Google & Meta Ads Management in Brisbane
Paid advertising that’s judged on one number: what it costs you to get an enquiry. We build, run and optimise campaigns across Google and Meta for businesses across Australia — and we report in leads and dollars, not impressions and reach.
Most Ad Budgets Are Being Quietly Wasted
If you’ve run Google Ads yourself, or handed them to someone who ran them on autopilot, you’ve probably seen the pattern. Money goes out. A report arrives full of impressions and click-through rates. The phone doesn’t ring noticeably more. Nobody can tell you what a customer cost.
Here’s where it usually goes wrong:
The account is set up to spend, not to convert. Google’s defaults are built to maximise Google’s revenue. Broad match keywords, automatic display network expansion, no negative keyword list — you end up paying for clicks from people searching for jobs, for free advice, or for something adjacent to what you sell.
Nobody installed conversion tracking properly. This is the big one. If conversions aren’t tracked correctly, you can’t tell which keywords produce customers, Google’s bidding algorithm has nothing useful to optimise toward, and every decision after that is guesswork. A surprising number of accounts we audit have tracking that’s broken, double-counting, or missing entirely.
The ad sends people to the wrong page. Someone searches for a specific service, clicks your ad, and lands on your homepage to fend for themselves. You paid for that click. They left in four seconds.
Nobody’s touched it in three months. Search behaviour shifts, competitors change their bids, some keywords quietly stop working. An unmanaged account decays. “Set and forget” is how budgets disappear.
How We Run Your Campaigns
- Work out what a lead is allowed to cost. Before we write an ad, we need to know what a customer is worth to you and what proportion of enquiries you convert. That gives us a target cost per lead — the number every decision gets measured against. Without it, “good performance” is just an opinion.
- Set up tracking properly, first. Conversion tracking for calls, form submissions, bookings and — where it matters — actual sales. Google Tag Manager configured correctly, Google Ads and Analytics linked, offline conversion imports where your sales cycle runs long. This happens before any spend goes out, because campaign data without tracking is just an invoice.
- Keyword and audience strategy. For Google Search: exact and phrase match keywords with real commercial intent, and a comprehensive negative keyword list from day one to keep you out of the searches that waste money.
For Meta: audience targeting built on your actual customer profile — interests, behaviours, lookalikes from your customer list, and retargeting for people who’ve already visited your site and didn’t act. - Ads and landing pages written to convert. Our copywriting team writes the ads, and we test multiple variations rather than guessing. Then we make sure the click lands somewhere that matches the promise — a page about the exact service they searched for, with the enquiry form visible without scrolling.
The landing page decides most of your conversion rate. It’s the part most agencies skip because it involves work outside the ads account. - Weekly management. Search term reviews to catch waste and find new keywords. Bid adjustments. Budget shifted toward what’s converting and away from what isn’t. New ad variations tested. Audience refinement. Landing page adjustments where the data points at them.
- Monthly reporting in plain English. Spend, enquiries, cost per enquiry, and how that compares to last month and to your target. What we changed and why. What we’re doing next. One page you can read over coffee, with the detail available if you want it.
Which Platform, and Why
- Google Search Ads Best when people are actively looking for what you sell. Someone searching “emergency plumber Brisbane” has a problem right now and a wallet out. High intent, higher cost per click, best conversion rates. This is where most service businesses should start.
- Google Display & YouTube Best for retargeting people who’ve already visited your site, and for building awareness in longer buying cycles. Cheap clicks, low intent — useful as support, poor as a primary channel for most small businesses.
- Meta (Facebook & Instagram) Best when your customers don’t know they need you yet, or when your product is visual. Strong for consumer brands, events, local businesses and e-commerce. Excellent retargeting. Lower cost per click than Google, generally lower intent.
- LinkedIn Best for B2B with a high customer value, where you need to reach a specific job title at a specific size of company. Expensive per click — only worth it when a single client is worth thousands.
Most of our clients run Google Search plus retargeting. We’ll recommend the mix based on how your customers buy, not on which platform we’d prefer to manage.
Getting Ahead of the Australian Business Calendar
Timing matters more than most businesses account for, and the good windows need setting up weeks before they open.
- End of financial year (April–June): Businesses are spending remaining budget and looking at deductible purchases before 30 June. If you sell to other businesses — equipment, services, software, professional advice — this is your peak. Campaigns should be live and optimised by early May, not late June.
- Pre-Christmas retail (September–December): Retail and consumer services compete hardest here, and click costs rise accordingly. Building your retargeting audiences from September means you’re not paying peak prices for cold traffic in November.
- New calendar year (January–February): Business owners return from the break with plans and budgets. Anything positioned around planning, growth, systems or a fresh start performs unusually well in this window.
- The quiet periods: Late January and the middle of winter are cheaper. For businesses without strong seasonality, that’s often when the same budget buys considerably more.
Ads Managed by People Who’ve Spent Their Own Money
Our director runs businesses of his own and has spent his own money on advertising. That changes how we treat a budget. We’d rather run a smaller campaign that reliably produces enquiries at a known cost than a bigger one that produces impressive-looking reports.
It also means we’ll tell you when ads aren’t the answer. If your website doesn’t convert the traffic it already gets, more traffic won’t help — fixing the site first will. If your margins can’t absorb a competitive cost per click in your industry, we’ll say so before you spend, not after.
Your accounts stay yours. We build campaigns in accounts you own. If we ever part ways, you keep the account, the history and the data. Some agencies run client campaigns inside their own accounts, which means leaving costs you everything you’ve built. We think that’s a poor deal for the client.