What we do · Google Ads
Google Ads that earn their keep
Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, and the landing pages, tracking, and analysis that determine whether either one is worth running.
01 — The Problem
How most businesses end up with PPC they can’t trust
PPC is one of the easiest channels to spend money on and one of the hardest to spend well. The prospects who come to us about it usually arrive in one of four states.
The first group has no idea what to do. They know Google Ads exists, they know their competitors are running them, and they suspect they should be doing something — but the inside of the Google Ads interface looks like an aircraft cockpit and the recommended-by-Google settings feel like a trap. So they do nothing, or they try once, get scared, and turn it off.
The second group tried it themselves with $50 a month, set the campaign to “maximize clicks,” ignored it for ninety days, and concluded PPC doesn’t work. PPC does work. $50 a month doesn’t.
The third group hired an agency that quoted a flat monthly number – call it $5,000 – and said “trust us, we’ll handle it.” Six months later the phone hasn’t rung any more than it used to. The agency sends a monthly report full of impressions and click-through rates. Nobody can answer the simple question: of that $5,000, how much went to Google and how much went to the agency? Because the agency never broke it out, the client can’t tell whether they paid $4,900 in management fees and $100 in actual ads, or the other way around. We’ve watched this play out more than once. Months of light ad spend pocketed as margin, results that look mysteriously thin, and a client who figures it out eventually – but only after a lot of money is already gone.
The fourth group is the slow-bleed version of the third. They hired an agency, ran a campaign for a year with nothing to show for it, and got a presentation about a “strategic pivot.” They signed a new contract. Another year went by. Another pivot. By the time they call us, they’re two or three years and well into six figures of spend deep, with no leads, no rankings, no insight into what went wrong, and a sinking suspicion they should have walked away in month six. They should have. The agency was never going to produce results. Each pivot was a way to reset the clock on the conversation about why nothing was working.
The reason this works is that PPC is opaque by default. The platforms don’t tell the client what’s normal. The agency doesn’t volunteer it. And the client doesn’t know what questions to ask.
The pattern across all four groups is the same. PPC isn’t broken. The way most businesses end up buying it is broken — either because they’re flying blind, or because they’re paying someone who’s incentivized to keep them flying blind.
02 — What’s Changing
PPC in 2026 doesn’t reward the tactics that used to work
For most of its history, paid search was a craft. You picked your keywords, wrote your ads, set your bids manually, and watched the campaign like a hawk. The advertisers who paid attention beat the ones who didn’t. The skill ceiling was high, and the reward for clearing it was real.
That game is mostly over. Google’s bidding has been algorithmic for years, and the algorithms have gotten good enough that manual bid management — the thing PPC managers used to do all day — is now mostly counterproductive. Performance Max and Smart Bidding decide where your money goes based on conversion signals you feed them. Which means the work has moved upstream. Setting the right max bid by hand for each keyword used to be most of the job. Now it’s a small part of it. What matters more is whether the algorithm has clean, accurate conversion data to learn from. Most accounts don’t.
This is where most PPC programs are quietly failing in 2026. The campaigns are running. The reports look fine. But the conversion events the algorithm is optimizing for are wrong — counting form views instead of form submissions, double-counting page loads, missing the offline sales that actually close a week later. The algorithm is doing what it was told. It was told the wrong thing.
Tracking got harder at the same time. iOS privacy changes, third-party cookie deprecation, and the move to server-side tagging mean that the conversion pixel you dropped on the thank-you page in 2021 is probably misfiring or missing data entirely. The accounts that haven’t been rebuilt for the current tracking environment are reporting numbers that don’t reflect what’s actually happening, and the bidding algorithm is making decisions based on those wrong numbers.
And the channels keep multiplying. Microsoft Ads has gotten more competitive as Bing’s market share grew alongside its integration with ChatGPT. ChatGPT itself opened a self-serve ad platform in May 2026. Google rolled AI Max into Search this year, which changes how queries match to keywords in ways most accounts haven’t been adjusted for. The advertisers who keep up will do well. The ones running the same campaigns they set up in 2022 are going to keep wondering why their cost per lead is climbing.
The cost of running PPC badly has gone up. The cost of running it well has gone down.
The gap between the two is wider than it’s ever been.
