r/smallbusinessuk
u/Antoniorobertov · July 2026
How to find a genuinely good marketing company?!
I want a company to run marketing ads but I'm finding so many companies charge insane amounts and deliver almost nothing.
A Google Ads agency where every pound is visible.
Two names for one thing: a Google Ads agency in London, and a PPC agency east London small businesses can audit line by line. Your budget goes to Google on your card, in an account registered to you.
- The fee
- from £195 a month
- The spend
- yours, £500+ a month, direct to Google
Google Ads management
Scroll down for the full page
The companies and local authorities who trust us
Business and IP Centre London, Rice 'n' Spice, The British Library, Altar Construction, Enfield Council, SRK Delight Juicing, Waltham Forest Council, Highams Park Hub, London Sewing Courses
Heard on Reddit
Where the last £800 went
These are real problems that founders are facing, which we don't think should be things anymore. Scroll down to see how.
r/smallbusinessuk
u/bacon_cake · February 2026
How do I get started with online advertising with a small budget?
We have a small amount of organic traffic these days but we desperately need to run ad campaigns, but I'm terrified of agency costs eating into our budget, and possibly even exceeding it.
r/smallbusinessuk
u/Fair_Chance5083 · February 2026
Ecommerce store doing £9k in 6.5 months, but I think ads are holding me back. What would you do?
From the data, I feel like the product itself works, when people land on the site, they buy. My concern is that growth is limited by my ability to scale paid ads effectively.
every pound visible
What a PPC agency east London does, and what it charges for
Two lines, always. What we charge for looking after the account, and what Google charges to your card. They are never added together and never blurred. The question worth putting to any PPC company is which of the two a quoted figure covers.
The fee
A flat monthly figure, printed below, banded on account structure rather than on your spend. A percentage would make us richer the more you spend, which is the wrong incentive, and spend is a poor measure of the work anyway: a tightly built £500 a month account can carry more labour than a broad £10,000 one.
The spend
Yours, paid direct to Google, never routed through us and never marked up. What we suggest is £500 a month or more, even at the entry band, because below that a campaign never gets enough clicks in a week to tell you which ones were the good ones.
The account
Yours, and you can open it yourself and give us access, or we open it for you. Whichever way round, you hold it with admin access from the first day, and if the relationship ends the account and its history stay with you. A year of conversion data is worth more than most people realise.
The results
What ran, what it cost and what came back, with the fee and the spend on separate lines. Search terms are read weekly, because waiting a month to notice a campaign is buying the wrong searches is four weeks of paying for them.
The delivery
How a month of paid search runs
Where the fee goes, week by week. None of it is mysterious, and none of it is commission.
Week one
The account, examined
Search terms, match types, negatives and tracking are read before anything changes. Most wasted spend hides in what an account is already doing quietly, and finding it is cheaper than outbidding it.
- Search terms read line by line
- Tracking checked before spend moves
- Wasted spend named, in pounds
Week one
Research shared with search
The same keyword research that steers organic steers the ads: what buyers actually type, priced against what a click costs. One piece of research, two channels paying for it once.
- Volumes priced, not estimated
- Buyer intent checked per term
- Shared with the organic work
Week two
Campaigns live
Tightly themed ad groups, ads written to the searches they answer, and budgets split so a test cannot quietly eat the month. Your spend goes to Google directly; our fee is the fee.
- Ad groups themed tightly
- Spend paid direct to the platform
- Budgets capped per campaign
Every week
Negatives and bids
Search term data is read weekly. The searches that waste money get blocked, the ones that convert get more of the budget, and the ads themselves get rewritten where the numbers say they should.
- Negative keywords added weekly
- Bids follow the converting terms
- Ads rewritten, not left to age
Every month
The numbers, plainly
What an enquiry cost this month sits beside what it cost last month, and the account changes where the numbers point. If the honest answer is that a channel is not paying for itself, you hear that too.
- Cost per enquiry, not clicks
- Read in short windows
- Honest calls, including stop
The work
Recent work
Real clients, shown as they are, with outcomes only where they can be cited. Drag through, or open one.
The prices
What a PPC management agency London fee covers
What a Google Ads agency charges, printed. Ad spend is always separate and paid direct to the platform. We suggest £500 a month or more at the entry band, and it rises with the tier. Every account is run by a Google Ads specialist you can actually talk to.
