Stop buying clicks. Start counting customers.
Google Ads managed for independent businesses, wherever they are — by a team that reports what you spent per new customer rather than what you spent per click.
Book a free 20-minute account review Your account, your screen, your findings to keep.
Twenty minutes, on your account, and you keep the findings.
We share your screen and go through your live Google Ads account together. Not a deck about what we might do — your account, your campaigns, your search terms, your conversion tracking.
By the end you will know three things: what your ads are actually being shown for, whether your enquiries are being counted properly, and where the money is going that is not turning into customers.
You keep all of it whether you hire us or not. There is no obligation and no follow-up sequence. If the account is in good shape we will say so, and that will be the end of it.
Why most independent-business accounts leak
Most owner-run Google Ads accounts were set up once, in an afternoon, by someone who had other things to do — often the owner, sometimes a web designer who built the site and added ads as a favour. They usually leak in the same four places.
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Broad match with no negatives
The account pays for searches that were never going to book. Someone researching for a school project costs the same as someone ready to book.
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Conversion tracking that counts the wrong thing
A form view counted as an enquiry, or a phone call not counted at all. If the tracking is wrong, every decision made from the numbers is wrong too.
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Relevance left unattended
Google charges less per click for ads it judges relevant to the search and the landing page, and more for ads it does not. An account left alone drifts toward the expensive end of that, and the drift is invisible unless someone is looking.
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One ad, running for a year
The same headline against the same audience until it stops working, with nothing ready to replace it.
A business does not buy clicks. It buys next month’s bookings.
What is included
Four things, and they are the same four whichever tier you are on — the top tier adds creative production on top.
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Campaign strategy and execution
The account is built or rebuilt properly: Search and Performance Max, keyword structure with real negative lists, bidding configured to the goal rather than left on the default, and Google’s newer AI-driven campaign settings activated deliberately rather than switched on and hoped for.
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Conversion tracking and lead attribution
The part most accounts get wrong. Form submissions and phone calls both tracked, and where your business uses a booking system, a booking traced back to the campaign that produced it. This is what turns “we got forty clicks” into “we got six enquiries and four of them booked”.
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Creative production
Ad creative — images, scenes and video — produced from your own photography, with every claim checked against the advertising rules of the country it runs in before it runs. Included on the top tier.
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Reporting
One dashboard, refreshed monthly, reporting cost per enquiry and cost per new customer. Not impressions, not click-through rate, not a screenshot of a graph going up.
Why the creative is now the campaign
For as long as advertising has existed, the cost of making the advert set the limit on how many you could run. A photograph meant a shoot. A film meant a crew. So a business made one, put it up, and left it there.
That limit has gone, and Google’s campaign types were rebuilt on the assumption that it had. Five things follow from it, and together they are why a monthly set of new creative is worth more than another hour of bid management.
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Google builds a different advert for each person who sees it
Performance Max and Demand Gen do not run a fixed advert. They hold your headlines, images and video in an asset group and assemble a combination at the moment of each auction, picking the one they predict the person about to see it will respond to. They can only pick from what is there. An account holding four photographs and one video offers a handful of combinations, so most people are shown an advert that was assembled for somebody else. An account holding the full set — every image shape, both video shapes, and the headlines to go with them — offers thousands, and a search for a small bathroom in Bath, made on a phone at nine in the evening, can be answered with the image and the headline built for exactly that. Loading the full set is what produces hyper-relevant ads: one built for the person in front of it, rather than one built for everybody.
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An advert wears out, and the wearing out is measurable
The same image against the same audience earns fewer clicks each month and costs more for each enquiry, because the people most likely to respond have already seen it. There is no bid that fixes this. Only a replacement does.
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Every shape gets shown somewhere
Square, landscape, portrait, horizontal video, vertical video. An account that submits one shape is absent from the placements that take the others, having already paid to qualify for them.
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The same room can be shown twelve ways
A different season, a different town, a different kind of customer in it. One shoot, restaged, rather than twelve shoots that were never going to happen.
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Some of the best adverts cannot be photographed at all
The kitchen that has not been built yet. The project whose owners have since moved. The finished result, shown the way the customer is imagining it. This used to need a budget nobody in an owner-run business has, and it no longer does.
What has not changed is that someone has to know which frame is worth making. The tools are available to everybody now, including to you.
Judgement is the part that is still scarce, and it is what you are actually buying.
About the free tool already in your account
Google Ads now includes Asset Studio, which will take a product photograph and add movement to it, at no cost, inside your own account. It is genuinely useful, and this practice uses it where it is the right tool.
It is also bounded, and the bounds are worth knowing before you conclude the problem is solved. It will not put a person in the frame — video generation refuses faces, including faces it generated itself. It will not cut two shots together, so it animates a photograph rather than telling anything. It gives you a short list of preloaded music and no way to supply your own. And it makes one asset at a time, by hand.
Everything made here is produced outside that tool, with the full model, and then loaded into your account as assets. That is why a video in your campaign can be a short film with a beginning and an end rather than a photograph that drifts.
Sectors
The way the account is run is the same in every sector. What changes is what counts as a booking, who is searching, and which rules the adverts have to follow. Three sectors have their own page:
- Aesthetics and skin clinics — where the rules on what an advert may claim shape every campaign.
- Interior designers and kitchen and bathroom studios — where the project photography is the advert.
- Independent fashion and lifestyle brands — where the product image is the advert.
If your business is in another sector and already running Google Ads, the free review works the same way, wherever you are. If you are not sure it fits, write first and we will tell you honestly.
Pricing
Published, because you should be able to decide whether this is for you before you speak to anyone.
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Setup — one-off
£495Founding price — normally £750Account audit and rebuild, conversion tracking built and verified, campaign build. Charged once, before management starts, because the first month is the heaviest work by a distance.
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Manage
£395 / monthFounding price — normally £595Ongoing management of one account. Search and Performance Max, monthly dashboard, quarterly strategy call.
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Manage and creative
£695 / monthFounding price — normally £995Everything above, plus a fresh set of ad creative every month produced from your own photography, and landing page iteration.
Who does the work
A team in Bath, led by Howard Allson.
The people who do the work are the people you speak to. There is no account executive between you and the team in your account.
Howard Allson, who leads the practice, has been building advertising creative with generative tools for the last year and running the production side of it end to end. Before that he trained at Central Saint Martins and the National Film and Television School, and worked on short films at Ealing Studios. That is where the creative half of this comes from, and it is the reason a client on the top tier gets film-standard ad creative rather than a stock library.
What we will not do is show you someone else’s results and imply they are ours. This service is new. It has no case studies, and it will not have any until a client gives permission to use theirs. What it has instead is the free review — twenty minutes in your own account, where you can judge whether we know what we are looking at before any money changes hands.
Book the twenty-minute review.
Your account, your screen, your findings to keep. If it turns out your ads are running well, we will tell you that.
Book a free 20-minute account review Prefer to write first? howard@vibestudiomarketing.com