Pay Per Click
PPC Management Planned Alongside Your SEO
Paid search should bring in sales you wouldn’t have made for free. We plan PPC management alongside your SEO and test what your ads actually add before you scale them. We deliver sales, not just rankings.
What Is PPC Management?
PPC management is the ongoing work of running paid search campaigns so they make money. PPC stands for pay-per-click, the model where you pay each time someone clicks your ad, usually in Google Ads. The levers are cost per click, Quality Score (Google’s rating of how relevant your ad and landing page are), conversion tracking (the code that records which clicks became sales or calls) and ROAS, or return on ad spend. Managed badly, spend runs ahead of revenue. Nobody notices until the month closes.
The lever most accounts skip is incrementality, the share of ad-driven sales you would have lost without the ad. Dashboards rarely show it. We work from Brea, in north Orange County, with ecommerce brands and local service businesses.
PPC Works Best Alongside SEO
PPC works best alongside SEO because the two compete for the same clicks. If you already rank first in the free results, some ad clicks are customers who would have clicked your organic listing anyway. In 390 ad-pause studies run in 2011, Google’s own researchers (2012) put that overlap at half when the advertiser held the top organic result. Google sells the ads. Its number still says half.
eBay’s tests, written up in an NBER working paper (2014), show how far off normal reporting can be. In 2012 eBay stopped non-brand bidding in roughly 30% of U.S. designated market areas (regional media markets) for 60 days. The effect on sales was very small and not statistically significant. Standard non-experimental estimates had put eBay’s short-term return on paid search above 4,100%. The experiment said negative 63%.
So we test first. A dashboard credits the ad with every sale that follows a click. A holdout test, where ads pause in some regions and keep running in others, shows how many of those sales the ad caused. We run it before anyone scales brand spend.
When to Bid on Your Own Brand Name
Bid on your own brand name when competitors bid on it. In Bing experiments across thousands of brands, run in January 2014 and published in Marketing Science (2018), competitors captured 18% to 42% of the clicks on a brand’s searches when that brand didn’t advertise (18% with one competitor in the top slot, 42% with four). With no competitors present, the brand’s own ad lifted total clicks by just 1% to 4%. When eBay switched off its brand-name ads in a 2012 test, 99.5% of the paid clicks it gave up came back through organic search (NBER, 2014). The rule is conditional. If rivals bid on your name, defend it. If they don’t, test switching brand ads off in some regions first.
Why Paid Search Needs an Organic Floor
Paid search needs an organic floor because ads work better for businesses people already find on their own, and clicks may keep getting pricier. In U.S. v. Google, plaintiffs’ expert economist Michael Whinston testified that the cost per click of Google text ads doubled between 2013 and 2021. The court’s 2024 opinion records that as his testimony, not as its own finding. Treat it as one side’s evidence.
The second reason is better documented. In a randomized experiment run on Yelp in 2015 (NBER, 2023), ads lifted customer leads about 4.6 times as much for restaurants in the top 10% of pre-experiment organic traffic as for those in the bottom quarter. Ads did the most where organic was already strong. So we build the organic side first, or at the same time.
PPC Problems We Solve
The PPC problems we fix are the ones that make an account look profitable when it may not be. Recognize yours here.
Your dashboard shows a strong ROAS, but nobody can say how many of those sales would have come anyway
You pay for clicks on your own brand name and have never tested switching them off
Competitors bid on your brand name and you don’t know how many clicks they take
Conversion tracking counts page views, duplicate calls, or nothing at all
Cost per click keeps rising while your organic traffic stays flat
Paid and organic are run by different people who never compare notes
How Our PPC Management Works
Our PPC management runs in a fixed order: audit, test, build, report. Audit always comes first. Each step uses what the one before it found.
Audit
You see which campaigns bring in new sales and which pay for clicks you’d get free. We check structure, search terms and tracking against where you already rank.
Test
You learn what your ads add. We pause a campaign in some regions, keep it running in others, and compare sales. Same design eBay’s economists used.
Build
Budget goes where an ad adds something: searches you don’t rank for, rivals on your name, high-margin products. Tight keyword groups, negative keywords that block irrelevant searches, matching landing pages.
Report
Each month you see spend, changes, and the calls, booked jobs or revenue they produced. If a dollar didn’t earn its keep, the report says so.
What’s Included
Every PPC engagement includes all of these.