Ads Starter£195/month
One campaign, built and pruned weekly. For a business testing whether paid search works at all.
- One campaign, managed weekly
- Search terms reviewed
- A written plan for every month
- No setup fee, and no percentage of spend
Your ad spend: £500 to £1,000/mo suggested, paid direct to Google.
EnquireAds Growth£375/month
More campaigns and ad groups to look after, which is what the band actually follows.
- More campaigns, more iterations
- Landing page advice included
- Conversion tracking in your own account
- Fee and spend reported apart, every month
Your ad spend: £500 to £5,000/mo suggested, paid direct to Google.
Get startedAds Scale£595+/month
A full account, scoped by structure rather than by budget, for a market that is already being worked.
- Full-account management
- Weekly working cadence
- Shopping and remarketing where they fit
- Landing pages quoted as their own line
Your ad spend: £2,000 to £15,000/mo suggested, paid direct to Google.
EnquireCharities, nonprofits and community projects can have this work free. Here is what that covers.
Could you hire someone, or outsource it?
A hire costs a salary before pension, software and cover. An outsourced freelancer is cheaper by the hour, and the brief, the judgement and the joining up all stay with you. A plan is one figure, and everything on it comes included.
A junior marketing hire
£30,201
- Salary, before everything below it
- Pension on top, about £719 a year at the statutory minimum
- One skill set, learning on your time
- Holiday, sickness and notice periods
- Recruitment fees and ramp-up time
Average UK marketing executive salary, from 6,200 reported salaries. Indeed, August 2026. Pension at the statutory 3% employer minimum on qualifying earnings, The Pensions Regulator, 2026 to 2027.
An outsourced freelancer
$15 to $45 an hour
about £11 to £33 an hour in sterling
- Genuinely cheaper by the hour
- You write the brief, and you check the work
- One task at a time, in one discipline
- A different time zone, and no cover if they move on
Typical hourly range for digital marketers on Upwork, from historical contracts worldwide. Upwork, checked August 2026. Converted at $1.3466 to £1, the Bank of England spot rate for 6 August 2026. A rate that moves is part of what a dollar-priced hour costs a UK buyer.
A pomegranate plan
from £195 /month
- Google Ads
- Search terms
- Conversion tracking
- Landing page advice
- Senior work from the first month
- Everything explained in plain English
- No recruitment, no notice period
- Scales up or down month by month
Who does the work
One person and a set of AI agents, and honesty about which does what. It is also the answer to how the pricing stays where it is.
The writing and the code
Claude Code, an AI coding agent, writes the pages, the copy and the changes, and ships them. Every line is read and signed off by a person before it goes live.
The pictures
Images come from gpt image 2, called by Claude Code. Words in pictures are typeset separately in real fonts, so an image model never writes the words.
The research
Research fans out across many opencode subagents reading search data, forums and competitors at once. The reading is delegated; every judgement stays human.
Karim scopes the work, reviews it and signs off everything that ships, from a studio in Walthamstow. The tools do the volume, a person does the judgement, and some of these worlds we are stepping into ourselves.
- £17.9bn
- Spent on UK search ads in 2025; competing needs care, not scale
- Source: IAB UK Digital Adspend, 2025
- 0%
- Of your spend taken as commission
- £500
- The monthly spend we suggest, entry band included
A written audit, free
Where you stand, what is holding you back, and what a sensible month of work looks like. In writing, within a working day, and no call required.
The process
How working together runs
The tracking
Week one
Conversions defined before the first pound is spent, so the account is judged on enquiries, not clicks.
The build
Weeks one and two
Structure, match types chosen deliberately, negatives from day one, and the landing page checked first.
The pruning
Weekly
Search terms read weekly, not monthly. Waste blocked, winners promoted, budget moved to what returns.
The review
Month end
What ran, what it cost, what came back. Our fee and your spend, always two lines.
When a PPC company is not what you need
- Your budget is under £250 a month. The account cannot gather enough data to be worth managing, and we would rather say so than take the fee.
- Nobody searches for what you sell. Some products have no demand to buy, and the honest answer there is a different channel.
- You want a percentage-of-spend arrangement, or a promised return. Plenty of agencies work the first way, nobody can honestly sell the second, and this is not the place for either.
