Performance marketing means running paid advertising against one figure agreed before any money is spent: a cost per lead the business can afford, or a return on ad spend (ROAS) that still leaves a profit after stock, delivery and VAT. I run Google Ads and Facebook and Instagram ads for UK businesses as a single programme measured against that figure, with your own record of enquiries and sales as the referee. Instead of two dashboards each claiming success, you see what the ads cost in total and how many paying customers they produced.
Signs your paid channels need one owner
- The platforms report more sales than the bank account shows. Google Ads and Meta each claim a customer who clicked or saw their ad, so one sale is often counted in both.
- The budget split is a habit. Last year’s division between Google and Meta carries on because nobody can show which channel wins customers more cheaply.
- Leads are counted, customers are not. Both accounts optimise towards any form submission, spam included, because nothing tells them which enquiries became paying work.
- Nobody owns the whole journey. One supplier runs the ads, another built the website, and when costs rise each can point at the other.
Who this suits, and who it does not
This work suits UK businesses that advertise on both Google and Meta, or plan to, and sell something you can put a value on: a typical job, a known margin, a fixed course fee. It works best when you can tell, even roughly, which enquiries became customers, whether that record lives in a CRM, a booking system or a spreadsheet.
It is the wrong service in these situations, and I would rather say so before you pay a fee.
- You run one channel and intend to keep it that way. Monthly Google Ads management or Facebook and Instagram ads management is simpler.
- You do not yet know what a customer is worth or which channels to try. A written digital marketing strategy with a budget split is the cheaper place to begin.
- The offer is the problem. If the price sits well above what the market pays, or almost nobody looks for the product, sharper targeting cannot close the gap.
- The budget is too small to learn from. Automated bidding needs a steady flow of conversions each week, so on a small budget one channel run properly beats two run thinly.
What the work covers
The target and the arithmetic behind it
The target comes from your numbers, not an industry average. Picture a firm whose typical new client is worth £2,400 in gross profit over the first year, and which wins one client from every four qualified enquiries. Each enquiry is then worth about £600 to that firm, so a cost per lead comfortably below £600 leaves room for overheads and profit.
A shop works through its margin instead. At a 40% gross margin, each £1 of ad spend has to bring back £2.50 of sales, excluding VAT, just to break even; the break-even ROAS calculator runs that sum for your figures. I write the target down with every assumption shown, so when your prices or conversion rates change, it is revised openly instead of drifting.
Measurement both platforms share
Before budget moves anywhere, each conversion that matters is tested end to end: a real form submission, a phone call from the website and, for shops, a purchase. Each should be recorded once, reach Google Ads and Meta under the same definition and appear in GA4. Where sales close later by phone or in person, offline conversion imports let the platforms learn from enquiries that became customers rather than from every form fill.
UK rules shape this part of the job. Under PECR, advertising tags need the visitor’s consent before they fire, so the cookie banner, the tags and Google’s consent mode must agree. Uploading customer emails or phone numbers to Google or Meta, even hashed, is still processing personal data under UK GDPR, so your privacy notice has to cover it first.
Google Ads for demand that already exists
Search ads reach people typing what you sell into Google, which usually makes them the most direct source of ready-to-buy enquiries. I keep searches for your business name apart from the rest. Many of those people would have found you without an ad, so their strong figures can hide whether the other spend adds anything. What an ad genuinely caused, as opposed to what it merely touched, is its incrementality, and that should decide where budget grows.
Facebook and Instagram for demand that has to be created
Meta’s ads reach people before they go looking, which suits products people understand at a glance or in a short clip. They are held to the same target as search, with one allowance: someone who first saw an Instagram ad may later type your name into Google, so when Meta spend changes I watch branded searches and direct enquiries as well as Meta’s own figure.
The pages the ads land on
A weak page raises the cost of every lead from either channel. Each offer needs a page that repeats the promise made in the ad, loads quickly on a phone and asks for one action. Sometimes a few changes to an existing page are enough; where a new page is needed, landing page design for paid campaigns covers the build.
What happens after the enquiry
Paying for an enquiry that waits two days for a reply means paying for a customer a competitor may already have answered. I check how quickly enquiries are picked up and which sources produce work that closes, then tell you plainly where leads are going cold. The fix is usually in how enquiries are handled, and it can lower the cost of each customer more than any change to the ads.
Budget moved on evidence
Budget follows the channels and campaigns that win customers inside the target, and the split is revisited as evidence builds. A campaign close to its ceiling usually returns less on its next £500 than it did on its first, which is marginal ROAS at work. So the question each month is where the next pound earns most, not which channel looks best on average.
How I run a performance programme
- A first conversation. What you sell, what a customer is worth, and what each channel costs and produces now. Where you can give me access, I go through the accounts and the site beforehand.
- The target, in writing. Worked out from your margin and the share of enquiries that become customers, and agreed before anything changes.
- Foundations repaired. Conversions tested, duplicates removed, consent checked, offline imports connected where sales close later, and the landing pages taking the most paid traffic put right.
- Spend concentrated at first. Most of the budget goes to the channel most likely to reach the target soonest, often search, so a reliable baseline forms quickly. The second channel joins once there is something to compare it with.
- Adjustments, logged. Search terms, audiences, creative, bids and pages are refined, and every change is recorded with its reason.
- A monthly review. Spend, leads, customers and cost per customer for each channel, checked against your own records, ending in a decision on where next month’s budget goes.
Problems I see most often on UK accounts
- Revenue reported with VAT included. Many UK shops pass the full basket value, VAT and delivery included, to Google and Meta, so the ROAS shown is a fifth or more above the true figure.
- One lead counted several times. A thank-you page that records a conversion every time it is reloaded, or a form counted both by a Tag Manager tag and by the platform’s own automatic detection.
- Phone calls left out. Plenty of UK customers ring rather than fill in a form, and if calls from the website go unrecorded, the channel that prompts them looks weaker than it is.
- Tags that ignore the cookie banner. Ad tags that fire before consent, which breaches PECR, or never fire after it because the banner and Tag Manager were set up separately.
What you receive
- The target, set down in writing with the arithmetic and assumptions behind it.
- A measurement plan listing every conversion, where it is counted and how it reaches each platform, with test results.
- Ad accounts in your business’s name, billed by Google and Meta to your own payment method in pounds, which I work in through access you can remove at any time.
- A change log of each adjustment and the reason for it.
- A monthly report built around the single target, with channel detail underneath, and a ranked list of the tests to run next.
What it costs
My fee covers the management work and is quoted in writing, in pounds, after our first conversation. Ad spend is separate: Google and Meta charge it directly to you, so you always see exactly what went to the platforms. The fee depends on how many channels and campaigns are involved and how much tracking needs repairing first, and nothing starts until you have agreed the proposal.
Next step
Send me roughly what you spend on each channel a month, what you believe a lead costs you today and what a new customer is typically worth. I will go through those figures before we talk, say whether the target you have in mind is achievable with your budget, and name the first fix I would make. You can book a consultation through the contact page.