Why we never touch your ad spend.

When an agency runs ads for you, there is a question worth asking before you agree to anything: where does the money go?

In most cases, the answer is: through the agency first, and then to the platform. The agency charges you a budget, takes their percentage, and passes the remainder on to Google or Meta. The number you see on your invoice is not the number that buys you clicks.

This is standard practice. It is also, in my view, a structural conflict of interest that most business owners do not know exists until they look for it.

Here is a typical arrangement. You agree to spend five hundred pounds a month on Google ads. The agency invoices you for five hundred pounds. But the amount that actually reaches Google might be four hundred. Or three hundred and fifty. The remainder is the agency's margin on your media budget.

Some agencies are transparent about this split. Many are not. The disclosure is often buried in the contract, written in a way that makes it easy to miss. You assume your five hundred pounds is working for you. Less of it is than you think.

The consequence is a misalignment of incentives. The agency benefits when you spend more. Not when you spend efficiently. Not when the campaigns earn back. When the budget goes up. So when they suggest increasing the spend, there is a financial reason for that suggestion that has nothing to do with whether the ads are performing.

We have no financial reason to keep a failing campaign running. That is by design.

We do not hold your ad budget. You pay Google or Meta directly, from your own card, at cost. No intermediary, no markup, no percentage taken off the top.

We charge a flat fee for the management work: writing the copy and creative, building the campaigns, setting the targeting, and reviewing performance every week. That fee is the same whether your monthly budget is two hundred pounds or two thousand.

If a campaign is working, we tell you and recommend what to do next. If it stops working, we pause it and tell you why. We do not let campaigns run on autopilot because they are easy to ignore. And we have no financial incentive to keep spending your money when it is not earning back.

On a modest ad budget, the difference is real. An agency taking fifteen per cent on a thousand-pound monthly budget is taking a hundred and fifty pounds a month that could have bought you clicks, conversions, or calls. Over a year, that is eighteen hundred pounds.

We would rather that money bought you customers.

The other difference is accountability. When you pay the platform directly and see the exact spend in your own Google or Meta account, there is no ambiguity. You can see what was spent, what it returned, and whether the work was worth doing. That transparency is part of what we offer.