PPC
Method 21 manages paid search and paid social for companies with a considered sale, where a lead is worth qualifying and a wasted click is worth eliminating. We run Google Ads, LinkedIn and Meta, and we report on what the spend produced rather than what it bought.
What we manage
Campaign strategy, account structure, keyword and audience targeting, ad copy, landing page alignment, conversion tracking and ongoing optimisation. We build accounts we can explain and hand back, not accounts that depend on us to stay legible.
How a paid account is structured
Single-theme ad groups, each with copy that matches one intent and a landing page built for that same intent. It is slower to build than a broad account and it is the difference between a click that converts and a click that bounces.
Sending paid traffic to a homepage is the most common and most expensive mistake in a B2B account. The homepage has to serve every visitor, so it converts none of them particularly well. A category-specific landing page answers the question the ad promised to answer.
Waste gets eliminated first
Waste. Most accounts we inherit have either no negative keyword list or one that was written once and never revisited, so budget quietly funds searches that could never convert.
For an industrial or technical product, the recurring offenders are consistent.
- Job seekers searching the company or category name plus careers, salary or jobs.
- Students and researchers looking for definitions, diagrams or coursework.
- DIY and repair intent, where the searcher wants to fix something themselves rather than buy.
- Free and cheap qualifiers, which select for buyers who will not reach your price.
- Competitor employees and suppliers researching rather than buying.
The first pass on a new account is usually subtractive, and the cost per qualified lead moves before anything else does.
Paid search now that answers sit above the results
Ads increasingly appear inside AI-generated answers rather than only above the blue links, and that placement is not available to every campaign type. Serving in those slots requires AI-driven targeting: broad match, Performance Max or the newer keywordless formats. An account built entirely on exact match, which used to be the disciplined choice, is now structurally excluded from that inventory.
This is one of the places where running search and paid in the same shop matters. The account structure that reaches answer placements and the content work that earns citations in those same answers are decisions that should be made together.
Which platforms?
| Platform | What it is good for | What to watch |
|---|---|---|
| Google Ads | Capturing existing demand, where someone is already searching for the problem or the product | Match types and negatives, and whether the campaign type can reach answer placements |
| Reaching a defined job title, industry or company size when the buying committee is known | Cost per click is high, so the offer has to justify it | |
| Meta (Facebook and Instagram) | Creating demand among people not yet searching, and cheaper reach than LinkedIn | Targeting is inferred rather than declared, so creative does more of the qualifying |
| Remarketing | Staying present through a long evaluation, which is most industrial purchases | Frequency caps, and excluding people who already converted |
How performance is measured
On qualified leads and what they cost, not on impressions, clicks or click-through rate. Those are diagnostics for us, not results for you. Conversion tracking is configured against Google's own conversion measurement documentation so the numbers in the account mean what the account says they mean.
That requires conversion tracking that actually fires and actually distinguishes a real enquiry from a form-fill by a bot or a job applicant. Fixing measurement is often the first thing we do, because an account optimising toward a broken conversion signal will confidently spend its way in the wrong direction.
How paid relates to the SEO program
They answer different questions. Paid buys presence today and stops when the budget stops. Search compounds and takes months. Companies that run both use paid to test which messages and terms actually convert, then let the organic program build depth against the ones that do.
Paid is also the sensible cover during a site migration, when rankings are temporarily unstable through no fault of the work.
Frequently asked questions
Do you require a minimum ad spend?
No fixed minimum, but below a certain spend a campaign cannot gather enough conversion data to optimise, and the management fee becomes a large share of the total. We will say plainly if a budget is too small to learn from rather than take it and hope.
Who owns the ad account?
You do. We work inside your account, on your billing. If the relationship ends you keep the account, the history and the learning. Agencies that build campaigns inside their own account are holding your data hostage.
How long before an account stabilises?
Expect a learning period of a few weeks after any significant change, during which performance is noisy and should not be judged. Meaningful reads on a B2B account with a long sales cycle usually need a quarter.
Can you take over an existing account?
Yes, and we audit before changing anything. Inherited accounts usually have some combination of missing negatives, conversion actions that double count and campaigns nobody has looked at in a year.
See where you stand
We will review your current search visibility and show you what buyers find when they look for what you do.
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