None of this means PPC has gotten easier. The skill that used to go into manual bidding now goes into the upstream work — making sure conversions are tracked correctly, fed back into the platform cleanly, and audited every month so the algorithm keeps learning the right lessons. PPC isn’t set-it-and-forget-it. It never was. The work just changed shape.
03 — Our Approach
What we actually do, what we won’t, and how we charge for it
PPC done well is a small number of things done in the right order. None of them are exotic. Most of them are boring. The agencies that struggle are usually the ones that skip the boring parts and go straight to the campaign.
The work itself
We start with an audit. If you have an existing account, we look at what’s running, what’s converting, what’s wasting money, and whether the conversion tracking is reporting reality or fiction. If you’re starting from scratch, we look at your site, your offer, your competition, and whether PPC is even the right channel before we recommend spending a dollar on it.
From there, the work is mostly four things.
What we’ll tell you not to do
Don't run ads to your homepage.
Your homepage is for people who already know your brand — they typed your URL in directly, they got your business card, they heard about you from someone. Someone clicking a paid ad has given you a specific signal about what they want, so send them to a page that answers it. We’ve never seen a homepage-as-landing-page campaign that wasn’t immediately improved by building a real landing page dedicated to the specific product, service, or offer the ad is promoting.
Don't trust an agency that won't separate their fee from your ad spend.
This is the single most important question to ask a PPC vendor and most clients never ask it. If the quote is one number and the agency won’t break it out, you have no way to know whether they’re spending your money on ads or pocketing most of it. We’ve watched shops spend almost nothing on ads in slow months and bill the full retainer anyway. By the time the client catches on, the damage is done.
Don't chase impression share or click volume.
These are vanity metrics that feel like progress and aren’t. Impressions don’t pay your bills. Clicks don’t pay your bills. Customers do.
Don't accept the keyword list your last agency gave you without questioning it.
Most accounts we audit are bidding on the keywords the client suggested in the kickoff meeting, plus whatever the previous agency’s tool spit out. Nobody’s looked at the search query reports in months to see what people are actually typing in. And what people type has changed — the rise of AI assistants and voice search has pushed users toward longer, more conversational queries, which means the long-tail keywords that used to be an afterthought are often where the real intent now lives. The keywords that convert are almost always different from the keywords you’d expect, and they’re moving every quarter.
Don't let the Google rep talk you into broadening match types and turning on every recommendation.
Google’s reps work for Google. Their job is to get you to spend more, not to spend better. Some of their recommendations are useful. Most of them aren’t. We tell you which is which.
How we charge
We charge a flat management fee, scoped to the engagement. It isn’t a percentage of your ad spend. That matters because percentage-of-spend pricing means the agency makes more money when you spend more money, which creates pressure to grow your spend past the point where it’s still returning. A flat fee removes that pressure. If the right answer is to shrink your spend, we’ll tell you so — and our paycheck won’t change.
The second piece matters just as much: Google bills you directly for ad spend. We never touch your ad money. The credit card on file at Google is yours, the invoice is yours, the receipt is yours. If we disappear tomorrow, your account is still your account and your billing history is still your billing history.
This is how it should work everywhere and it doesn’t. Plenty of agencies bundle your fee and your spend into one number, refuse to break it out, and ask you to take it on faith that the split is fair. They’re asking for trust in place of transparency. We’d rather earn the trust the other way — by being transparent first.
We work with whatever platform makes sense for your business — Mailchimp, HubSpot, Constant Contact, Campaign Monitor, ActiveCampaign, and others. Which one is right for you depends on your stack and your goals, and that’s a conversation, not a default. If you’re already on a platform that’s working, we’re not going to make you switch just to bill a migration.
Platforms
Google Ads
The default and the right starting point for almost everyone. The volume is there, the intent is there, and the platform is the most mature.
Microsoft Ads
The underrated channel. Covers Bing, Yahoo, AOL, a network of syndicated search partners, and the integration with ChatGPT search. Competition is lower than on Google, which usually means cost per click is lower too. The audience skews older, more affluent, more desktop, and more Windows than Google’s, which matters a lot for some businesses and not at all for others. We can import your Google campaigns into Microsoft Ads with minimal additional setup, run them in parallel for a couple of months, and see whether the math works. If it does, we keep it. If it doesn’t, we shut it off and stop charging you to manage it.
