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Ad management · Add-on

Paid traffic that books real customers — to accounts you own.

£600/month management fee, on top of a Foundation, Growth, or Scale plan. Plus ad spend, paid directly to the ad platforms. You hold the ad accounts, you set the budget, every penny of spend is visible to you.

Who it is for

Ad management is the right call when…

Businesses that need leads now, rather than in six months

SEO compounds; paid ads buy traffic immediately. When the moment is a sales push, a seasonal window, or a new service line, paid is the lever that moves quickly.

Owners who have run campaigns before and got nothing back

You have spent on Meta or Google before with little to show for it, because nobody was tracking what worked. You want someone running the campaigns who knows what conversion tracking really is.

Service businesses with high lifetime value

A booked customer is worth far more than a click. Paid ads only make sense when the maths works, and we work that out before recommending a budget.

Scope

What the retainer covers

Campaign setup

Account hygiene, conversion tracking wired up properly, audiences, ad groups, and exclusions. The foundations that decide whether ads return money.

Creative direction

Ad copy, headlines, image and video direction, landing-page suggestions. We brief and review; new creative production is scoped separately when the build calls for it.

Bid management

Ongoing budget allocation across campaigns, audiences, and platforms. Budget chases the channels and keywords actually returning enquiries.

Conversion tracking

Conversions wired up correctly across the site and ad platforms, so the numbers in the dashboard match the bookings in your calendar. Tracking is the difference between insight and guesswork.

Weekly review

A weekly look at what is working and what is not, with adjustments made the same week. Decisions happen on a weekly cadence rather than a monthly one.

Ad spend

How the money flows

The most important thing to be clear about. Ad spend is paid by you directly to the platforms; IDS manages the campaigns.

Your accounts, your card

Ad accounts are created in your name. Google, Meta, and LinkedIn each hold your credit card directly. IDS is granted user access to manage the campaigns.

Spend goes straight to the platforms

Ad spend is invoiced to you by Google, Meta, or LinkedIn directly. IDS does not buy media on your behalf and does not see your card.

Full visibility

Every penny of spend, every campaign, every ad, and every conversion is visible to you in your own accounts. The platform dashboards are your source of truth.

You set the budget

You decide the monthly ad spend, and you can change it at any time. We recommend a starting figure based on your unit economics, and the number stays yours.

The £600/month paid to IDS is the management fee: time spent on setup, tracking, optimisation, and reporting. The ad spend is whatever budget you choose to put with Google, Meta, or LinkedIn, paid directly to them.

First 90 days

What the ramp looks like

Realistic expectations: month one is for setup and tracking. Real performance data starts in month two.

Month 1 · Setup

Account audit (or fresh creation), conversion tracking, audience research, competitor analysis, and the first campaigns built. Spending usually starts in week 2 or 3 once tracking is correct.

Month 2 · Learn

The first real data lands. Bid adjustments happen daily; weak audiences and creatives are paused; winners are scaled. A baseline cost-per-enquiry is established.

Month 3 · Compound

Budget is reallocated to what is working, retargeting and lookalike audiences are layered in, and creative is refreshed. Cost-per-enquiry should be trending down.

Cadence

What happens, and how often

Daily

Bid checks, anomaly monitoring, and pause-or-scale decisions on what is clearly working or wasting spend.

Weekly

A short written review covering spend, conversions, cost-per-enquiry, the campaigns paused or scaled, and the tests lined up for next week.

Monthly

A full report covering spend, conversions, cost-per-enquiry, return on ad spend (where measurable), the work that landed, and the priority list for next month.

Pairing

Which plan to pair this with

With Foundation

Workable when the site is already converting. Ads send the traffic; the site does the rest.

With Growth

Stronger. Growth ships monthly improvement work on landing pages and conversion paths while ads send traffic to them. The two reinforce each other.

With Scale (recommended)

The strongest pairing. Scale runs the pipeline that captures, acknowledges, books, follows up, and routes every enquiry the ads bring in. Every pound of spend gets a chance to convert.

FAQs

Common questions about Ad management

Why £600/month management plus ad spend, rather than all-in?

The management work is similar whether you spend £500 or £5,000 a month, because the time goes into setup, tracking, bid management, and review. A single all-in fee either caps your reach or pads our margin. Separating the two is the cleaner pricing.

Do you take a percentage of ad spend?

The £600 management fee is fixed. Our income is the same whether your budget is £500 or £5,000, so the recommendations are not skewed toward bigger budgets.

What budget should I start with?

It depends on your unit economics and your patience. Most service businesses start at £20 to £50 per day, which gathers enough data to optimise within a month. Lower than that and learning takes too long; higher than that without tracking in place is wasteful.

Which platforms do you run?

Google Ads (Search, Performance Max, YouTube where it fits), Meta (Facebook and Instagram), and LinkedIn for B2B. The platform mix is recommended based on your customers, and our fee is the same regardless of which platforms we end up running.

How does this differ from the SEO retainer?

Paid ads buy traffic; SEO earns it. Ads work this month and stop the moment the budget stops. SEO takes 3 to 6 months to compound but keeps working when the budget turns off. Most pipeline-driven businesses run both: ads while SEO catches up, SEO while ads keep the calendar full.

Can the retainer run without a plan?

Ad management runs alongside a Foundation, Growth, or Scale plan because the campaigns depend on a fast, well-measured site with working tracking. Without that, the ad spend is hard to justify.

Do you guarantee a cost-per-lead?

A specific cost-per-lead cannot be guaranteed by any provider. What we commit to is the work itself, the tracking, weekly visibility, and direct reporting on what is and is not working.

What happens if I cancel?

No minimum term. Cancel any time — your plan stops renewing and the current month is not refunded. No exit fee. The ad accounts stay in your name, along with the data, the audiences, the conversion setup, and the creative. IDS access is removed on the cutover date.

Also consider

Or build a free-traffic engine alongside

SEO retainer, £650/month

Paid ads buy traffic now; SEO earns it later. Running both together (ads filling the pipeline while SEO compounds in the background) is the durable model. Read about the SEO retainer →

Start Ad management

£600/month management, plus your ad spend.

IDS is not currently VAT registered. No VAT is charged. No minimum term. Cancel any time — your plan stops renewing and the current month is not refunded. No exit fee.