Pay-Per-Click Marketing
Pay per click (PPC) advertising puts your business at the top of the results page the day the campaign goes live. Our PPC management services cover Google Ads search, Shopping, Local Services, Performance Max, YouTube and remarketing campaigns for small businesses, with every call and form traced back to the keyword that produced it. Flat management fee fixed up front, ad spend paid to Google from your own account, no contract.
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Example of a search ad and a Local Services ad.
What PPC is
Pay per click (PPC) advertising is buying a position at the top of Google for the searches your customers type, and paying only when someone clicks. Unlike SEO, which earns its position over months, a Google Ads campaign is visible within hours of approval. Unlike a billboard, it is shown only to people who just typed “emergency plumber Fort Collins” or “immigration attorney Houston”, and it reports exactly what each of those clicks cost and what it produced.
That precision is also the trap. Google Ads will happily spend any budget you give it, on any search that loosely matches your keywords, sending people to a homepage that was never built to convert. Most accounts we audit lose between a quarter and half of their spend to irrelevant searches, broad match keywords left on by default, and landing pages that make visitors hunt for a phone number.
aStash is a PPC agency that manages Google Ads the way a careful owner would if they had the time: tight keyword lists with negatives added weekly, landing pages built for the offer, call and form tracking before the first dollar is spent, and a monthly report that shows cost per lead by campaign, not just clicks. The management fee is flat. The ad budget stays in your account, in your name, visible to you at any time.
Ad Formats
Google sells seven kinds of ads. A small business usually needs two or three. The audit decides which, and the rest wait until the numbers justify them.
Search
Text ads above the organic results for searches with buying intent: “garage door repair near me”, “divorce lawyer Denver”, “custom cabinets Fort Collins”. Search is where most service businesses should start, because the person searching has a problem today and is choosing who to call.
We build campaigns by intent, not by product list: emergency searches, comparison searches and brand searches each get their own ads, bids and landing page.
Shopping
Shopping ads show an image, a price and your store name for product searches. They are the first thing a shopper sees for “leather sectional sofa” or “CBD tincture 1000mg”, and they convert because the price is already agreed before the click.
Shopping runs on a product feed, so the work is in the feed: titles, categories, GTINs, images and availability kept clean, then campaigns split by margin so the budget goes to products worth selling.
Local Services
For plumbers, electricians, HVAC, cleaners, lawyers, real estate and a growing list of home and professional services, Google runs a separate ad unit above search ads that shows your name, rating and a Google Guaranteed badge. You pay per lead, not per click, and you can dispute leads that were not real.
We handle the licensing and background-check verification, set the per-lead budget, answer the leads with you and keep the review count climbing, because LSA ranking is driven by responsiveness and reviews, not bids.
Performance Max
Performance Max lets Google place your ads across search, Shopping, YouTube, Display, Gmail and Maps from one campaign, using your conversion data to decide where. It can work well for stores with a clean product feed and plenty of conversions. It can also quietly spend your budget on your own brand name and low-quality placements.
We add it after search and Shopping are stable, with brand exclusions, placement exclusions and asset groups built per product line, and we read the placement reports Google would rather you did not.
Display & YouTube
Display banners and YouTube ads reach people who are not searching yet. On their own they rarely produce a lead for a small business. Paired with remarketing lists and a specific audience, they keep your name in front of the people most likely to buy: past visitors, past customers and the in-market audiences Google builds from search behaviour.
We use them for launches, seasonal pushes and for businesses with a longer decision, such as home remodels, legal matters and B2B services.
Remarketing
Most visitors leave without calling. Remarketing shows those people a follow-up ad over the next days and weeks, across Google and, when it fits, Facebook and Instagram. It is the cheapest conversion in the account, because the audience already knows you.
We sequence it: a reminder first, then proof, then an offer, and we exclude people who already converted so the budget is not wasted on customers.
How We Work
Every account follows the same sequence. What changes is how long each step takes, and the audit tells you that before you commit.
If you already run ads, we read the account: search terms, match types, wasted spend, conversion set-up, landing pages, Quality Scores and what the last twelve months actually cost per lead. If you are new, we research the keywords, the cost per click in your market and the competitors already bidding. Either way you get a written list of what we would change and a projected cost per lead.
