Paying Google for clicks should pay you back.
Ads put you at the top of the results page while the slower work of ranking there naturally goes on. Sometimes they are exactly right, and sometimes they are a way to spend money quickly. You get the honest arithmetic before a pound leaves your account, and the account is yours, not mine.
Sometimes the right answer is no ads at all.
Nobody selling ads management has much reason to tell you that. My fee is fixed rather than a slice of your spend, so the arithmetic can be honest: if the numbers do not work, you hear that instead of a pitch.
Where ads earn their keep
- Searches with buying intent behind them, where the person typing is ready to spend
- A new business nobody searches for by name yet, while the slower ranking work takes hold
- A season or a push that cannot wait for SEO: bookings to fill, a launch, a quiet month
- A market where the top of the results page is all adverts, and being below them is invisible
Where they quietly burn money
- You already rank where it matters and nobody is bidding over you: the click is free
- The website does not convert the visitors it gets: fix the site first, then multiply the traffic
- The margin on what you sell cannot carry the price of the clicks
- The budget is so small the numbers will never tell you whether it worked
Most of the work is stopping waste.
A well-built campaign is mostly a list of things it will not spend your money on.
- The searches chosen for buying intent, and the ones that would waste money excluded from day one
- Negative keywords maintained: half the job is stopping Google spending your budget on the wrong searches
- Targeting drawn around Jersey, and Guernsey if you serve it, not the whole of Britain
- Conversion tracking wired in, so you know what an enquiry actually costs you
- A hard budget cap that you set, and can change or stop at any time
- Watched monthly rather than set up and forgotten, with the honest advice to stop if it is not paying
Your account, your budget, your name.
The Ads account is created in your name with your payment details on it, and the ad spend goes to Google directly. I never handle it, mark it up or take a percentage of it: no commission, no reselling, no referral fees, the same as everything else I do. The set-up and the monthly watching are quoted as a fixed price before anything runs, and how that pricing works is on the pricing page.
Because the fee does not grow with the spend, the advice can point in either direction. If the ads are paying, the numbers will show it. If they are not, the honest recommendation is to turn them off, and I will be the one to say so. Either way the account, the history and everything learned along the way stay yours: stop working with me and you lose nothing.
The things people ask first.
How much does Google Ads cost in Jersey?
Two separate numbers, and it matters that they stay separate. The ad spend is yours: you set it, you cap it, and you pay it to Google directly from your own account, so every pound of budget buys advertising rather than margin for a middleman. What I charge covers the set-up and the watching, quoted as a fixed price before anything runs, the same as every other job. There is no percentage of spend, so I have no incentive to tell you to spend more.
Do you take a percentage of the ad spend?
No. The Ads account is created in your name with your payment details on it, the spend goes to Google directly, and my fee is fixed and agreed first. No commission, no reselling, no referral fees. That is what makes the advice to spend less, or to stop entirely, worth having.
Are Google Ads better than SEO?
They do different jobs. Ads put you at the top of the page tomorrow and stop working the moment you stop paying; the local search groundwork takes longer and keeps working after the invoice. For most Jersey businesses the honest order is a findable site and a tidy Google Business Profile first, with ads on top where a specific search is worth paying for. If you already rank where it matters and nobody is bidding over you, ads may be a waste of money, and I will say so.
Will ads fix a website that does not sell?
No, and this is the most expensive mistake in paid search. Ads multiply visitors, not persuasion. Send traffic to a page that is slow, confusing or burying the thing you sell, and you pay for every one of the people it loses. If the site is the problem, fixing the site comes first, and it is usually cheaper than a month of wasted clicks.
Wondering whether ads would pay for you?
A digital once-over looks at your website, your tools and your spend together, and gives you the arithmetic on ads alongside everything else. Or just ask: questions are free.