PPC management services for a platform that now pulls most of the levers itself
Google decides your keyword matching, writes your ad variants and adjusts your landing page targeting. Campaigns using Dynamic Search Ads and campaign-level broad match are being upgraded automatically, whether or not anyone opted in. What remains under your control is now the whole job.
Structure, negatives, exclusions and bids set against margin. Flat fee, never a percentage of your ad spend.
What are PPC management services?
PPC management services cover running paid search and shopping campaigns as a system: account and campaign structure, negative keyword discipline, brand and URL exclusions, bids and budgets set against product or lead margin, landing page alignment, conversion tracking that measures the right thing, and reporting that ties spend to profit rather than to clicks.
The discipline changed considerably in 2026 and a lot of published advice has not caught up.
Choosing keywords used to be most of the work. It is now largely automated, and constraining the automation well is what separates accounts that make money from accounts that spend it efficiently on the wrong people.
What actually changed in Google Ads
Four things, and the first one is happening to accounts whether anybody agreed to it or not.
AI Max reached general availability and upgrades are automatic. Campaigns using Dynamic Search Ads, automatically created assets or the campaign-level broad match setting are being upgraded to AI Max on a schedule. If nobody in your business has been reading the notifications, this is arriving regardless.
It broadens your matching deliberately. Turning it on enables search term matching at ad group level, combining broad match with keywordless targeting drawn from your assets and landing pages. Your ads appear on queries nobody ever chose, which is either useful reach or expensive noise depending entirely on your negatives.
AI Max is not Performance Max, and the difference matters. This is the most common misconception we hear. AI Max keeps full search terms transparency, keyword-level control and familiar Search campaign reporting. You can still see what you paid for and still exclude it. Treating it like a black box means leaving the controls you do have switched off.
New controls arrived alongside it. Brand exclusions and URL restrictions were not available in the initial rollout and are now. Combined with negatives, these are the levers that decide where automated spend lands, and most accounts are not using them because they were not there when the account was set up.
Google revises this frequently, so verify current behaviour in your own account before restructuring anything. The direction of travel is settled though: less manual targeting, more constraint setting.
Where the work moved to
Same account, same budget, different job. If your agency is still selling you keyword research as the main deliverable, this is the conversation to have.
| The old job | The job now | |
|---|---|---|
| Targeting | Choosing keywords and match types | Setting the boundaries the machine works inside |
| Ad copy | Writing and testing variants | Feeding good assets and excluding bad generated ones |
| Waste control | Occasional negative keyword review | Continuous, and the single highest value activity in the account |
| Brand protection | Not really available | Brand exclusions, actively maintained |
| Landing pages | Pointing ads at a chosen page | URL restrictions, because targeting adjusts dynamically |
| Bidding | Manual adjustments | Targets set from margin, then left alone long enough to learn |
| Reporting | Clicks, impressions, CTR | Profit contribution per campaign after cost of goods |
The waste control row is where most accounts have the largest gap. Automated matching without disciplined negatives is simply a faster way to buy irrelevant clicks.
What our PPC management services cover
Structure and constraint first. Those two decide where automated spend lands, and everything else is refinement.
Account and campaign structure
Grouped so reporting means something: brand separate from generic, high margin separate from low, so a single blended number cannot hide a losing segment.
Negative keyword discipline
Reviewed continuously rather than quarterly. With broadened matching this is the highest value recurring activity in the account by a wide margin.
Brand and URL exclusions
The newer controls, actively maintained. Most accounts have them switched off simply because they did not exist when the account was built.
Bids and targets from margin
Derived from what a sale or a lead is actually worth after costs, rather than from a target that sounded reasonable in a meeting.
Conversion tracking
Measuring the thing that makes money rather than the thing that is easy to fire. Bad tracking makes automated bidding optimise confidently in the wrong direction.
Assets and creative input
Since copy is generated from what you supply, the quality of your assets and landing pages is now an input to the ads rather than separate from them.
Shopping feed quality
Titles, attributes and product data, which decide Shopping visibility far more than bids do. A neglected feed caps everything downstream of it.
Search terms review
AI Max keeps full search terms transparency, so this remains possible and remains essential. It is where you find both waste and unexpected demand.
Profit reporting
Spend against contribution after cost of goods, per campaign. Return on ad spend flatters accounts that sell cheap things at volume.
Before committing a budget, our Google Ads budget calculator will give you a sensible starting figure based on your own numbers rather than on what a competitor is rumoured to spend.
The individual parts of paid media
Most clients want the account run. Some arrive with one specific job.
Google Ads management
Search, Performance Max and AI Max campaigns run against margin, with the constraint settings that decide where automated spend actually goes.
See Google Ads →Google Shopping Ads
Feed quality, product titles and attributes, where the data decides visibility far more directly than the bid does.
See Shopping Ads →PPC audit
A one off review of structure, waste, tracking and margin alignment, delivered as findings you can hand to anyone, including your current agency.