ChatGPT Ads
ChatGPT’s ad platform opened in May 2026. It’s too new to recommend by default, and for most of our clients the smart move is to wait until there’s more data on what works. For a small number of categories where the audience lines up, there may be a credible early test. We’ll tell you which side of that line you’re on.
What ongoing looks like
PPC isn’t a project. It’s an engagement. Every month, we review what converted and what didn’t, what got cut, what got added, what changed in the platforms, and what the next month’s work should focus on. Negative keyword lists grow. Ad copy gets refreshed before it goes stale. Conversion data gets audited so the algorithm keeps learning the right lessons. Landing pages get tested against each other. The work isn’t dramatic month to month. It compounds.
PPC works when the math works. Our job is to make sure the math is right — and to tell you when it isn’t.
04 — A Real Example
The prospect we sent away
Case Study
A local electrician came to us a few years back. He had a real specialty — rewiring old houses, the kind with knob-and-tube wiring or aluminum branch circuits from the 1960s and 70s. It’s skilled work, dangerous if done wrong, and there aren’t many people who do it well. He had a legitimate business and a clear value proposition. He just couldn’t figure out how to get in front of the right homeowners.
He came in with a hand-drawn map. Actual paper, actual pen, with lines marking the roads he wouldn’t cross. He wanted to target the neighborhoods inside those lines and nothing outside them. The houses in that area were old enough to have the wiring he specialized in. The houses on the other side of the lines were too new.
We told him we couldn’t do it.
Not because we didn’t want the work. Because the campaign he was describing was geographically impossible to run profitably. Google’s location targeting works at the city, ZIP code, and radius level. It does not work at the “everything south of this street but not past that one” level. We could have set up a campaign that targeted the broader area and tried to filter from there, but most of the impressions would have gone to homeowners outside his service area, in newer homes that didn’t need his services. He’d have paid for clicks from people he couldn’t help and wouldn’t have wanted to help even if he could.
The honest math made it worse. He needed maybe a few jobs a month to be busy. The number of homeowners actively searching for “aluminum wiring replacement” or “knob and tube rewiring” inside his hand-drawn boundaries on any given day was probably in the single digits — and that’s generous. Even if we caught every one of them, the campaign wouldn’t have produced enough volume to justify the management fee, let alone the ad spend.
We told him to print door hangers.
Seriously. We told him to print a few hundred door hangers explaining what he did, why the homes in that neighborhood likely needed it, and how to reach him. Then walk the streets inside his hand-drawn boundaries and put one on every door. The cost was a fraction of what a PPC campaign would have run, the targeting was perfect because he’d be physically standing in front of the houses he wanted to work on, and the conversion rate on a well-designed door hanger in a niche like his was almost certainly higher than anything we could have produced through paid search.
He didn’t hire us. He went and did the door hangers. We don’t know exactly how it worked out for him, but we know it cost him less than the campaign would have and that he was quite literally standing in front of the right homeowners from day one.
The right marketing recommendation isn’t always the one that makes us money. Sometimes it’s the one that costs us the engagement.
Sending a prospect to door hangers instead of taking their money is the version of this work most PPC shops don’t do. The default move in our industry is to say yes to the campaign, take the management fee, and let the client figure out a year later that the math never worked. We’d rather have the honest conversation up front. Some of the people we have that conversation with end up hiring us for something else. Some don’t. Either way, nobody walks away having paid us for a campaign that was never going to work.
05 — The Bigger Opportunity
The work most PPC shops won’t touch
Most PPC agencies sell campaign management. Keywords, ad copy, bid strategy, monthly reports. That’s the whole offering. Which is fine when everything around the campaign is already working — the tracking is correct, the landing pages convert, the offer is sharp, the rest of the marketing program is pointed in the same direction. But that’s almost never the situation we walk into. The campaign is the visible part. The unglamorous work underneath it is where most accounts are quietly failing.
