// ADVERTISING & STORES
You are paying for clicks.
Do you know what comes of them?
Google Ads puts you straight to the top — for money. An online store takes orders while you sleep. Both only become an investment rather than an expense once somebody measures what comes out at the other end. That is exactly where we start.
The top slot is available to rent
Above the ordinary search results sit up to four ads. They are labelled Sponsored, but otherwise look almost exactly like everything else — and they sit in front of the result somebody else spent months earning.
Ads or SEO? Both, but not equally at the same time
The two routes do not rule each other out, they simply have entirely different characteristics — like renting and owning: ads are rented visibility that ends the moment you stop paying. A good organic position is closer to property — it needs upkeep and comes with no guarantee, but it does not vanish just because a budget runs out. Confusing them means spending money in the wrong place.
Google Ads
- Visible on the day it goes live
- You decide the wording, region and time of day
- Every click costs money — permanently
- Budget off, visibility gone. Immediately.
- Good for: filling capacity fast, new offers, seasonal business, testing whether anyone searches at all
Search engine optimisation
- First movement after four to eight weeks
- Google decides how you appear
- Clicks cost nothing
- Keeps working even when you pause
- Good for: a steady base load, trust, everything that does not change
Our usual recommendation: start with ads, continue with SEO. Within a few weeks, ads show you with real money which search terms actually produce enquiries. Those are precisely the terms worth earning organically afterwards — rather than optimising on a hunch for three months.
The real problem: hardly anyone measures
We regularly see accounts where money has been draining away for months — and nobody can answer the simplest question: which ad produced that phone call?
Nobody would run a shop without a till. With online advertising that is the normal state of affairs: how many people walk in gets counted, who buys something does not. The reports in the account still look impressive — impressions, clicks, click-through rate. Yet none of those numbers tells you whether the whole thing adds up.
Somebody searches
A term is typed in, your ad appears. Google shows this part to everyone.
Somebody clicks
The click costs you money. That is in the account too — it is the number everybody looks at.
Somebody calls, writes or buys
This is where the chain breaks for most. Without measurement the analysis stops at the click — and everything after it is guesswork.
Google learns from it
Only once step 3 is measured does the algorithm know which clicks are worth anything and buy more of them. Without that feedback it optimises for clicks — that is, for your costs rather than your revenue.
That is why our order of work is not negotiable: measurement first, then the first ad. We do not put a campaign live without conversion tracking — it would burn your budget and show neither of us anything.
What we set up
Four building blocks that belong together. We build them so that you can check for yourself afterwards — and are not dependent on us to find out how things are going.
Campaigns that match the question
Search campaigns for people typing in exactly what you offer. Performance Max where products and imagery exist. Plus the list of terms you do not want to pay for — in practice that often saves more than any bid tuning.
Conversion tracking
We measure what counts for you: a call from the website, a submitted form, a booking, an order. Built in properly through a tag manager, instead of pasting snippets into pages at random.
Consent that holds up
A banner where declining is as easy as accepting, and the technical transfer of that decision to Google. Without consent, no personal data flows. The matching paragraph for your privacy policy comes with it.
A report you can understand
One page, monthly: spent, enquiries received, cost per enquiry, trend. No 40-page analyses with the uncomfortable number hidden on page 31.
Online stores with Shopify
Anyone selling products needs more than an ad — they need a store that actually takes the order. We use Shopify for this, because payment, shipping and legal texts are already handled there and nothing hangs on a home-made checkout that eventually nobody maintains.
We set up new stores, rebuild existing ones and take over running ones. That includes the part many leave out: preparing product data so Google understands it. Because then your items appear not only in paid ads but also in the free product listings within Google Shopping results.
Build or take over
A new store from scratch or taking over an existing one — including an honest assessment of what should stay and what should not.
Product data & Merchant Center
Titles, descriptions, images and prices in the form Google requires. Faulty product data is the most common reason items are never shown in the first place.
Buying without hurdles
The path from product to order without unnecessary steps. Every additional form field costs you orders — on mobile especially.
Connected to your processes
Orders into your accounting, stock levels from your system, shipping labels generated automatically. Precisely the part we most enjoy building anyway.
Work out whether it pays off
The decisive figure in online advertising is not the budget but what an enquiry ends up costing. Move the sliders to match your situation.
The money that goes to Google. Below roughly €300 too little data accumulates to recognise anything at all.
Depends heavily on the sector. Trades and local services often sit at €0.80–2.50, contested fields such as insurance or law considerably higher.
How many visitors call or write? 2–5 % is usual for service businesses; for stores the order rate applies instead.
What is left of a job once materials and working time are paid for — not the invoice total.
Your win rate. Winning every second enquiry puts you at 50 %.
