Advertising

Some businesses need ads. Plenty don’t. Before we talk about a budget, it helps to know there are two very different kinds of ad, because they do different jobs. The difference is who’s looking at them.

Active audience ads, like the ones you see at the top of Google when you do a search, show up when someone is already looking.

They typed in what you do, in the place you do it, and your ad is one of the answers. A Google Search ad works this way. 

Someone with a leaking water heater searching “plumber near me” is ready to call, and that’s why this is where we start for most local businesses.

Passive audience ads show up while someone is scrolling on social media. 

They weren’t looking for you, so the ad has to stop the scroll. 

That can be a great fit for an inn, a restaurant, an event, or a shop with something worth showing off. It’s a weak fit for a business that mostly hears from people when they have a problem right now. It’s a tool with a place, not a tool for every business or every product.

Social media management is its own service. If we are already looking after your posts on Facebook and Instagram, we generally roll the ads on those platforms into that work. You still pay the ad budget to Meta, or to whichever platform we are using, but you don’t pay a second management fee on top of the social retainer for those ads. 

Get in touch and we’ll tell you which type of ad suits your business. We’ll also tell you if neither does. Send us an email at [email protected] or call (252) 349-3280 and we’ll be in touch by the next business day.

For most local businesses, a good place to begin is $300 to $500 a month, paid directly to Google. That money doesn’t come to us. It’s your ad budget.

What comes to us is smaller than most people expect, and it gets smaller once the account settles:

• Setting up your first Search campaign starts at $500. That covers the Google Ads account, the campaign, the keywords, the ad copy, and conversion tracking, so we can tell whether an ad led to a call or a form and not just a click.
• A second campaign starts at $150. A second service or a second town doesn’t cost what starting from scratch does.
• The first month or two need a closer eye, because that’s when the wasted searches show up. Figure on about $250 a month for monitoring for that stretch.
• Once things settle, keeping an eye on it runs about $150 to $200 a month. We look at the searches, pause what’s wasting money, and tell you what we see in plain English.

All in, the first two months usually come to about $1,000 to us, plus whatever you’ve chosen to spend with Google. After that, our part drops. That’s on purpose. A settled account doesn’t need the attention a new one does.

A budget of $300 to $500 is enough for us to keep your account from wasting money. It isn’t enough to promise a full calendar. At that size there isn’t enough data to learn something new every week, and we’d rather tell you now than have you find out in month three.

A business spending around $2,000 a month with Google, in more than one market, is a different job. There’s enough search volume to really refine, and the management fee is different. We price that when we see the account, and we don’t quote it to a business that’s starting at a $300 per month ad spend.

If your customers make up their minds while they’re scrolling, a Meta campaign can sit beside Search or stand on its own. Photos and a clear offer matter more there than keywords do. We won’t recommend it just to add a line to the invoice. If we think it fits, we’ll tell you what the setup would involve and what a reasonable test budget looks like before you spend anything.

Ads work better with something worth looking at. We can make video ads that run alongside a Google Ads campaign or a Meta campaign, and we can shoot photography for your ads, too. If you’re not sure whether your business needs either one, ask us. Sometimes a few good photos do more than a video would, and we’ll say so.

We won’t turn on a campaign and disappear. We won’t hand you a spreadsheet of impressions and call it a report. Every month you’ll get a short, plain note: what happened, what we changed, and what we’re watching.

Tell us what you sell, where you sell it, and what a new customer is worth, and we’ll tell you whether ads belong in the picture at all.

Send us an email at [email protected] or call (252) 349-3280 and we’ll be in touch by the next business day.