Landing pages, not just ads
The ad gets the click. The landing page decides whether the click was worth paying for. Most PPC shops don’t touch the landing page because they can’t — they’re not designers, they’re not developers, they don’t have a team that can rebuild a page in a week and test it against the old one. So they send the ad to whatever page the client gives them, watch the conversion rate underperform, and recommend “creative refresh” when the real problem is the page.
We’re a web design and development shop that also does PPC. We started building sites in 2002 and running paid ad campaigns much later, after we cracked the code on designing a good landing page that converts visitors into paying customers. That means we approach the campaign and the page as one piece of work instead of two. The client doesn’t have to hire a second vendor and play telephone between two teams that don’t talk to each other.
Tracking and attribution that reflects reality
We covered the basics of conversion tracking in section three. The bigger version of this work is attribution — connecting the click to the eventual sale, even when that sale closes weeks later, comes in over the phone, or starts online and finishes in person.
For most of our clients, the sale doesn’t happen on the website. The website produces an inquiry. The inquiry becomes a call, an email exchange, a meeting, eventually a customer. This is especially true for B2B, where a one-click close almost never exists — even ecommerce sales in that space usually involve a consultation, a quote, or some kind of process after the form gets submitted. Without offline conversion import — feeding the closed-won deal back to Google so the algorithm knows which click produced real revenue — the platform is optimizing for inquiries instead of customers. Those aren’t the same thing. Some of your inquiries close at 50%, others at 5%. Google can’t tell the difference unless you tell it.
This is the kind of work that takes a few days to set up properly and pays dividends every month afterward. Most PPC shops skip it because it requires coordinating with the client’s CRM, their sales process, and their definition of a real customer. We don’t skip it. It’s where the math actually gets honest.
Killing spend, not growing it
Our flat-fee structure makes this possible. When the agency’s pay isn’t tied to your spend, “let’s cut this campaign because it isn’t working” becomes a normal recommendation instead of a self-defeating one. Some months we’ll come back and say the right move is to spend less. Sometimes the right move is to pause a whole channel entirely and put the money somewhere it will have a positive return on investment.
This is the conversation percentage-of-spend agencies almost never have, because they can’t afford to. Their revenue model depends on growth, even when the math doesn’t support it.
How PPC fits with the rest of your marketing
PPC isn’t an island. The same landing page work that makes a PPC campaign convert also helps the SEO traffic that finds the same page. The same speed and UX fixes that improve Quality Score also improve organic rankings. The same conversion tracking that tells you what’s working in paid search also tells you what’s working in email, in social, in direct traffic. When the foundation is good, every channel benefits.
We’re not going to tell you that you need to do SEO and PPC together. Plenty of our clients only do one. But if you’re going to do both, having the same team handle the underlying site work means you’re not paying for it twice and the two channels aren’t fighting each other. The work compounds. And if you start with one and add the other later, most of the setup is already done.
The channels we’re watching
PPC is in the middle of a real shift. ChatGPT ads opened to self-serve in May 2026. Google’s AI Max is changing how Search works. Performance Max keeps eating more of the platform’s surface area. Microsoft Ads is more interesting than it’s been in a decade. Three years from now, the channel mix will look meaningfully different than it does today.
We’re paying attention. We’re not selling you an “AI ads package.” When there’s a credible early test for one of these channels and the math works for your business, we’ll bring it to you. When it doesn’t, we’ll wait. The difference between agencies that survive these shifts and agencies that don’t is usually patience — chasing every new platform on day one is how clients end up paying for experiments that should have been someone else’s.
06 — How We’re Different
Why this works coming from Glimmernet
We’ve been doing this since 2002. Twenty-three years of building websites, running campaigns, and watching the digital marketing industry cycle through tactics, platforms, and panic.
years in business
That history matters for PPC specifically because the agencies that disappear in this category tend to disappear the same way. They build their offering around whatever tactic was working when they started — manual bid management, broad-match keyword stuffing, Performance Max as a magic button, AI ads as the next gold rush. The tactic stops working. The agency doesn’t have anything else to fall back on. The clients figure that out a year too late.
We’ve watched this happen many times in twenty-three years. The throughline is always the same: the agencies that survive aren’t the ones with the cleverest tactics, they’re the ones with the discipline to do unglamorous work consistently. Tracking that’s actually correct. Landing pages that convert. Honest reports. Recommendations that sometimes cost the agency money. We’ve made ourselves uncomfortable plenty of times by telling clients to spend less, or pause a campaign, or — like the electrician — not run one at all. That discomfort is the cost of being the kind of agency that’s still here in another ten years.
