You wouldn’t put £1,000 a month into a fund and never check how it’s doing. Yet plenty of UK business owners do exactly that with pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. Money goes in, clicks come out, and nobody’s quite sure what happened in between.
The fix isn’t a bigger budget. It’s a change of mindset. Treat your ad spend the way a sensible investor treats a portfolio, and the questions get sharper: what am I getting back, which holdings are pulling their weight, and when should I cut my losses?
Here’s how to think about it.
Know what you’re actually buying
Clicks aren’t returns. A thousand visitors who leave without buying are about as useful as a share certificate for a company that’s gone bust.
So before you spend a penny, decide what a “return” looks like for your business. For an online shop it’s a sale. For a builder, accountant or B2B supplier it’s more likely a phone call, a quote request or a booked meeting.
Then make sure you can see it happen. Conversion tracking in Google Ads and Google Analytics 4, plus call tracking if your phone rings a lot, turns guesswork into data. Running ads without it is investing blindfolded.
Measure the return, not the activity
The number that matters most is return on ad spend (ROAS): the revenue your ads bring in divided by what they cost. Spend £500, make £2,500 in sales, and your ROAS is 5, or 500%.
But, like any investment, the headline figure can flatter you. A ROAS of 3 sounds healthy. If your profit margin is 20%, though, you’re losing money on every sale. A rough rule for your break-even point is one divided by your margin. At a 25% margin you need a ROAS of at least 4 just to stand still.
For lead-based businesses, compare cost per lead with what a customer is actually worth. If a new client is worth £1,200 over a year and costs £150 in ads to win, that’s a trade most investors would happily take.
Rebalance regularly, not constantly
Think of your campaigns, ad groups and keywords as holdings. Some will outperform. Others will quietly drain cash for months if nobody looks.
A monthly review does most of the heavy lifting. Check the search terms report and block the irrelevant ones (“free”, “jobs” and “DIY” are common culprits). Pause keywords that spend without converting. Move that budget to the ones that do.
What you shouldn’t do is tinker daily. Google’s automated bidding needs data to learn, and every big change resets the clock. As with the stock market, panic selling after one bad week rarely ends well.
Diversify, but only when you’re ready
Each ad platform does a different job:
- Google Search catches people already looking for what you sell.
- Google Shopping puts your products, prices and photos in front of buyers.
- Facebook and Instagram are better for building awareness with visual ads.
- LinkedIn can work well for B2B, but clicks cost more. Is it right for every small business? Not always.
The mistake we see most often is spreading £500 a month across five platforms. None gets enough budget to produce useful data. Concentrate first, prove what works, then diversify.
Watch for hidden fees
Investors know that fund charges can eat into returns. PPC has its own equivalents.
Long contracts that lock you in, management fees that grow faster than results, and landing pages that don’t convert all chip away at your return. That last one is the sneakiest. If your page turns 2% of visitors into customers rather than 4%, every sale costs you twice as much, whatever you pay per click.
And if you can’t understand your monthly report, that’s a red flag. Good reporting tells you what you spent, what you got back and what’s changing next month, in plain English.
How much should you start with?
There’s no magic number, but most small businesses running PPC well spend somewhere between £500 and £5,000 a month. Below about £1,000, it can take a long time to gather enough data to make confident decisions.
Give any new campaign two to three months before judging it. The first few weeks are a learning period, for you and for Google’s algorithms. Nobody expects a new investment to double overnight, and ads are no different.
When to get a second opinion
If any of these sound familiar, it’s worth having someone independent look over your account:
- You can’t say what your ROAS or cost per lead is.
- Conversion tracking isn’t set up, or you’re not sure it works.
- Your cost per lead has crept up month after month.
- Nobody has touched the account in a while.
Many agencies offer a free audit, and a good one should show you where money is leaking without a hard sell. For example, BeeBrilliant offers PPC management for small businesses on a month-to-month basis, with a no-obligation review of existing campaigns. A fresh pair of eyes often spots the quick wins that are hard to see when you’re running the business at the same time.
The bottom line
PPC isn’t a cost you put up with. It’s an investment that should earn its keep. Track what matters, measure the real return, rebalance regularly and watch for the fees that quietly eat into profit.
Do that, and your ad budget stops being a monthly leap of faith. It starts behaving a lot more like the rest of your portfolio.