Account and Tracking Audit
Where spend leaks, starting with tracking you can trust.
Brand vs Non-Brand Split
Brand campaigns reported separately, so they can’t inflate ROAS.
Incrementality Tests
Regional holdouts that show what an ad adds.
Structure and Negatives
Budget on searches that convert, leaks blocked.
Paid and Organic Overlap Map
Bids go where your free ranking doesn’t reach.
Monthly Report in Sales
Spend tied to calls, booked jobs or revenue.
PPC for HVAC: Price Every Channel Per Booked Job
PPC for an HVAC company starts with knowing what each channel actually sells you. An HVAC owner thinks he’s buying leads. On Google Ads he buys clicks. On Angi he buys a name that’s also sold to competitors. On Local Services Ads (Google’s pay-per-lead ads) he buys the lead. On his Google Business Profile he buys nothing at all. So we price every channel against one unit, a booked job.
What Happened When a Paid-Reliant Brand’s Ads Went Dark
When the brand’s Google Ads account went down for about three days, sales fell far less than in past outages. The brand credits its organic cushion.
An 8-9 figure pet brand came to us almost entirely reliant on paid media. Its fractional CMO says the paid channels worked, but the cost of ad impressions and clicks kept climbing. We didn’t run those ads. We built the organic channel underneath them. Ten months in, he told us on camera: “Our monthly organic revenue went from about 850K a month to a little over 1.3 million a month.” Those are his unaudited figures, and he says the organic gain was measured separately from paid.
The outage came after the engagement started. “The drop that we experienced in those three days was significantly less than the drops we’ve experienced in prior years when our Google Ads account went down,” he said. His summary of paid search: “Like, it’s a spigot that you turn on and off that you have to keep pumping dollars into to get dollars out of. SEO is different, right?”
PPC Management FAQ
How is PPC different from SEO?
PPC buys a spot at the top of Google’s results as soon as your ads go live, and the spot disappears when you stop paying. SEO earns placement over months and keeps it without a per-click cost. The two also overlap. Google’s own 2012 study found only about half of ad clicks were new when the advertiser already held the top organic result. Where you rank should decide where you bid.
Should we bid on our own brand name?
Bid on your own brand name when competitors bid on it, and test it when they don’t. In Bing experiments, rivals captured 18% to 42% of the clicks on brand searches when the brand sat out. With no rivals present, brand ads added only 1% to 4% more clicks. eBay kept 99.5% of its brand clicks through organic results after switching brand ads off. Run a holdout before you scale.
How long does PPC take to work?
PPC starts sending clicks within days of launch, once Google approves your ads. Proving profit takes longer. You need enough conversions to compare campaigns, and a holdout test needs enough time to show a real difference between regions. So we agree on a review date with you up front and judge the account on its conversion data.
What counts as a good ROAS?
A good ROAS (return on ad spend, revenue divided by ad cost) is any figure above your breakeven, and breakeven is 1 divided by your gross margin, before other costs. At a 60% margin you break even near 1.7 to 1. At a 20% margin you need 5 to 1. Then take out the sales you would have made anyway. eBay’s standard estimate showed a 4,100% return. Its controlled test showed a loss.
Who owns our ad accounts and data?
You own your ad accounts and the data in them. Spend stays fully visible to you. You also keep the account and its history if we ever part ways, so nothing you built depends on us.
How much does PPC management cost?
PPC management cost depends on scope: how many campaigns and markets you run, and how much testing the account needs. We cover fees and billing on the free consultation call. Bring your account. You get the number once we have seen it.
Where PPC Fits in Your Growth Plan
PPC fits best as one channel in a plan where SEO carries the searches you can win for free. Here’s where it connects.
- All growth services: everything we offer, on one page.
- SEO services: the organic floor that decides which searches still need an ad.
- E-commerce SEO: product and collection pages that rank without a per-click cost.
- Local SEO: the map pack and your Google Business Profile.
- GEO and AI search optimization: getting named in ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews.
Turn Your Ad Spend Into Profit
A 30-minute call is enough to tell whether your paid search is leaking money. We’ll look at your account, your tracking, and your ROAS together, and you’ll leave with clear next steps either way. Bring your numbers. If you’re comparing PPC agencies, bring the other quotes too and we’ll tell you honestly which scope makes sense for your spend. The office is in Brea, minutes from Fullerton.