PPC Consultancy
Freelance PPC consultant — Google Ads, done properly.
From four-figure monthly budgets to six, the difference between a good account and a mediocre one isn't ad copy — it's measurement architecture, bidding strategy and the pages the clicks land on. That's where I work.
Who this is for
Real spend, fuzzy return
Four, five or six figures a month, optimising to leads or form fills — but the connection between spend and actual revenue lives in a spreadsheet nobody fully trusts.
Smart bidding, starved of truth
The account runs Target CPA or Target ROAS, but the algorithm is learning from the wrong signals: unqualified leads counted as wins, offline sales invisible, values missing or flat.
Scaled past its structure
The account grew faster than its architecture. CPCs and CPAs drift upward, lead quality drifts down, and every restructure attempt feels like open-heart surgery on a live budget.
Foundation
Measurement first — because bidding is only as smart as the data feeding it
At meaningful spend levels, Google's automated bidding makes thousands of decisions a day on your behalf. Every one of them is based on the conversion data you feed it. Feeding it the wrong signals doesn't just distort reporting — it actively trains the system to buy the wrong clicks. So every engagement starts with the measurement layer:
Conversion architecture
A deliberate hierarchy of primary and secondary actions — what bidding optimises to versus what's merely observed. Deduplication rules, sensible attribution settings, and conversion windows matched to your actual sales cycle rather than the defaults.
Offline conversion imports
For lead-gen businesses, the sale usually closes in a CRM days or weeks after the click. I build the pipeline that closes that loop: click IDs captured at the form, qualified and closed-won stages imported back into Google Ads (natively, via the API, or through your CRM's integration), so the algorithm finally learns which clicks became customers — not just enquiries.
Enhanced conversions & consent
Enhanced conversions for web and for leads, first-party data matching, and Consent Mode v2 configured properly — recovering the measurement that browser privacy changes quietly took away, without cutting compliance corners.
Tracking integrity audit
Before judging any performance number: duplicate conversions, page-view "leads", broken imports, double-counted purchases. If the measurement is wrong, every automated decision downstream is wrong — this gets fixed before anything else is touched.
Bidding
Value-based bidding: the gold standard
The end state I work towards on every serious account is bidding to value — Target ROAS against real revenue, so budget flows automatically toward the campaigns, audiences and queries that make you the most money, not the most enquiries.
Where revenue is directly trackable — ecommerce, or lead-gen with closed-won values imported from the CRM — that's true ROAS bidding on actual numbers.
Where it isn't, I build honest proxy values. Not every business can pipe revenue into Google Ads, and pretending otherwise is how accounts end up optimised to fiction. The practical alternative is a proxy value framework: conversion stages weighted by what they're genuinely worth — an enquiry valued from qualification rates, a qualified lead from close rates, segments adjusted for margin or lifetime value where the data supports it. The values don't need to be perfect; they need to be proportionally right, reviewed on a schedule, and understood by everyone reading the reports.
And where the data volume doesn't yet support value bidding, I'll say so — a Target CPA strategy with clean data beats a Target ROAS strategy hallucinating on twelve conversions a month. Getting to the gold standard is part of the work: conversion volume thresholds, portfolio strategies, and seasonality adjustments applied when the business actually has seasons.
The full engagement
What you get
The wasted-spend audit
Search terms vs keywords bought, negative architecture, bidding strategy vs conversion volume, structural overlap, Performance Max cannibalisation, the set-and-forget tax. In the SME accounts I audit it's common to find 15–30% of spend on queries that could never convert; at higher spend the percentages shrink but the absolute waste grows. Where accounts waste money first.
Structure built for scale
Campaign architecture that maps to how customers search and how you budget — brand separated from generic so the blended numbers tell the truth, match types matched to data volume, Performance Max fenced with proper guardrails so "incremental" means incremental.
Landing page development
I design and build the pages, not just recommend them: fast, static, message-matched to the ad groups that feed them. The Home Instead rebuild took conversion from 0.7% to 8.5% — at serious spend, that multiple is worth more than any bid optimisation.
Continuous conversion optimisation
A proper testing programme on the pages where the money lands: message hierarchy, form friction, proof placement, page speed. Tests sized to your traffic so results mean something, with a maintained backlog rather than one-off tinkering.
