A Google Ads account can report a healthy conversion figure that the sales desk never sees, because the tracking is counting the wrong thing. We line that figure up against your actual enquiries, calls and orders before touching bids or budgets, then rebuild the account around what you sell and where you can actually deliver.
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2020
Building since
1,000+
Clients served
UK
Registered company
4.6/5
Rated on Clutch
Quick answer
Whether the conversions are real. Before anyone adjusts a bid, someone should set the conversion column in Google Ads beside what actually arrived over the same weeks: forms in the inbox, calls the office logged, orders in the shop. Automated bidding learns from that column. If it is counting page loads, button presses or one phone call twice, the account gets steadily better at buying the wrong visits while the dashboard looks fine.
Next comes geography, and around Birmingham it needs care. The city runs into Sandwell and the rest of the Black Country to the west and into Solihull to the south east, with no edge a customer would notice. Google's location options also default to people who are in your area, regularly there, or merely showing interest in it, so an account aimed at Birmingham can quietly pay for clicks from people elsewhere in the country who searched about the city. For a business that only serves people here, that setting is usually the first thing to change.
Then the search terms report, which lists what people actually typed before they clicked. A large city produces a steady flow of searches that look relevant and are not: job hunting, training courses, free advice, student projects. Broad match will spend on them until someone adds them as negatives.
One plain statement about us: SpiderHunts has no office in Birmingham. We are a UK-registered company with a registered office in London and a remote team, and West Midlands accounts are run through shared access, video calls and written reports. Google Ads works the same wherever the person managing it sits, but if you want someone at your premises every month, we are not the right choice.
What we do
Eight pieces of work, roughly in this order. Measurement and structure come before bidding, because bidding can only learn from what those two feed it.
Each conversion action rebuilt so it stands for something your staff would recognise: a form that was really submitted, a call long enough to be a genuine enquiry, a paid order. Server-side measurement is added where the browser is dropping data, and the totals are compared with your own records each month.
Campaigns grouped by service and by margin, ad text written to match what the person searched, and negatives added from the search terms report as a standing monthly task. In a city this size that report fills up quickly with searches you never meant to buy.
Targeting set to people in your chosen areas, towns picked to match the patch you serve rather than a single circle on the map, separate bids where one part of the West Midlands is worth more to you, and schedules set to the hours your phones are staffed.
For retailers, Shopping starts in Merchant Center: titles, attributes, variants and disapprovals. Performance Max is set up with asset groups and exclusions arranged so you can still see what it is spending on and why.
If the ads bring in the right people and the page then loses them, we build a better page. Because we make websites as well as manage advertising, the fix does not stall while an agency and a web developer argue about whose problem it is.
For firms with a proper sales process, we import which enquiries became quotes or orders from your CRM, so bidding learns from the leads your sales team accepted. This suits the long B2B buying cycles common in Midlands manufacturing and engineering.
Ads and organic results answer the same buyer. Where you already rank well, paying for the same searches may add little; where you do not, ads can cover the gap while SEO work catches up. We look at both before recommending spend.
A written note every month, in pounds: how much went to Google, how many genuine enquiries came in, what each one cost, which changes we made and anything that failed. The account, its history and its data remain yours throughout.
Before you sign
If you are talking to two or three suppliers before handing over an account, their pitches will probably sound alike. The differences come out when you ask a handful of direct questions and expect written answers before any quote. Whether the supplier calls itself a PPC agency, a paid search specialist or a digital marketing firm, these questions still apply.
Whose name is the account in? It should be yours, with the agency given access. When an agency runs your ads from an account it owns, leaving can mean losing years of history, conversion data and everything the bidding has learned.
How will you check our conversions? Relying on whatever Google reports is not an answer. A careful supplier will explain how it will compare the conversion column with your enquiries, calls or orders, and what it does when the two disagree, which they often do.
How is the fee worked out? A fee taken as a share of ad spend rises every time the budget does, whether or not results improve. A quote for the work itself, with the scope written down, keeps the agency's interest tied to what the spend brings back rather than how much of it there is.
Who will actually work on it? Ask who logs in to the account week to week, and whether the same person writes the report you receive. In some agencies the person who wins the account is not the person who runs it.
What happens in a bad month? Every account has them: a competitor raises its bids, a season ends, a website update breaks a tracking tag. You want to hear how the agency would spot it and tell you, not an assurance that it will never happen.
