Where the budget goes
Most wasted spend is visible in one report.
Nearly every underperforming account we open fails in the same three places, and none of them needs a clever strategy to fix.
Nobody has read the search terms
The search terms report shows what people actually typed before your ad appeared, and in most accounts nobody has looked at it for months. Broad match with a thin negative list spends a surprising share of the budget on queries that were never going to buy — job seekers, DIY researchers, a competitor's brand name. Any PPC agency Australia advertisers hire should start there, because the first month of competent management is mostly subtraction.
The account is optimised for the wrong number
Clicks, conversions and click-through rate are all easy to raise and none of them is profit. An account run to maximise conversions will buy cheap, worthless ones, including your own brand name, which you would have won for free. The number that matters is cost per acquisition against margin, with brand and non-brand reported separately so the figures do not flatter themselves.
Tracking measures a page view, not a sale
Conversion tracking that fires on a thank-you page load, or twice per order, or not at all since the last site update, quietly invalidates every decision made on top of it. Checking that the conversion is real — and ideally that purchase value reaches Google from the server as well as the browser — comes before any question about bids or creative.
What we can show you, and what we cannot
Two Australian advertisers use us for Google Ads: AVW, where paid search sits alongside search and site maintenance, and Asim MotoGear. We are not publishing figures for either yet. When we do, they will be read from the accounts, with the date range stated — not rounded up into a headline. A Google Ads agency Australia businesses can trust should be able to show you an unedited screenshot of an account with its name and dates visible. Ask every agency you are considering for one.
What you can check on day one
The structure. Your account is in your company's name, billed to your card in Australian dollars, so media spend goes to Google directly and never passes through our invoice — we cannot mark it up, and you can see exactly what was spent without asking us. You keep the account and its history when the engagement ends. Reporting comes out of your own account, not a dashboard only we can log into.
The timezone, honestly
Our working day starts at 2pm on the east coast (3pm in Sydney and Melbourne under daylight saving), so a campaign misconfigured at 9am runs for hours before anyone here sees it. For account management that matters less than it sounds — good decisions are made on days of data, not on this morning — but for a launch or a sale it matters a lot. So we set daily budget caps and automated alerts before anything goes live, and launches are scheduled into the overlap rather than first thing.
The first fortnight
Read the search terms and build the negative list that should already exist. Separate brand from non-brand. Verify that conversion tracking measures revenue. Check location targeting — accounts meant for Australia frequently show ads to anyone merely interested in Australia, which is a default setting and an expensive one. None of this is clever, and all of it comes before any conversation about scaling.
How it runs
You see the waste at step one.
Free account teardown
Read access is enough. Inside 48 hours: wasted spend, what the search terms say, and whether tracking can be trusted.
Structure and tracking first
Negatives, brand separation, location settings and conversion tracking that measures revenue.
Run against cost per acquisition
Reported monthly from your own account, with brand and non-brand separated.
Say so when it is not working
Recommending you pause or cut budget is a legitimate outcome, and we will put it in writing.
Money
How we charge — and how we do not.
Monthly management
A flat monthly fee in Australian dollars, scoped after the free teardown. Media spend is paid to Google directly from your account.
- ✓Cancel with notice
- ✓Account in your name
- ✓Spend visible to you at all times
Audit and fix, one-off
For teams that run their own account and need the structure corrected. Fixed scope, ends when delivered.
- ✓Search terms cleaned
- ✓Tracking verified
- ✓Written handover
Not offered: percentage of spend
A percentage of media budget pays an agency more when you spend more, which is a conflict at exactly the moment you need advice about spending less.
- ✓No markup on media
- ✓No incentive to scale badly
- ✓Fee independent of budget
No rate card, in any currency. One written scope and one price, agreed before anyone starts.
FAQ
Straight answers.
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