Full-funnel paid media
Search, Shopping, Performance Max, Display, YouTube, Meta and LinkedIn where they earn their place — with the measurement rigour applied consistently, so channel comparisons are real comparisons.
Reporting that answers the board's question
"What did we get for the money?" — answered monthly against targets we agreed, in revenue terms wherever the measurement supports it. AI-assisted anomaly detection flags what needs a decision; the decisions stay human. Bad months get explained, not buried.
How an engagement runs
- Access & scope
Read-only account access, analytics, and a call on goals, margins and sales process.
- Audit
Fixed-fee, ~2 weeks. Measurement verdict first, then the ranked waste and opportunity report.
- Measurement build
Conversion architecture, offline imports, enhanced conversions — the foundation, done properly.
- Restructure & pages
Campaign architecture and landing pages rebuilt against the clean data.
- Optimise to value
Progress to value-based bidding, with testing and honest monthly reporting.
Why the founder experience matters
Managing client budgets taught me structure; spending my own taught me discipline. As director of Travel Magical I spent roughly £200k a year of my own company's money on marketing, in travel — one of the most competitive, seasonal, price-scrutinised paid-search verticals there is. The business averaged ~£2.5M annual revenue across those years, operated under FCA regulation for its insurance activity, and I sold it in 2017. And I've never stopped: today I run my own paid media for Skär Organics — far smaller budgets, exactly the same discipline. When a broad-match experiment fails with your own money, you remember it — and it changes how carefully you treat everyone else's.
Before that: five years managing ~£100k/month at Online Travel Group, where paid search, analytics and A/B testing were my whole job. Since: as a freelance PPC consultant, campaigns and landing pages across legal, dental, healthcare, B2B industrial and professional services — including Home Instead's recruitment marketing: applications up 200%, cost per application held under £20 against a £50 target, and a landing page conversion rate taken from 0.7% to 8.5%.
Fraser has an exceptional skill set & has delivered outstanding results for our business.
Fraser has a wealth of knowledge and experience in running effective digital marketing campaigns.
AI, applied carefully
How AI accelerates this work
AI-assisted search-term clustering, waste detection, anomaly summaries and reporting automation — hours of rows become minutes of decisions. For example: thousands of search terms clustered into intent groups, with the proposed negatives reviewed by hand before anything changes in the account. Two hard rules: budget and bidding decisions stay human-controlled, and no automated change ships without review. The systems behind this are part of my AI marketing consultancy.
Questions before hiring a PPC consultant
Our sales close offline, weeks after the click. Can we still bid to ROAS?
Yes — this is exactly what offline conversion imports exist for. We capture the click ID with each lead, your CRM records which leads qualify and close (and for how much), and those outcomes flow back into Google Ads on a schedule. Where deal values can't come back cleanly, a proxy value framework — stages weighted by qualification and close rates — gets you most of the benefit honestly. It's usually a few weeks of plumbing that changes the economics of the whole account.
What does a Google Ads audit cost and what do I get?
Fixed fee, agreed up front, sized to account complexity. You get a measurement verdict first — because nothing else can be judged until tracking is trustworthy — then a ranked report: what each issue is likely costing, the estimated upside of fixing it, and the order I'd tackle it in. It's designed to stand alone: you're entirely free to take it to your own team and run with it — though most people keep me around for the fixes.
What spend levels do you work with?
From four-figure monthly budgets up to six. The measurement-first approach is the same at every level — what scales with the spend is the depth of the engagement. At smaller budgets, an audit plus a landing page and tracking rebuild is often the best-value starting point, and I'll say so.
Do you handle Performance Max?
Yes — with guardrails. PMax can quietly cannibalise your search campaigns and dress it up as incremental growth; fencing it with brand exclusions, careful asset-group structure and honest incrementality reading is a standard part of the work at scale.
Can you just audit, while our agency keeps running the account?
Yes. Independent audit-and-oversight is common at higher spend: I diagnose, your agency executes, I review quarterly. Good agencies usually welcome clear independent diagnosis — the findings give everyone the same priorities to work from.
Do you require long contracts?
No. Audits are one-off, and ongoing management rolls monthly — if it ever stops being useful, you can simply stop.
Spending serious money on Google Ads?
Share read-only access and within a fortnight I'll show you what the measurement is hiding, what the waste is costing, and the path to bidding on value — looked at the way I looked at my own budget for eight years.