Month to month
Ongoing management is mostly routine, and the routine is what protects the budget. The table below shows what a normal month covers once an account has been rebuilt. The first month or two after taking over are heavier, because that is when tracking and structure are repaired.
| Task | When it usually happens | Why it matters around Birmingham |
|---|---|---|
| Search terms and negatives | Every month, more often while an account is new | A big city throws up job, course and free advice searches that drain spend |
| Conversion tracking check | Monthly, and after any change to the website | A site update can silently stop a tag firing, and bidding carries on regardless |
| Budget and bid review | Monthly | Money should follow the services and areas that bring in work, not last year's split |
| Ad text and assets | As results come in | Testing which headlines and offers West Midlands buyers respond to |
| Location and schedule review | Quarterly, or when the business changes | New branches, new areas covered, new opening hours |
| Written report | Monthly | Spend, genuine enquiries and cost per enquiry, set out in pounds |
Beyond the city boundary
Plenty of firms that think of themselves as Birmingham businesses sell across the whole West Midlands, from Wolverhampton to Coventry, and some across the Midlands as a whole. That changes how the account should be built.
Many people never type the city. Someone in Erdington looking for an electrician will often type the trade on its own and let Google work out where they are. So the location settings decide far more than putting the word Birmingham into every ad. Naming the area in the ad text can still help, but only once targeting is right.
Split by value, not by map. If jobs in Sutton Coldfield or Solihull are worth more to you than elsewhere, or one area is noticeably more contested, give it its own campaign or bid adjustment so you can see and control what it costs. Splitting every town into a campaign of its own spreads the data too thinly for automated bidding to learn from.
Exclude what you will not serve. A firm on the south side of the city that does not cover Walsall should exclude it, rather than paying for clicks it will have to turn away. The user location report shows where clicks actually came from, and it is worth reading every quarter.
National sellers need a different question. For an online retailer or a manufacturer that ships across the UK, the city may not matter to targeting at all. The location work then becomes about regions where delivery costs, margins or competition differ.
Fees and budgets
There are two separate costs, and it helps to keep them apart. Your ad spend is paid by you directly to Google, on your own billing, and never passes through us. Our management fee is quoted for the work, after the free review, once we both know what the account needs.
We do not publish a single fee, because the honest range is wide. What moves it is the size of the account and the scope of the job: how many services and campaigns there are, whether Shopping and a product feed are involved, how much tracking has to be rebuilt, whether landing pages are part of the work, and whether sales outcomes need importing from a CRM. You get a written quote with the scope agreed up front.
Click prices are set in an auction by the other businesses bidding against you, so they vary a great deal by sector. A personal injury firm in the city centre and a dog groomer in Kings Heath face very different auctions. The review looks at what your clicks currently cost and what your margins can support, and if the sums do not work for search ads, it says so rather than recommending a budget the business cannot recover.
Where budgets leak
Waste in a local Google Ads account seldom comes from bid levels. More often it comes from settings chosen once, at set-up, and left alone while the business, its patch and its competitors changed around them.
How many of last month's Google Ads conversions reached a real person?
If nobody can say, the review will. It sets the account's figures beside what your business actually received, and the findings are yours to keep whether or not we work together.
Typical situations
These are illustrations of common situations, not client stories. None of them describes a real business or a real result.
A retailer whose Shopping ads show the same ring in several variants that compete with each other, and whose feed titles leave out the words buyers use, such as metal, stone and size. The work starts in Merchant Center rather than in the bids.
Aim: a clean feed and Shopping spend traceable to products
A precision engineering firm whose enquiries take months to turn into orders. Counting every form as a conversion teaches Google to chase students and job seekers. Importing which leads became quotes gives bidding a signal the sales team would agree with.
Aim: bidding that learns from quotes, not form fills
A dental or cosmetic clinic where some treatments are restricted by Google's healthcare policies and UK advertising rules, and where every ad lands on one page listing every service. The fix is ad text written within the rules and a page for each treatment.
Aim: approved ads that land on the right treatment page
A roofing or plumbing business in Dudley or Walsall where most enquiries arrive by phone, and the ads run overnight with nobody answering. Calls only count once they pass a set length, schedules follow opening hours, and targeting lists the towns the vans actually reach.
Aim: paying for calls someone can answer, in areas you cover
A city centre practice whose search terms report is full of training contract, salary and free advice searches, in a sector where clicks are among the dearer ones on Google. Negatives, tighter match types and a conversion that counts booked consultations rather than page visits.
Aim: spend going to people who want to instruct a solicitor
A stand builder or event caterer whose demand bunches around the exhibition calendar. A campaign left at full budget all year can keep spending between peaks; budgets planned around the calendar keep spend closer to when buyers are actually searching.
Aim: a budget that follows the events calendar
How we work
The order matters. Tuning bids against a broken conversion count only makes the account worse more quickly. The first step costs nothing.