Plain English for the jargon
Plain English over industry speak, always. These are the technical terms this page could not avoid.
- PPC
- Pay per click. The model Google Ads runs on: the listing is free to show and you pay only when somebody clicks it.
- Search terms
- What people actually typed, as opposed to your keywords. The gap between the two is where most money is lost.
- Match types
- How loosely Google is allowed to interpret a keyword. Broad match is the loosest and the most expensive to leave unattended.
- Negative keywords
- Searches you refuse to pay for. The single cheapest improvement in most accounts.
- Quality score
- Google's estimate of how relevant your ad and page are. Higher scores lower what you pay for the same position.
- Conversion tracking
- The setup that records what happened after a click. Without it, everything above is guesswork.
fee and spendnever blurred
Straight answers
How much of what I pay you is your fee, and how much is ad spend?
All of what you pay us is the fee. The ad spend never reaches us: it goes to Google on your card, in your own account, where you can see it. The fee is a flat monthly figure, printed on this page and banded on how the account is structured rather than on what you spend. It is never marked up and never blended, and every month's review reports the two on separate lines.
So what decides what one click costs me?
An auction that runs again for every search, rather than a price list. Your bid is one of six things Google names as deciding where an ad shows and what it costs, and the quality of the ad and the page it lands on are two of the others, which is why a bigger budget does not automatically win.
Why not a percentage of spend?
Because it makes us richer when you spend more, which is the wrong incentive, and because spend is unrelated to how much work an account actually takes. A tightly built £500 a month account can carry more labour than a broad £10,000 one, so the fee follows the structure instead. Plenty of agencies work the other way and it is a perfectly normal arrangement; it is simply not the one sold here.
Who holds the Google Ads account?
You do, with admin access from day one, and the account and its history stay with you if you leave. Opening it is your call: set it up yourself and add our manager account, or ask us to set it up for you. Conversion tracking is set up inside your own account too, so a year of conversion data stays where it belongs, and it is worth more than most people realise.
Does it matter that you are not down the road?
Not for the work, which happens inside your account and can be read from anywhere. It matters for the conversation, and the studio is in Walthamstow, so if a PPC agency near me is what you searched for, meeting in person is possible where that helps. The monthly review is the same either way: what ran, what it cost and what came back, with our fee and your spend on two lines.
Is there a setup fee?
No. The first month's fee covers the build as well as the management: conversion tracking defined before the first pound is spent, then the structure, the match types, the negatives and a look at the page the campaign points at. Nothing about that is invoiced twice. The one thing quoted separately is building a landing page; checking the one you already have is part of the build.
I am also considering SEO. Do I need both?
Probably not to start with. Every SEO plan runs a Google Ads campaign from week one, so if search is the whole picture, start there. Buy this page's service when paid search is the strategy in its own right, when the account is large or complex, or when you want the ads managed and nothing else.
My ads did not pay for themselves last time. Why would this be different?
Often that is a margin question rather than an advertising one. Many businesses break even on a first sale and earn on what follows, so an account is judged on the pipeline it feeds rather than on the first invoice. Where it is an advertising problem, it is usually the same one: search terms read monthly rather than weekly, so a campaign buys the wrong searches for four weeks before anybody notices. Here they are read weekly.
How quickly will it work?
Traffic arrives the day it goes live. Whether it converts depends on the page it lands on and how long the testing phase needs, and we will not put a date on that. What happens in the meantime is visible: conversions are defined in week one, so the account is judged on enquiries rather than clicks, and the search terms are read weekly from the start. Nobody can honestly sell you a promised return.
What this usually sits next to
Most engagements here turn out to be more than one of the six. These are the three that come up alongside this one most often, and why.
SEO
Ads stop the day the budget does. Search work is the half that keeps earning afterwards.
Web design & development
A campaign is only as good as the page it points at, and most wasted spend is a landing page problem.
GEO
Buyers who ask an assistant instead of searching never see the ad at all.
Or take it as one plan
This is one of six services, and most months it is not the only one running. Our digital marketing plans bundle the matching tier of each, at 16% under buying them apart, on the same no-notice terms.
What happens next
You send the form. Within one working day a written reply arrives, from a person.
A short audit follows, in plain English, with the price of fixing what it finds.
If it reads right, work starts inside a week. If not, keep the audit.