The other thing twenty-three years buys you is a team that can do the whole job. We design and build the site. We run the campaign. We set up the tracking. We do the analysis. We do the SEO work that makes the same pages rank organically. We do the email marketing that follows up with the leads the ads bring in. When something breaks, we don’t have to coordinate with another vendor to figure out whose problem it is. It’s our problem and we fix it.
That isn’t a unique offering — there are other full-service shops. But it is increasingly rare. Most of the agencies that pitch PPC today specialize in PPC and nothing else. Which is fine when PPC is the whole problem. It isn’t, very often.
07 — Honest Filter
Who this probably isn’t for
PPC is one of those services where the wrong-fit engagement is worse for both parties than no engagement at all. We’ve turned down enough of these to know what they look like. A few situations where we’re not the right fit:
You won't share margin data, customer lifetime value, or what a sale is actually worth to you.
We ask probing questions about what a customer is worth, what the average sale looks like, and the most you can profitably pay to acquire one. These aren’t nosy. They’re the inputs that determine how the campaign gets built and how aggressively we bid. Without them, we’d be guessing and so would Google. There’s more on why this matters in the FAQ below.
You need the phone to ring this week to make rent.
It’s possible to launch an ad on Tuesday and get a call Tuesday afternoon. It’s not the norm. PPC works best with time to learn, enough conversion data to optimize, and a few months to refine what’s working. It’s a growth tool, not a survival tool. The timeline doesn’t bend.
You realized Valentine's Day is tomorrow and you sell chocolates.
Seasonal campaigns need runway. Christmas work starts in late summer. Halloween starts in July. Valentine’s Day starts in December. The campaigns that perform during the season are built and tested in the months before it. We’d rather start the conversation three months early than spend yours trying to catch a wave already cresting.
You want to micromanage bids, change spend every month, or stop and start the campaign.
The bidding algorithms need consistency. Increasing spend when things are working is fine. The problem is cutting it mid-campaign because the rest of the business had a slow month. Dropping spend by 70% and bringing it back later breaks the campaign two ways: there’s not enough conversion data for the algorithm to learn, and the bid position resets — competitors take the slots you dropped, and you have to fight to win them back. We need a spend commitment we can plan around, not a number that moves with the rest of your business’s monthly mood.
You're under $1,500 a month in ad spend.
This isn’t about whether your business deserves it. It’s about whether the math works. Smaller budgets don’t generate enough conversions for the bidding algorithm to learn, so most of what a $500 spend buys is wasted, not invested. Once you cross the threshold where the algorithm can actually learn, the same dollar starts working harder.
For most industries, $1,500 is the floor. For competitive ones such as legal, B2B SaaS, and certain home services the real floor is much higher. If your number is significantly lower, we’ll tell you so and suggest other ways to spend the money. Like we told the electrician: sometimes the right answer is door hangers.
If none of those describe you, that’s a good sign. The clients we do our best work for are the ones who want PPC done honestly, are willing to share the data we need to do it well, can commit to spending consistently while the campaign finds its footing, and want a partner who tells them the truth about what’s working and what isn’t.
If that’s you, the next step is a conversation.
07 — Frequently Asked Questions
Frequently Asked Questions about PPC and Google Ads
Because the success of the campaign depends on the answer.
We understand the instinct to keep this information close to the vest. Margin data is sensitive, and most business owners have spent years not telling anyone what their numbers look like. We’re not asking for a forensic dive into your accounting system, but we will need a ballpark for what a customer is worth, what you can pay to acquire one, and what the margin looks like on an average sale.
These numbers matter because you’re in a bidding war against competitors who have margins similar to yours. If your competitors are bidding what a customer is actually worth to them and we’re bidding less, you’ll lose every time. That doesn’t protect your margin, it hands the customer to your competitor.
We had a prospect once tell us he wanted to land new customers for $1.00 each. A few questions later we found out his average customer was worth $50,000.00 on the first sale. His competitors knew that number too, and they were bidding accordingly. A dollar was never going to win that auction. It wasn’t going to come close. And if we can’t win the auctions, you’d be paying us to manage a campaign that loses every time. We don’t take on campaigns that can’t win.
