GOOGLE ADS AGENCY THAT CALCULATES PROFITABILITY FIRST

A Google Ads agency builds and runs your advertising in Google's search results: keyword selection, account structure, ad copy, bidding and follow-up. The key question is not whether the agency knows the tool, but whether its improvements are worth more than its fee on your particular budget. With smaller budgets, the answer is often no to ongoing management – but yes to a proper setup.

The difference between a Google Ads consultant and an agency is mostly one of scope. A consultant often works on the account alone. An agency covers more links in the chain, and much of the profitability is decided in the links outside the account: the landing page, the conversion tracking and how the advertising works alongside SEO. With us, you deal directly with the specialist who runs the account.

What sets us apart from a pure ads agency is that the same team builds the website, handles SEO and optimises the conversion rate. For you, that means one partner instead of three. If you are looking for an AdWords agency, it is the same service – Google Ads was called AdWords until 2018.

Google Ads works when three things are all true. There is active search demand for what you sell. Your margin can bear the cost of paying for every visitor. And your website can turn visitors into enquiries. Typical cases where the numbers add up are B2B services with high customer value, local service businesses with purchase-ready searches, and e-commerce with a product feed and a reasonable margin.

We advise against it on the very first call if any of the following applies:

• A small budget without conversion tracking. A few hundred SEK a month in a competitive industry gives you neither results nor lessons. Build the tracking first – otherwise neither you nor Google's algorithm has anything to optimise towards.
• A low margin. With a low order value and a thin contribution margin, you rarely reach break-even – the point where the advertising pays for itself – however cheap the clicks are. Break-even ROAS – the return per unit of ad spend needed to break even – is 1 divided by the margin. With a 40 per cent margin, every SEK spent on ads has to bring in SEK 2.50 before the campaign earns anything at all.
• The website is not convincing. Sending paid traffic to a website that does not convince is the most expensive way to discover the problem. In that case we would rather start with conversion rate optimisation and return to advertising later.
• Nobody searches for what you sell. Google Ads captures existing demand. If the product category is new, awareness has to be built in other channels first.

If Google Ads is not the right channel yet, we tell you what should be in place before you come back. We earn more from a client who stays than from a campaign that loses money.

It depends on the cost per click in your industry and on how you bid. With manual bidding on a narrow list of purchase-ready keywords, a smaller budget can produce conversions straight away. If you want to use Smart Bidding, Google's automated bidding, the account needs to generate a steady flow of conversions so the strategy has data to learn from. With expensive clicks and a small daily budget, that takes months, and manual bidding is often more effective in the meantime. We run the numbers on your budget during the first call.

By time horizon. Google Ads brings traffic the same day but stops when you stop paying. SEO takes months, but the effect compounds: every ranking keeps bringing in traffic with no cost per click. Use the ad budget to validate demand quickly, capture seasonal peaks and reach purchase-ready searches you do not rank for yet. Then shift it to other keywords as your pages start to rank organically. If your horizon is longer than a year, SEO should take a larger share. Most growing companies need both, and search term data from the ads makes the SEO work more precise.

We set up the Google Ads account at a fixed project price. Then we follow up as needed, charged by the hour and as often as the budget justifies. For larger accounts with several campaign types, we offer ongoing management at a fixed monthly fee. None of the arrangements has a lock-in period, and we never take a percentage of the budget.

The industry norm is different. According to our pricing guide, most Swedish agencies charge either a fixed monthly fee – roughly SEK 3,000–20,000 – or 10–20 per cent of the ad budget, often with a minimum charge. The percentage model gives the agency a built-in incentive to propose a higher budget. A fixed fee avoids that, but with small budgets it still weighs heavily: SEK 10,000 in ad budget plus a SEK 6,000 fee means more than a third of the total goes on management. Calculate profitability on the total, not on the ad budget alone.

In our experience, continuous fine-tuning only pays for itself with larger monthly budgets. On a smaller budget, a thorough setup and a couple of follow-ups deliver most of the benefit. Run your own figures in the break-even calculator for Google Ads before settling on a level. It works from budget plus fee, not just cost per click.

