What this costs, and what you get for it.
No retainers dressed up as strategy. You pay for a build, then you pay for someone to run it. Both are priced so you can see what you're buying.
The reason most Google Ads accounts fail has nothing to do with Google Ads.
Every account I take over arrives with the same three problems. Conversion tracking that counts the wrong thing. A checkout or enquiry form that quietly doesn't work. And prices or delivery terms that lose to the competition before the click is even paid for.
None of that is fixed by writing better ads. If you turn on campaigns without fixing it first, you are paying Google to find out your website doesn't sell.
So the setup fee isn't an admin charge. It's the diagnosis and the repair. It's also the part most agencies skip, because it's slow and it doesn't look like Google Ads work.
Recent example: a paving supplier came to me spending money on Shopping ads for a year. I placed a test order before touching the campaigns. The checkout wouldn't accept an order under £450 — no shipping rate existed. Nobody had ever tried to buy from their own shop. Delivery was then costing £80 on orders where competitors charged nothing, so I pulled five competitors' checkouts apart, got the client's own haulier to send me their rate card, and worked out which products they could actually win on. Only then did I build the campaign.
You only pay for the parts you actually need.
Most people arrive with some of this already in place. If your tracking is clean, we skip it. If you already know your best sellers and your feed is sound, we skip that too. The 15-minute audit tells us which modules are live.
| Module | What it covers | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Tracking & measurement | GA4 and Google Ads conversions rebuilt, verified end-to-end, micro-conversions stripped out of bidding. | £195 |
| Commercial check | Test purchase or enquiry placed, checkout and form verified, delivery and pricing benchmarked against five live competitors. | £195 |
| Product feed | Merchant Center audit, rebuilt titles and descriptions from real search data, unit pricing, custom labels driven by 12 months of your own sales. | £295 |
| Campaign build | Structure, keywords, negatives, ad copy, bidding, geo targeting built from the data above. | £295 |
Modules can be bought individually if you only want one thing fixed.
From £495 to £2,000+ a month. Here's what moves it.
I don't publish a fixed monthly fee, because the same ad spend can mean wildly different amounts of work. A settled account with one product range and a client who wants a monthly report is not the same job as a growing account with a shifting catalogue and a weekly call.
Four things set the fee:
Be honest with yourself about £500 a month.
Here's the arithmetic nobody does before they start.
Divide your monthly budget by 30.4. A £500 budget is £16.45 a day. If clicks in your market cost £2, that's eight clicks — which can be gone by nine in the morning, after which your ads are off until tomorrow.
Eight clicks a day is 240 a month. At a 5% conversion rate that's twelve enquiries. That may be a perfectly good month for you. If your clicks cost £8, the same budget buys two a day, and there isn't a campaign structure in the world that fixes that.
So the first question isn't "who manages this." It's whether the budget buys enough clicks to learn anything. I'll tell you on the call, before you've spent anything.
If the numbers work but the budget is tight, there are cheaper ways to use me:
Priced separately, and deliberately.
Once the ads are working, the constraint moves. It stops being "are we getting clicks" and becomes "why is this traffic not buying."
That's a different job: the cart page, the delivery proposition, how you look in Shopping next to four competitors, whether anything on the page captures an email, whether the site earns trust in the first three seconds.
I don't bundle this into setup, because it's real work and it deserves a real scope. It's usually the right second project — after month one, when there's data to point at.
Things owners ask before booking.
What's in the free 15-minute audit?
I look at your account, your tracking and your website while you're on the call, and tell you which of the modules above you actually need. If the answer is none of them, I'll say so.
Is the setup fee refundable?
No, because the work is done regardless of whether the campaigns then succeed. But you own everything — accounts, tracking, feeds, campaigns are all in your name from day one.
What if I already have an agency?
Then you may only need the commercial check. It's the module almost nobody runs, and it's the one that most often explains poor performance.
Minimum term?
None. Month to month.
Fifteen minutes, and you'll know what's broken.
No pitch deck. I'll open your account, tell you what I find, and quote for the parts that need fixing.