We treat the information you share the way an accountant or a lawyer would. It doesn’t leave the engagement. It’s just a piece of information that we tuck away that lets us do our job correctly.
No. Many of our clients only do one, and each channel works on its own.
That said, the underlying site work is mostly the same for both including creating landing pages that convert, tracking that’s correct, and speed and mobile experience that don’t push visitors away. If you’re doing both with us, you’re not paying for that work twice, and the two channels feed each other.
PPC tells you which keywords actually convert, which informs the SEO strategy. SEO builds the durable pages that PPC can also send traffic to. If you start with one and add the other later, most of the foundation is already in place.
But we’re not going to tell you that you need both to make either one work. Plenty of clients only do one, and the one they pick can absolutely succeed on its own.
The honest answer is “it depends on your industry, your target customer, and what a customer is worth to you.” But here are the realistic ranges.
For most local service businesses, $1,500 to $3,000 a month in ad spend is the floor where the math starts to work. Below that, the bidding algorithm doesn’t get enough conversion data to optimize, and you end up paying for clicks that don’t lead anywhere.
For competitive industries such as legal, B2B SaaS, certain healthcare and home service categories, the floor is higher. Sometimes much higher. In those categories, $3,000 to $10,000 a month is where serious results start, depending on how aggressive the competition is.
For ecommerce, it varies more than any other category. Some product categories are profitable at $1,500. Others need ten times that to learn anything useful.
We’ll tell you which range applies to your business after one conversation. If your number is significantly lower than what the math requires, we’ll tell you that too, and recommend what to do instead.
Our management fee is a flat monthly amount, scoped to your specific engagement. It isn’t a percentage of your ad spend.
We quote it after we understand what the work actually involves, including how many campaigns we’re running, how many platforms we’re on, how many landing pages need to be built or fixed, and whether we’re rebuilding an existing account or starting from scratch.
What we don’t do is bundle our fee with your ad spend and quote one number. You’ll always see them as separate line items, and Google (or Microsoft) will bill you directly for the ad spend so you can verify it independently.
The whole point is transparency. You should always know exactly what you’re paying us versus exactly what’s going to ads.
Both. Google is the default starting point for almost everyone because the volume and intent are there. That said, Microsoft is the right call for more businesses than people realize.
Microsoft Ads, which covers Bing, Yahoo, AOL, syndicated search partners, and the integration with ChatGPT search, is the underrated channel. Lower competition usually means lower cost per click, and the audience skews older, more affluent, and more desktop than Google’s, which matters a lot for some businesses.
If Microsoft Ads looks like a fit for your business, we can start there directly, or, if you’re already running Google campaigns, import them into Microsoft Ads with minimal additional setup and run them in parallel for a couple of months. Either way, we see whether the math works. If it does, we keep it. If it doesn’t, we shut it off and stop charging you to manage it.
ChatGPT opened its self-serve ad platform in May 2026. It’s new enough that for most of our clients, the right move is to wait until there’s more data on what works there. For a small number of categories where the audience demographics line up, there may be a credible early test. We’ll tell you which side of that line you’re on.
What we won’t do is sell you an “AI ads package” because the term sounds current. The platforms that work for your business are the ones that put you in front of customers who convert. That’s an empirical question, not a marketing one.
Yes, when it fits the goal.
Performance Max can be powerful, but it can also waste a lot of money without proper conversion data feeding it, which is true of a lot of accounts we audit so we’re cautious about turning it on before the foundation is right.
YouTube and Display make sense for some businesses and not others.
We’ll tell you which side of that line you fall on, and we won’t recommend channels that aren’t likely to deliver a positive return on investment.
Let’s start with whether Google Ads is the right move for your business.
If you’ve been running ads and the numbers don’t add up, or you’ve been pitched by someone whose pricing structure makes you nervous, let’s have a conversation.
Twenty minutes. No deck. No pitch. We’ll ask the questions that tell us whether Google Ads is the right channel for your business, whether your current setup is working, and what we’d do differently.
If we’re not the right team for the job, we’ll tell you and point you toward who is.