Five ways to reduce CPA without cutting your budget
Actionable levers to improve performance across Google Ads and Microsoft Ads.
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Google Ads and Microsoft Ads
Paid search that respects the P&L
We manage search advertising against contribution, not clicks. In practice that usually means spending less where intent was never going to convert, and considerably more where it unmistakably is.
PPC
Smarter campaign management that lowers costs and lifts revenue.
- Account audit with prioritised findings
- Rebuilt campaign structure and conversion tracking
- Weekly search-term and negative-keyword governance
- Landing page specifications for your developers
- Monthly performance report tied to contribution
The problem
What usually goes wrong
Most accounts we inherit have three problems at once. A meaningful share of spend is going to search terms that were never going to convert. Smart Bidding is optimising towards a conversion action that counts form fills rather than revenue. And the landing page is a category page that makes the visitor work out for themselves whether you sell the thing they searched for. None of those are fixed by raising the budget.
Fit
Who this is for — and who it is not
We would rather tell you now than three months into an engagement.
A good fit if
- Businesses with a measurable conversion worth more than the cost of a click
- Teams who can feed offline or CRM outcomes back into the platform
- Accounts where spend is large enough that efficiency gains are worth real money
- Companies willing to change landing pages, not just ad copy
Probably not right if
- Anyone looking to buy their way past a fundamentally weak offer
- Businesses with no way to measure what a lead is worth
- Budgets so small that the account cannot gather enough data to learn
Outcomes
What this work is meant to produce
Commercial outcomes, stated without a ranking guarantee — because nobody can honestly offer one.
Lower cost per acquisition
Usually from removing waste and improving the click-to-enquiry rate, before any bidding change.
Bidding that optimises for value
Offline conversion imports so the platform learns which leads actually became revenue, not which forms were filled.
Spend concentrated where it works
Fewer, better-funded campaigns instead of budget spread thinly across everything.
Reporting finance recognises
Contribution and blended acquisition cost, reconciled against your own numbers.
Scope
What is included
- 01
Account audit and restructure
Campaign architecture, match types, negative strategy, asset groups and conversion configuration.
- 02
Search term governance
A weekly review cycle with negative lists maintained deliberately rather than quarterly.
- 03
Conversion tracking rebuild
Accurate, consent-aware tracking with values attached, plus enhanced and offline conversions where lawful.
- 04
Bidding and budget strategy
Target selection grounded in your margin, with a documented reason for every change.
- 05
Ad and asset testing
Fewer, sharper variants built around a genuine differentiator rather than twenty rewordings.
- 06
Landing page recommendations
Specific page changes with the reasoning, delivered as a specification your team can build.
Method
How we run it
Establish the economics
What a lead is worth, what converts to revenue, and what an acceptable acquisition cost actually is.
Find and stop the waste
Ninety days of search terms, placements and audiences, read line by line.
Fix the measurement
Nothing else is reliable until the conversion signal is right, so this comes before bidding changes.
Rebuild the structure
Consolidate towards campaigns with enough volume to learn, and separate what genuinely needs separating.
Improve the destination
Match the page to the query. This is usually the single largest lever and the most neglected.
Iterate on evidence
A weekly operating rhythm and a monthly review against the baseline.
Tooling
What we use, and why
Every data source is named so you can see where a number came from.
Google Ads
The primary auction for high-intent search demand in the UK.
Microsoft Advertising
Often materially cheaper for B2B and older demographics.
Google Analytics 4
Ties paid sessions to engagement and conversion.
Google Tag Manager
Consent-aware, auditable tracking deployment.
FAQ
PPC questions
How much should we spend to start?
Enough for the account to learn: as a rule of thumb, at least thirty conversions a month across the campaigns you want optimised. Below that, automated bidding has too little signal and you are better off with a tighter keyword set and manual control.
Do you charge a percentage of spend?
No. A percentage of spend rewards us for spending more, which is the wrong incentive. We work to a fixed monthly fee based on the scope of the account.
Should we run brand campaigns?
It depends on whether competitors are bidding on your name and how much of that traffic you would have got anyway. We will test it properly with a holdout rather than assert an answer.
Can you guarantee results?
No, and you should be wary of anyone who does. Auction platforms and search engines are third-party systems nobody controls. What we commit to is a documented plan, a baseline set before work starts, honest measurement, and a quarterly review where we look squarely at whether it is working.
Adjacent
Services that pair with this
- Google AdsSearch, Shopping, Performance Max and YouTube, managed against contribution.
- Paid socialCreative-led social campaigns measured against pipeline, not impressions.
- Display & programmaticReach the right audience without paying for the wrong inventory.
- TikTok AdsNative, creator-led advertising that works with the platform rather than against it.
Reading
Related insights
Talk to a ppc specialist
A thirty-minute call with the people who would do the work. No pitch deck.