Calls, forms, chats and purchases are connected to Google Ads and Google Analytics 4, with call tracking numbers per campaign. The landing page is built or fixed so it loads fast on a phone, states the offer above the fold and has a phone number and a form visible without scrolling. No campaign goes live until a test lead shows up in the report.
Campaigns are structured by intent and service, with tight ad groups, exact and phrase match keywords, negative lists from day one, location targeting drawn around where you actually work, ad schedules that match when you answer the phone, and three ad variants per group so testing starts immediately.
The account goes live with a conservative daily budget and a bid strategy that fits the data available. New accounts start on manual or maximize-clicks bidding and move to target cost-per-action once Google has thirty or more conversions to learn from.
Every week we read the search terms and add negatives, pause ads and keywords that cost more than they return, shift budget to the campaigns producing the cheapest leads, adjust bids by device, location and hour, and listen to a sample of recorded calls to check lead quality.
One report: spend, clicks, leads, cost per lead and cost per sale by campaign, with the changes we made and the plan for next month. We decide together whether to scale, hold or add a format. If the account is not producing, we say so and we change it, or we recommend stopping.
Budget
The right budget is not a round number. It is the arithmetic of your market’s cost per click, the share of clicks that become leads on your page, and what a lead is worth to you. We do this sum in the audit so the budget is a decision, not a guess.
The example is typical of a local service business: a few thousand dollars of monthly spend producing leads at a cost most owners would happily pay twice for.
PPC Management
PPC management is the ongoing work between launch and results: keyword research, bid management, negative keywords, ad copy and split testing, audience targeting, landing pages and reporting. Google will run an unmanaged account for you, and it will spend the budget. A PPC specialist decides where the budget should go, and keeps deciding as the market moves.
Every search triggers an ad auction. Your position, the ad rank, is your bid multiplied by your Quality Score, which is Google’s rating of how relevant your keyword, ad and landing page are to each other. Keyword research is where that starts: the searches with buying intent in your market, grouped tightly so each ad group has one theme, one ad and one page. Negative keywords are the other half: the searches you never want to pay for, added every week from the search-term report.
Bids are adjusted by device, location, hour and audience. Geo-targeting is drawn around where you actually work, not a state. Audience targeting layers in demographic data, in-market segments, remarketing lists and lookalike audiences built from your customer list, so the same keyword costs less for the people most likely to buy. Ad extensions, calls, locations, sitelinks and prices, are added to every ad group because they raise click-through rate at no extra cost.
Three ads per ad group from day one, so split testing starts immediately and the losers are replaced monthly. Display ads and video ads on YouTube are added for brand awareness and remarketing once search is producing. Microsoft Ads, formerly Bing Ads, is added for accounts where a cheaper second auction makes sense, often professional services and B2B. Facebook and Instagram ads come in for ecommerce, events and retargeting. Lead generation is the measure for all of it: every channel is reported in cost per lead, in the same monthly report.
Which Format First
A dentist, an online store and a manufacturer do not need the same campaigns. This is the order the audit usually lands on.
| Campaign type | Local service | Online store | Professional services | B2B / manufacturing |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SearchText ads for buying-intent searches | Core | Add-on | Core | Core |
| Local Services AdsPay-per-lead ads with the Google Guaranteed badge | Core | — | Add-on | — |
| ShoppingProduct ads from your feed | — | Core | — | Later |
| RemarketingFollow-up ads to past visitors | Add-on | Core | Add-on | Add-on |
| Performance MaxGoogle-placed campaigns across every surface | Later | Add-on | Later | Later |
| YouTube and DisplayAwareness and in-market audiences | Later | Add-on | Later | Add-on |
| Social adsFacebook, Instagram and LinkedIn campaigns | Later | Core | Later | Add-on |
Levels are set after the audit and change as the account matures. Every format is run from your own ad account.
Results
Three accounts, three industries, the same method. Each tile names the account and shows the figures behind the headline number.
Case Studies
Screenshots straight from Google Business Profile, Search Console, Ahrefs and Google Ads for aStash clients. No projections, no mock data.
Keywords like “attorney firms near me” and “law offices” were managed for cost efficiency across a $1.65M ad spend, connecting the firm directly with clients ready to call.
