What it is
Paid search is advertising on Google and Bing, the ads that appear when someone searches for what you sell. It is the only channel where the customer states their intent at the moment they want something. The craft is deciding which of those moments are worth paying for and which are not, then writing ads that win the click and pages that win the action. PPC management is the discipline that runs the money behind it, and it has its own page. This one is about the search ads themselves. The keywords, the copy, the negatives, and the match between the ad and the page it lands on. When those four are right, the cost per acquisition falls without anyone touching the budget.
Search adverts are the only advertising where the customer declares their intent out loud. They type what they want and you pay to be standing there when they do. That is why the channel converts harder than almost anything else and why the clicks cost what they cost. The money is made or lost in the sorting. A search for an emergency plumber at eleven at night is worth several times a search with the word free in it, and the two should never share a budget, a landing page or an advert. Most accounts we look at have them mixed together in one campaign, judged on an average that describes neither. The result is a business convinced its market is too expensive, when what it actually has is an account that cannot tell a buyer from a browser. That distinction is the first job. Everything after it is maintenance.
We build around intent and margin. We look at what each query means about the buyer, how close to a decision they actually are and what margin sits behind the sale. Then the account is structured to keep those things apart, so the expensive clicks get the attention they deserve and the cheap ones do not get to inflate the numbers. It keeps the account smaller and more profitable than the platform would ever build it on its own, and that is not a criticism of the platform. It is simply paid by the clicks you should not be buying. There is also the question of what happens after the click, which the platform will happily leave to somebody else. A brilliant bid on a weak page is an expensive way to discover your bounce rate, and most accounts have paid for that lesson several times over.
Then the boring work that pays for itself. Negative keywords added weekly, match types controlled, adverts tested against each other and the landing page aligned with the promise made in the ad. Google Ads and Microsoft Ads both run where the economics work, because Microsoft conversions are often cheaper and most agencies ignore that surface entirely. Reporting ties every line back to what the enquiry or the order was actually worth, so the argument at the end of the month is about profit rather than about who clicked what. None of it is complicated. All of it is relentless, and the accounts that win are usually the ones where somebody has been paying attention every week rather than every quarter. Seasonality gets planned rather than discovered. Competitor activity gets watched rather than blamed. When something stops working it gets switched off that week, not at the annual review.
What we do
Intent-led keyword strategy
Queries sorted by what they mean about the buyer, not by volume alone. Commercial, informational, navigational and junk each get their own treatment, and the bid reflects the margin behind the sale. You end up paying for searches close to a decision and skipping the ones that were never going to convert in the first place.
Ad copy and extensions
Ads that say the specific thing you do, written to be chosen over the three above them. Headlines tested against each other, sitelinks and callouts used where they earn their space, and every claim checked against what you can actually prove before anything goes live. Specific beats impressive every time.
Negative keyword hygiene
The invisible work that stops you paying for the searches you will never win. Weekly search term reviews, shared negative lists across campaigns and match types kept under control so the account does not quietly drift into broad matching. It is unglamorous, repetitive and quietly the most valuable thing anyone does to a search account.
Landing page alignment
Every ad lands on the page that answers its promise, never the homepage. Message matched word for word where it helps, proof placed where the doubt actually sits, and speed measured on the phones your customers use. Where the page needs work, we build it rather than simply reporting the problem.
How we work
Audit
Two to four weeks of evidence gathering. What the account spends, which conversions are real, where tracking is missing or double counting, what competitors appear for and which search terms waste money today. You get the findings in writing first.
Plan
One written strategy. The intent we will pay for, the queries we will deliberately exclude, the structure that keeps them apart, the bidding approach and where each advert should land. You approve it before anything ships and the budget need is stated plainly.
Build
The account itself. Structure rebuilt, tracking implemented and tested end to end, adverts written and approved, negatives seeded, extensions set and bid strategies trained on real conversions. Compliance sign-off happens before spend in regulated markets. Then it goes live in stages.