On paper something is left over. The figure is an order of magnitude, not a forecast.
Management fees are not included here — subtract them from the result, otherwise the sum flatters you.
Equally not accounted for: competition, seasonality, the quality of your website and whether you could even take the work on. This calculation does not replace a conversation — it only shows which lever matters most in your case.
And then? Somebody has to handle the enquiry
Advertising creates enquiries. Enquiries create work. If thirty forms sit in the inbox by the evening and nobody gets round to answering them, you paid dearly for attention that led nowhere — an enquiry left unanswered for two days makes you unpopular faster than no advertising at all.
This is exactly where the rest of our work comes together: the enquiry from the ad flows straight into a process that files it, adds the details needed and prepares a draft reply. How far that can go is shown by our own agent system Operator One, which takes tenders all the way to a finished quote — with human approval before anything is sent.
You do not have to order this from the start. But it is the reason advertising does not stand on its own with us: we build the processes behind it anyway, and getting both from one provider spares you the ping-pong of responsibility between agency and IT.
What Google Ads cannot do
This part is missing from most proposals. It matters to us, because disappointed expectations cost more than an honest answer up front.
✕ Create demand
Ads capture existing demand. If nobody searches for what you offer, even the best ad finds no one. That can be checked beforehand — and if it is the case, we say so before you spend money.
✕ Rescue a weak website
The click brings people to your site. What happens next is down to the site. If it loads slowly, is unusable on mobile or names no price range, you are paying for visitors who leave again straight away.
✕ Keep getting cheaper forever
At the start there is a lot to improve, because a lot is wrong. After that it gets harder: you are bidding against competitors doing the same. Anyone promising further halvings after the second year is selling you a story.
✕ Look after itself
An unattended account drifts: search terms shift, competitors change bids, Google's automatic recommendations activate themselves unasked. Without a regular look you will be paying for clicks you never wanted within a few months.
How this runs with us
Initial consultation and check
Free, 30 to 45 minutes. We check whether anyone searches for what you offer at all and roughly what a click costs in your field. If advertising will not pay off for you, you find out here — not three months later.
Set up measurement
Tag manager, conversions, consent banner, privacy policy. Only once measurement is demonstrably working do we go further.
Build campaigns and launch
Structure, ad copy, search terms and exclusion lists. We deliberately launch on a small budget — the first weeks are for learning, not scaling.
Sharpen up
We see which search terms genuinely produce enquiries, exclude the expensive duds and shift budget towards what works. This is where the biggest gains sit.
Management with a report
One page a month with the numbers that matter. No maintenance contract with a minimum term — you can stop at any time, and the account, store and data are yours regardless.
Is this right for you?
Advertising is worth it for you if several of these sentences apply:
- “We have spare capacity and would like it filled.”
- “We do not know whether our current advertising achieves anything.”
- “A new customer is worth several hundred euros to us.”
- “We have a store, but hardly any orders come through it.”
- “There is an Ads account running that nobody has looked at for months.”
If, on the other hand, you are booked out anyway or nobody searches for what you offer, your money is better spent on the foundations of your website or on automated processes. The free initial consultation exists precisely to settle that beforehand. How a project runs with us afterwards is described under Process.
// FAQ
Common questions about advertising and stores
Two items: the advertising budget that goes straight to Google, and the management. You set the budget and can change it at any time. Below roughly 300 euros a month the effort rarely pays off, because too little data accumulates to recognise anything at all. Setup comes at a fixed price, ongoing management at a fixed monthly fee with no percentage cut of your budget.
The first clicks arrive on the day the campaign goes live. It becomes meaningful after roughly four to six weeks, because before that there is too little data to judge search terms and ads sensibly. That is the big difference to SEO: ads work immediately, but they also stop working immediately once you switch the budget off.
Conversion tracking measures what happens after the click: a phone call, a form, a booking, a purchase. Without it you only know how many clicks you bought, not which of them achieved anything. Google then steers the campaign blind. That is why we set it up before the first ad goes live — we do not run a campaign without tracking.
Yes, when it is set up properly. You need a consent banner that makes declining as easy as accepting, the technical transfer of that decision to Google via what is called consent mode, and an honest paragraph in your privacy policy. Without consent, no personal data is transmitted. We set this up alongside and document what is being measured.
Yes, and that is the more common case. We review the existing account or store first and tell you what we find — including when it is uncomfortable. You remain the owner of the account, the store and the data throughout. We work with access permissions, not with your passwords, and you can revoke them at any time.
No. If nobody searches for what you offer, the ad will not find anyone. If your margin is too small for the click price, you lose money. And if you are booked out anyway, you are buying enquiries you then have to turn down. We check this before quoting and tell you openly when your money would achieve more elsewhere.