Remarketing, Display, YouTube and Performance Max campaigns brought cost per conversion down to $18.32 and delivered several of the best-performing months in the store’s history.
Audience and creative fine-tuning over 97 days lifted engagement across the board while keeping every click under a dollar.
Myths
Most of these come from a bad first experience with an account nobody was watching.
Google Ads is too expensive for a small business.
Unmanaged Google Ads is expensive. A managed account with exact-match keywords, negatives and a real landing page produces leads at a cost most local businesses would pay twice for. The retail account above cut its cost per click from $4 to under $1 with the same budget.
I tried it once and it did not work, so it does not work for my industry.
It did not work for that account, usually because the ads sent clicks to a homepage, broad match was left on and nobody added negatives. Every industry we run has competitors buying leads profitably from the same auction.
The Google rep who calls me is giving me the best advice.
Google’s account representatives are measured on your spend. Their recommendations, broad match, Performance Max for everything, automatically applied changes, raise spend first and results second. We turn auto-apply off on day one.
Once the campaign is set up it runs itself.
An account left alone drifts: Google widens match types, new competitors enter, search behaviour changes, and the landing page ages. The weekly search-term review is where the money is saved.
More clicks means the campaign is working.
Clicks are the cost. Leads and sales are the result. We report cost per lead by campaign, and we listen to calls, because a cheap lead that never buys is not cheap.
If I rank well organically I do not need ads.
Ranking well organically means ads on your own brand are cheap and competitors are bidding on your name. It also means search ads can cover the keywords SEO has not won yet and the budget shifts to organic as rankings arrive.
A bigger budget always means more leads.
Only until you have bought every relevant search in your area. After that extra budget buys worse searches. The audit estimates where that ceiling is for your market, and we tell you when you reach it.
Self-Managed vs. Managed
The platform is the same. The difference is attention, structure and what gets measured.
Free PPC Audit
The audit is free, takes about a week, and becomes the first month’s task list if you go ahead.
Where the budget goes
Across the accounts we take over, the pattern is consistent. Fixing these five things in the first month usually frees a quarter to a half of the budget to buy searches that convert.
None of them require a bigger budget. They require someone to read the account.
Plans
A flat monthly management fee, fixed after the free audit, separate from the ad spend you pay to Google. Change plans any month.
For a business that serves a city or a radius and needs the phone to ring from search and Local Services Ads.
For a business with several services or locations, or a store, that needs more than one format and a landing page per offer.
For stores and companies with longer sales cycles that need awareness, retargeting and nurture joined up and attributed.
The amount of work they put in was impressive. We have received great feedback from the customers about our website and signed up over 500 people. Everything was delivered on time.
Go Deeper
Each page covers one part of the paid work: what is included, how it is tracked and how it is priced.
Pay-per-lead Local Services Ads and radius-targeted search for businesses that serve a city.
Learn more ↗Meta, LinkedIn and TikTok campaigns for retargeting, launches and visual businesses.
Learn more ↗Shopping, Performance Max and dynamic remarketing tied to your product feed.
Learn more ↗SEO and Google Ads run together from one keyword set and one report.
Learn more ↗More leads from the clicks you already pay for.
Learn more ↗Single-goal pages for campaigns, with the tracking to prove the cost per lead.
Learn more ↗Industries
Cost per click, lead value and the right formats differ by industry. These pages explain what works in yours and what the audit looks for.
Near You
Campaigns are managed from Fort Collins for businesses in Colorado, Texas, Washington, Louisiana, Florida and beyond. Location targeting is drawn around wherever you work.
Glossary
Google Ads has its own vocabulary. These are the ones that matter to an owner reading a monthly report.
Written and reviewed by
Kateryna QuinnFounder and CEO, aStash. Forbes Next 1000, NOCO Style 30 Under 30Kateryna founded aStash in Fort Collins in 2017. Her team has managed Google Ads accounts for law firms, retailers, home-service companies and manufacturers across the United States, including a law-firm search account that produced over 21,000 conversions and a retail account that cut its cost per click from $4 to under $1. Every method on this page is one the team runs today, and she reviews it whenever Google changes how campaigns are built, bid or measured.
FAQ
Anything else? (970) 399-9004 reaches a person in Fort Collins, not a call center.