Prove
Monthly reporting that separates what we did from what happened. Cost per acquisition and profit carry the verdict. Search terms, impression share and quality metrics explain why. Every decision is written down, so you can audit the thinking rather than trust it.
What it costs
Two separate numbers, and keeping them apart is deliberate. The media budget goes to Google and Microsoft. The management fee pays for the work of spending it well, quoted in writing and never hidden inside a percentage of your spend. What moves the fee is the number of campaigns, the size of the keyword set, how much of the tracking is broken and whether landing pages need building first. What moves the media budget is simply the price of clicks in your market and how many of them you want to be present for. If the arithmetic only works at a spend you cannot reach, we say so early.
Who it is for
For high-intent services in competitive markets. Legal, healthcare, home services, professional practices and anywhere the cost per acquisition decides whether the business case holds at all. For regulated markets it is the channel where claims are checked line by line and every landing page has to stand behind its own words. We work with iGaming operators, fintechs, healthcare providers and law firms, and with local service businesses paying for calls against national competitors who have national budgets and national overheads to match.
Two kinds of business come to us: local service businesses and companies in regulated markets. See everything in Be chosen.
Questions we get asked
Google or Bing?
Both where the economics work. Microsoft Ads often delivers cheaper conversions and is ignored by most agencies for exactly that reason. We run the split your data supports and report on each surface separately, so the cheaper one never hides behind a blended average and the expensive one never gets blamed for volume it did not want. Cheap and quiet is still cheap. That money spends the same at the end of the quarter, and the volume is smaller there precisely because the competition is usually thinner.
Do you run Performance Max?
Where it earns its keep, and never as a black box. If we cannot see what a budget is doing inside an automation, we do not pretend to manage it. Performance Max has its uses for ecommerce and broad reach. For high-intent search it competes with a level of control we would rather keep, so it gets a share of the budget and a watching brief rather than the keys to the account. If an automation cannot explain itself, it gets a smaller budget.
How much does paid search cost?
The clicks are the big number and they vary wildly by market. Insurance and legal clicks cost many times what a local trade does, and no amount of optimisation changes the auction price. The management fee is separate and set by the size of the account. We will map both numbers before you commit to anything, and we will tell you if the maths does not work in your favour. Ask us for the arithmetic rather than the quote. It is better to hear how the numbers were reached before an invoice than after.
How long does paid search take to work?
Ads can run within days of approval and a short period of platform learning. A genuinely useful and profitable account takes longer, because the first weeks are spent finding which queries convert and cutting the ones that do not. Expect a clearer picture within weeks and a better account every month after that. Anyone promising a finished account in a fortnight is describing a launch rather than a result, and the difference matters a great deal when you are being sold to.
Paid search vs SEO?
Paid search rents the position and stops the moment you stop paying for it. SEO earns the position and compounds over time. Paid moves in weeks while organic search compounds over three to six months. Most businesses end up running both, with the mix set by how urgently they need demand and how much margin sits behind each sale to fund the clicks. The honest starting point for most is to run paid where the margin exists and build organic underneath it.
What is the difference between paid search and PPC?
Paid search is the channel, the ads on Google and Bing. PPC is the discipline that manages that spend, and the rest of paid media, for profit. You do not need to choose between them. Winning the auctions is the craft on this page. Making the budget earn is the PPC work, and the two run together in practice.
More Be chosen services
- PPCPaid media managed against profit, not clicks.
- Paid socialThe feeds your buyers scroll, and WhatsApp where they actually talk.
- Google ShoppingFeed, structure and bids for ecommerce that has to turn a profit.
- ChatGPT advertisingPlacement inside AI conversations, run as a careful test rather than a promise.
- CROTurning the traffic you already have into more customers.
- Landing pagesPages built for one job, the next click that matters.
Tell us what you need from paid search. We will tell you what we would do about it.