to pay for the same person.
It is the market price of attention in your category, and it moves with demand.
Commonly misread
A rise usually means competitors entered the auction, not that something broke. The right response is checking whether cost per lead held, not cutting the bid on reflex.
Frequency
How many times, on average, the same person saw your ad.
Familiarity sells — up to a point. Past that point it irritates.
Commonly misread
Rising frequency with falling response does not mean the ad stopped working. It usually means the audience has seen enough of it, and that is a creative refresh, not a crisis.
Keywords
The phrases someone types that make your ad eligible to appear.
Choosing them is choosing your customers. It decides who finds you and, just as importantly, who does not.
Commonly misread
More keywords is not more reach in any useful sense. A long list mostly buys clicks from people who were never going to become customers, which is the single most common way advertising money disappears.
Conversion rate
The share of visitors who became leads.
It separates a traffic problem from a page problem. Same traffic, worse rate, means the answer is on your site rather than in the ad account.
Commonly misread
A drop is not automatically a page fault. It also happens when we deliberately widen reach to find new pockets of demand, and the trade is usually worth making.
Straight answers
The questions people have about agencies
None of these are difficult questions. They are only awkward when the answer is bad.
Am I locked in?
No. The agreement is month to month. Give notice and the next month simply does not bill. There is no exit fee, no offboarding charge and no export charge.
If we part ways, what do I keep?
Everything. Every ad account, analytics property, pixel, audience, your Google Business Profile, the landing pages, the creative and the lists are yours and stay in your name. We work inside your accounts, never our own. This is written into the agreement, not offered as a courtesy.
It has gone quiet. Is something broken?
Usually not, and we would rather you ask than assume. Volume moves with your market's week, the auction, seasonality and your own capacity. If something is genuinely wrong we will tell you before you notice it — that is what the response times in your agreement are for.
Why did results dip after you took over?
Because the first fortnight is measurement, not performance. Tracking gets rebuilt and verified before we spend, and the platforms re-learn your account from a clean baseline. A dip in weeks one and two is the normal shape of a rebuild, and we would be more worried by an account that looked perfect immediately.
What am I actually paying you for?
Judgement and the hours behind it: what to run, what to stop, what to say, and where. The platforms are free to log into and that has never been the hard part. The fee is on the website and it does not change based on your spend, so we have no incentive to talk you into a bigger budget.
Why will you not guarantee a ranking or a lead count?
Because nobody can, and the ones who do are either guessing or counting something that does not matter. What we do guarantee is published in full on the guarantee page, and it covers what we deliver and when, which is the part we control.
Will a junior end up running my account?
No. A senior operator owns the account and is the person who answers you. Every plan is published in your portal with a name against it.
Why is there no long monthly PDF?
Because a fifty-page deck arriving three weeks late is a performance, not a report. Your portal is live, refreshed daily, and shows the same numbers we look at. Nothing is held back for a meeting.
How long before I can judge this?
Thirty days for the system to be built and measuring honestly. Ninety days before cost per lead means anything statistically. Anyone promising a verdict sooner is reading noise.
Can my own team see what you are doing?
Yes, in full, at any time. You have the logins because they are your accounts. We will also walk anyone on your side through the account on a call — an agency that needs the account to stay a mystery is telling you something.
Still deciding? The prices are published, the guarantee is the whole policy on one page, and how to choose an agency is written to be useful even if you pick someone else.