We ask for read access to Google Ads, Analytics and any call tracking tool you use. We set the account's conversions beside your own records for the same weeks, read the search terms and check the location options. The findings come in writing and are yours to keep.
If there is work worth paying for, you get a written quote with the scope agreed up front: which campaigns, what tracking work, whether landing pages are included and how reporting will run. Ad spend stays between you and Google.
Measurement first, then structure: conversion actions fixed or replaced, campaigns grouped by service, area and margin, negatives built from real search terms, and schedules set. You see and approve the plan before the live account changes.
Ongoing management with a written monthly note in pounds covering spend, genuine enquiries and what each cost, plus the changes made and what did not work. We can go through it on a video call if you would like to.
Clear scope · Regular demos · Full handover
Honest fit
We combine ads management with website and tracking work, which helps some advertisers far more than others. If your account is already well measured and your site converts well, a specialist who only manages bids may suit you better, and we would say so in the review.
Your options
There are three reasonable ways to run Google Ads for a Birmingham business. A freelance PPC consultant in Birmingham can be a very good choice for a simple account. Which suits you depends on your time, your budget and how much website work the ads need.
| What matters | Run it in-house | Freelance PPC consultant | SpiderHunts |
|---|---|---|---|
| What you pay for | Staff time and training | A monthly fee, usually for one person's hours | A quote for the agreed scope, after a free review |
| Who does the work | Someone who often has another job too | One specialist, who may be the whole business | A remote team with one named contact |
| Knowledge of your business | Closest, from the inside | Builds up over time | Builds up over time, from your records and calls |
| Landing pages and site fixes | Needs your web developer | Usually needs your web developer | Built by us alongside the ads |
| Tracking and server-side measurement | Depends on in-house skills | Varies by consultant | Part of the work from the start |
| Meeting face to face in Birmingham | Yes | Possible if they live nearby | No: video calls and shared documents |
| Works well when | Someone has time each week and the account is simple | The account is search only and the website is sound | Tracking, landing pages or Shopping need fixing too |
Sectors
Birmingham has a broad economy, and each sector brings its own difficulties with search ads. These are the ones we would expect to come up, described in general terms.
FAQ
What Birmingham and West Midlands advertisers ask before handing over an account.
Still have a question?
Ask us directly. A senior engineer reads every question.
Ask about your projectNo. SpiderHunts has a registered office in London and a remote team, and works with Birmingham businesses through video calls, shared documents and a named contact. If you want an agency that visits your premises, we are not the right fit.
It depends on the size of the account and the scope of the work, so we do not publish one price. A Shopping catalogue with thousands of products, or an account where tracking has to be rebuilt from nothing, is more work than one search campaign for a single service. The account review is free, and the quote follows it in writing with the scope agreed up front. Your ad spend is paid to Google directly and is separate from our fee.
Yes. Google renamed AdWords as Google Ads in 2018, and plenty of people still search for the old name. The platform has changed a lot since then, with more automated bidding, Performance Max and less of the search term detail visible than before, which is why tracking and structure now matter more than manual bid changes.
No, but whoever manages them needs to understand where your customers are. Targeting, exclusions and schedules come from what you tell us about your area and your hours, and we check them against the report showing where clicks really came from. Being nearby does not help an account whose location options were left on their defaults; reading that report does.
Usually both, kept apart. Searches naming the city show clear local intent, but they are only part of what people type. General searches made by people inside your target area can be the larger share, and the location settings decide whether you appear for them at all.
Yes, as long as the account is in your name. If your current agency runs the ads from an account it owns, ask it to transfer ownership, or at least export the history, before you move. We start with the review either way, and nothing in the account changes until you have seen what we would do.
No. Click prices move with competitors, seasons and Google's own changes, and in a busy city market they can move quickly. After the review we will tell you what the account is doing now and what we think is realistic, and then report against that honestly each month.
Yes, starting with the Merchant Center feed, because feed problems hold Shopping back more often than bidding does. Our Google Shopping page covers feeds, disapprovals and Performance Max for retailers in more detail.
Not usually. Ads can run to an existing page if it loads quickly, repeats what the ad promised and makes enquiring easy. If the page is the weak point, we can build landing pages ourselves, and a full rebuild is covered on our Birmingham web design page.
It stays with you: the account, the conversion actions, the history and the data. We leave a written list of what we changed and why, so whoever runs it next, in-house or another agency, can carry on from there.
Start here
Send the form with your website, the areas you serve and whatever you are unsure about. We will compare the account's conversions with your own records, read the search terms and check the location options, then send the findings in writing with a plain view of what is worth changing. Free, and yours to keep.
Thanks, that’s with us.
A senior engineer reads every enquiry and will reply as soon as they can.
Book a time that suits you, or send a message on WhatsApp.