Pay per click (PPC) is paid advertising where you pay each time someone clicks your ad. On Google it means your business appears at the top of the results for searches you choose, and you are charged only when a searcher clicks through to your site. The price per click is set by auction and depends on the keyword, your location and how relevant your ad and page are.
It depends on your market’s cost per click and how many leads you can handle. Most local service campaigns we run work from about $1,000 to $1,500 a month in ad spend. Competitive categories such as legal, HVAC and plastic surgery often need $3,000 or more a month to buy a meaningful share of searches. The audit calculates the number from your cost per click and your target cost per lead, so the budget is a decision rather than a guess.
A flat monthly fee fixed after the free audit, not a percentage of spend. It covers strategy, campaign build, landing pages, tracking set-up, weekly optimization, call review and the monthly report. Ad spend is separate and paid directly to Google from your own account. Because the fee is flat, there is no incentive for us to spend more of your money.
Campaigns go live within seven to ten days of sign-off, once tracking and the landing page are ready. Most accounts see leads in the first week. A stable cost per lead usually arrives by the end of month two, after enough data has come in to tune bids, negatives and ads.
Yes, and it is free. We read your search-term reports, match types, negatives, conversion tracking, landing pages, Quality Scores, location and schedule settings, bid strategy, auto-applied changes and competitor auction data, then give you a written list of what we would change and what it would likely save. If you go ahead, that list becomes the first month’s work.
They do different jobs. Ads produce leads within days and stop the day you stop paying. SEO takes months but the cost per lead falls as rankings compound. Most of our clients run both: ads cover the searches SEO has not won yet, and budget shifts to organic as rankings arrive. If you can only afford one, the audit tells you which gap is bigger.
Not if the campaign is built properly. We draw location targeting around where you actually work, set it to people physically in the area rather than people merely interested in it, and exclude cities you do not serve. We also review the location report monthly, because Google’s defaults are generous.
You do. We build and manage campaigns inside a Google Ads account in your name, with your billing, and you can see every setting and every dollar at any time. If you ever leave aStash, the account, the data and the campaigns stay with you.
Yes. For plumbers, electricians, HVAC, cleaners, lawyers, real estate agents and the other categories Google supports, we handle the verification documents, set the per-lead budget and job types, dispute leads that were not real, and keep the reviews flowing, since reviews and response time drive LSA ranking more than bids.
Yes, where it earns its place. Microsoft Ads reaches the searchers on Bing, Yahoo and DuckDuckGo, usually at a lower cost per click, and it tends to work for professional services, B2B and older demographics. We import the Google campaigns, adjust bids and negatives for the different auction, and report it in the same cost-per-lead report.
PPC management is the weekly work that keeps a paid search account producing: reading search terms and adding negatives, adjusting bids by device, location, hour and audience, testing ad copy and landing pages, managing budgets and reporting cost per lead. An account that nobody manages drifts toward broad searches and higher costs within weeks. If you cannot give the account a few hours every week, you need someone who will.
Yes. Social ads are part of the Growth and Full Funnel plans and can be bought on their own. They work best for ecommerce, events, restaurants, fitness and anything visual, and for retargeting people who visited from Google. For a plumber or a law firm, search almost always produces cheaper leads, so we start there.
By leads and sales, not clicks. Every campaign is connected to call tracking, form tracking and, for stores, purchase tracking in Google Analytics 4. The monthly report shows spend, leads, cost per lead and cost per sale by campaign, with the calls listed so you can judge lead quality yourself.
Remarketing shows follow-up ads to people who visited your site but did not call or buy, across Google, YouTube and social platforms. It is usually the cheapest conversion in the account because the audience already knows you. We add it in the first month for stores and in month two or three for service businesses, once the search campaigns are producing visitors worth following.
Yes. There is no contract. You can pause the campaigns for a slow season or cancel the management fee any month. The ad account, the campaigns and the data stay with you.
Yes. aStash is based in Fort Collins and serves Northern Colorado and Denver in person, and manages Google Ads for clients in Texas, Washington, Louisiana, Florida and across the United States. Location targeting is drawn around wherever you work, and the auction works the same everywhere. What changes is the cost per click, which the audit measures before we quote.