The setup decides whether the account collects useful data or just costs money. We run it as a fixed-scope project with a clear end point. It includes:

• Profitability calculation and stop criterion. What a customer is worth, a reasonable conversion rate, the highest acceptable cost per click – and the point at which we pause if the figures are not moving towards the target.
• Conversion tracking. We set up tracking of forms, purchases or calls and check it with a test conversion before the campaign goes live. Without it, neither you nor Google's algorithm can optimise for real business.
• Account structure in Expert Mode. Expert Mode is Google's advanced mode, in which every setting is available – unlike the simplified mode Google suggests to new advertisers. Campaigns and tightly themed ad groups are built around search intent, not around the product catalogue.
• Keyword research with match types and negative lists. Purchase-ready keywords in phrase or exact match, informational searches filtered out, and a negative keyword list from day one.
• Responsive search ads (RSA). Google's ad format, in which several headlines and descriptions are combined automatically. We write them to mirror the keyword and to make a promise the landing page keeps.
• A landing page that matches the ad. If none exists, we build one – see the question about landing pages further down.
• A bidding strategy suited to the volume. Manual bidding on a narrow keyword list for smaller budgets. Smart Bidding – Google's automated bidding – only once the account generates enough conversions to give the strategy data to learn from.

These points match the checklist we recommend everyone works through before starting. The full reasoning is in the checklist for your first Google Ads campaign.

Yes, always. The account is created in your name, and you pay the ad budget directly to Google. We work in it through access granted to our manager account – Google's tool for agencies that run accounts for several clients. If the partnership ends, you keep all the history, conversion data and keyword lists. Beware of agencies that set up the account in their own name – you lose both the data and the learnings the day you want to switch.

If you already have an account, you do not need a new setup. Instead, we review what is there and fix the most costly problems first. The review follows the same logic as the setup:

• Tracking. Does the account measure the right conversions, and have they been tested? An account that optimises towards the wrong goal will not improve however many hours you spend elsewhere.
• The search terms report. Which searches have the ads actually been shown for? This is often where the biggest savings are: searches with no purchase intent that nobody has filtered out.
• Negative lists and match types. If negative keywords are missing, or broad match runs unchecked, budget leaks away every day.
• Account structure. If the ad groups mix different search intents, the ad cannot mirror the keyword, and the Quality Score drops.
• Landing pages. Do the clicks land on a page that keeps the ad's promise, or on the homepage?

You get a prioritised action list. The work is charged by the hour, and if the account is large enough, we move to ongoing management. That is how we worked for Startabolag: we optimised their existing search ads in Google Ads and Microsoft Ads alongside the SEO and AEO work, and found several ways to cut costs.

Yes. Your cost per click in Google Ads depends not only on your bid but also on the quality of your ad. Position and price are decided by Ad Rank. According to Google Ads Help, Ad Rank takes into account, among other things, how relevant your ad and landing page are – and higher-quality ads can often lead to a lower cost per click. Quality Score summarises Google's assessment in three components: expected click-through rate (CTR), ad relevance and landing page experience (Google Ads Help). A relevant ad with a good landing page can therefore win a higher position at a lower price than a competitor who bids more. In other words, one of the three components sits on the website – outside the ad account.

That is why we do not send paid traffic to the homepage. Someone who clicks an ad for a specific service should land on a page about exactly that service, making the same promise as the ad. If no such page exists, we build it – in Webflow or as a coded website, depending on what you have – and measure its conversion rate separately. If you already have pages, we review them against the ads' promises before the campaign starts. Having the same team build the landing page and run the account is often what separates an ads agency that reports clicks from an arrangement that reports cost per enquiry.

After the setup, we follow up on the account as needed and charge by the hour. Normally that means about once a month, and more often in the first few weeks while the account gathers data. Every follow-up covers the same ground: we review the search terms report, add negative keywords, adjust bids and pause whatever does not convert. You pay for the hours spent.

We report in SEK per enquiry (lead) and per deal, not in clicks and impressions. That is the figure you can compare with customer value, so it is the one that decides whether a campaign should continue, grow or pause. We run several ad copy variants against each other. On larger accounts we test headlines and messages against each other; on smaller ones there is rarely enough traffic for a reliable result, so we report the difference as a trend.

For accounts that have grown – several campaign types, Performance Max, a larger budget – we move to ongoing management at a fixed monthly fee, reported on the same metrics. Performance Max is Google's automated campaign type, which advertises across all of Google's channels at once towards a goal you set. We only launch Performance Max once the search campaigns have shown that tracking works, because it still gives you less insight than a search campaign into what the budget was actually spent on. Read about the trade-off in the section on why Performance Max can get expensive. If you want to compare with what the organic side costs, see the price levels for SEO agencies in Sweden.

Ads can go live the same day the account is activated, so traffic arrives quickly. Profitability takes longer. The first weeks are about collecting data: we see which keywords and ads produce enquiries and weed out the rest via the search terms report. We wait for enough clicks and conversions to see patterns before judging, and we have a three-month stop criterion if the numbers are not moving towards break-even.