See PPC audit →How the account gets run
Find out what a conversion is worth
Margin after cost of goods, or genuine value per lead including close rate. Every bid decision descends from this number and a surprising share of accounts have never established it.
Fix tracking before touching spend
Automated bidding optimises towards whatever you tell it to. Bad conversion tracking does not produce random results, it produces confident results in the wrong direction.
Restructure and constrain
Campaigns separated so segments are visible, negatives applied properly, brand and URL exclusions configured. This is where automated spend gets pointed at the right people.
Review search terms, weekly
Waste out, unexpected demand in. With broadened matching this is no longer a monthly tidy-up, it is the core recurring work of the account.
One discipline worth naming: automated bidding needs stability to learn. Constant tinkering with targets is a common way to keep an account permanently in a learning phase and permanently underperforming.
What we will tell you before taking the budget
Paid media is the easiest service to sell and the easiest to waste, so here is where we would push back.
PPC cannot fix bad unit economics. If the margin does not support a click price in your market, no structure, bidding strategy or agency rescues that. Volume makes it worse rather than better, and finding that out slowly is expensive.
It amplifies your landing page, it does not improve it. Paying to send people to a page that does not convert produces a more expensive version of the same outcome. Frequently the first honest recommendation is to spend a fraction of the budget on the page instead.
Small budgets and broad automation are a poor combination. Broadened matching needs enough volume to learn from. Below a certain spend, tight manual targeting on a narrow set of high intent terms often beats letting the system explore on your money.
And we do not charge a percentage of ad spend. It pays an agency more for spending more of your money, which is precisely the wrong incentive when the first improvement in most accounts is spending less of it.
How much do PPC management services cost?
A flat monthly fee, set by the work the account needs rather than by how much you spend through it.
PPC audit
Structure, wasted spend, tracking accuracy and whether bids match your margins, with a prioritised list. Yours to act on with or without us.
Rebuild project
Restructure, negatives, exclusions, tracking and feed work. A one off, scoped after the audit and priced before it starts.
Ongoing management
Weekly search terms work, budget and target management, and monthly profit reporting. Flat fee, cancellable, and we will say if your spend is too small to justify it.
Judge the work on profit contribution and on wasted spend removed. Return on ad spend is easy to improve by simply advertising less to people who were going to buy anyway.
Paid alongside the rest of the marketing
SEO services
Paid buys visibility while you have budget. Organic keeps it after you stop. Most businesses need both and over-invest in whichever they started with.
See SEO services →Amazon PPC management
Marketplace advertising, where the metric that matters is TACoS rather than ACoS and the rules are entirely different from Google.
See Amazon PPC →Landing page development
Where the click lands decides whether the spend was worth it. Fixing the page is frequently cheaper than raising the budget.
See landing pages →Common questions about PPC management
It is a campaign-level setting that lets Google broaden keyword matching, generate ad headlines and descriptions from your assets, and adjust landing page targeting on intent signals. It reached general availability in 2026, and campaigns using Dynamic Search Ads, automatically created assets or campaign-level broad match are being upgraded to it automatically. So for many accounts it is arriving whether or not anyone chose it.
No, and this is the most common misunderstanding we hear. AI Max keeps full search terms transparency, keyword-level control and familiar Search campaign reporting. Performance Max is considerably more opaque. Treating AI Max as a black box means leaving controls switched off that you actually still have, which is the worst of both approaches.
The constraints, and they now carry the account. Negative keywords, brand exclusions, URL restrictions, campaign structure, conversion tracking accuracy and the bid targets derived from your margin. Automated matching without disciplined negatives is simply a faster way to buy irrelevant clicks, so the work moved rather than disappeared.
Enough for the system to learn from, and never more than your margin supports. Start from what a conversion is genuinely worth after cost of goods rather than from a figure a competitor is rumoured to spend. Below a certain budget, tight targeting on a narrow set of high intent terms usually beats letting automation explore on your money.
Usually because the metric is flattering you. Return on ad spend ignores cost of goods, so a campaign selling low margin products at volume can look excellent and contribute almost nothing. It also credits sales that would have happened anyway, particularly on branded terms. Profit contribution per campaign is the number worth reporting.
Faster than SEO and slower than people expect, because automated bidding needs a stable period to learn. Constant adjustment of targets is one of the most common ways to keep an account permanently in a learning phase. Expect a few weeks before performance data means anything, and resist the urge to intervene daily during it.
No, a flat monthly fee. A percentage pays us more for spending more of your money, which is exactly the wrong incentive given that the first improvement in most accounts we audit is removing waste rather than adding budget. We would rather the fee be unaffected by that recommendation.
Find out where your ad budget is actually going
We will review your structure, your search terms for waste, whether your tracking measures the right thing, and whether your bids match your margins. On most accounts there is spend to remove before anything else changes. You get the findings either way. No obligation, no sales pitch.
Get my free PPC audit- Wasted spend
- Tracking accuracy
- Bids against margin