(21) — Google Ads & PPC
Google Ads in Dubai, with the numbers in your account.
You pay Google directly. You own the account. Our fee is published and does not change based on what you spend it on. Everything below is what we do inside that account and how we report it.
AED 1,000 a month, or 10% of spend.
Whichever is greater, published, and separable from the media. You pay Google directly from your own account — we are never between you and the invoice, so there is no figure you cannot see.
That structure matters more than it sounds, and it is worth being blunt about why. An agency that marks up media earns more when you spend more, which means every recommendation to increase budget is also a recommendation to increase its own invoice. The incentive is not hidden or malicious; it is simply built in, and it sits in every conversation about scaling.
A fee that is a flat rate or a fixed percentage of spend, with the media untouched, removes that. We earn the same whether the right answer this month is to spend more, spend less, or move the budget to something else entirely — which is the only position from which that advice is worth anything.
AED 5,000 a month, and why.
Below that floor there is not enough data to optimise toward a reliable cost per lead. Not because the campaigns cannot run — they can — but because the volume is too small to tell a real pattern from noise, so every adjustment is a guess dressed as a decision. You would be paying us to guess.
If your budget is smaller we will tell you what to fix first instead. It is usually the website or the tracking, both of which cost less than the campaign would have and both of which make the campaign work better when you do run it.
Paid clicks into broken measurement is paying to lose the data.
A campaign is a machine for turning money into visits. What makes it worth running is knowing which of those visits became business, and that is a property of the measurement rather than of the campaign. Start spending before it is right and you buy the traffic twice: once for the click, and again in the months of decisions made from numbers that were never true.
So the Measurement group of the audit runs before anything goes live — GA4 installed once, calls and form submissions as events, conversions imported and de-duplicated, consent that does not silently discard what it claims to collect. All four are published on the work page, with the other sixteen checks.
What we actually do in there.
- 01 — The search terms report, and the negative list
- What people actually typed, read against what you are willing to pay for. A B2B account with no maintained negative list buys job seekers looking for work at your company, students researching the field, and people searching your competitor by name. The list is built from the report and revisited, not written once at launch.
- 02 — Match types, chosen deliberately
- Broad match without a negative list is a way of letting Google spend your budget on adjacent industries. Each match type has a job; the mistake is using one everywhere and then blaming the platform for what it bought.
- 03 — Ad group to landing page relevance
- The promise in the ad is the first line on the page it opens. Sending every campaign to the homepage is the most expensive shortcut in a paid account: you pay full price for the click and then ask the visitor to find what you advertised.
- 04 — Budget pacing
- Where the money is going this month, and where it is being wasted. Campaigns drift — a change in competition or a seasonal shift moves spend toward whatever is cheapest to serve rather than whatever produces enquiries.
- 05 — Conversion import, so bidding optimises toward revenue
- Conversions imported and de-duplicated against Analytics, so smart bidding is optimising toward enquiries that became business rather than toward form fills. An account bidding on the wrong signal gets very good at producing the wrong thing.
The Paid group, in full.
Four of the twenty checks are about a paid account, and they are what the first audit looks at before anyone proposes a budget. They are published, alongside the other sixteen, on the work page. Run them against your own account — all four are visible from inside it and none of them need us.
Monthly, in plain language.
What we did, what it cost, and what came back. Written to be read by whoever pays the invoice rather than by whoever ran the campaign, which mostly means naming things in the words the business uses instead of the ones the platform uses.
If a channel is underperforming it appears in that report before you ask. A report that only contains the good months is not a report, it is a renewal document, and the numbers are in your own account anyway — you can check every figure we send without asking us for access.
What we turn down.
- No guaranteed cost per acquisitionIt is set by your market, your offer and your competition, none of which an agency controls. A guaranteed figure is either a guess or a number chosen because it is easy to hit.
- No markup on mediaOur fee is our fee. A percentage quietly added to the media is a second invoice you did not agree to, and it changes what the agency is incentivised to recommend.
- No reporting impressions and clicks as outcomesThey are inputs. A month with more clicks and fewer enquiries is a worse month, and a report that leads with clicks is hiding that.
- No campaigns under the minimumBelow AED 5,000 a month in spend the data cannot support the decisions, so managing it would be charging you for guesswork.
Questions, answered plainly.
What is your fee on ad spend?
The greater of AED 1,000 per month or 10% of your ad spend. It is published, it is separable from the media, and it does not change based on what you spend the media on.
What is the minimum budget for Google Ads in Dubai?
AED 5,000 per month in ad spend. Below that there is not enough data to optimise toward a reliable cost per lead — you would be paying us to guess. If your budget is smaller we will tell you what to fix first instead, usually the website or the tracking, and that advice is free.
Do you mark up media?
No. You pay Google directly from your own account. We never sit between you and the invoice, so there is no figure you cannot see and no margin buried in the media line.
Who owns the Google Ads account?
You do, along with Analytics, Search Console and Tag Manager. Nothing sits behind our login. If you stop working with us the account continues, the history continues, and there is nothing to hand over because it was never ours.
How soon will I see enquiries?
Google Ads can produce enquiries in the first weeks once tracking is correct. That is the honest position and it is deliberately not a number — what actually determines it is your market, your offer and whether the measurement was right before the campaign started.
Do you manage Meta Ads too?
Paid social sits under our social media service rather than here, and it is priced separately so you can run one without the other. If a campaign genuinely belongs on Meta rather than search we will say so, including when that means less work for us.
What if the campaigns aren’t working?
We raise it before you ask. Monthly reporting says what we did, what it cost and what came back, and where a number went the wrong way it appears in that report rather than being left for you to find. If the channel is wrong for your business we will recommend stopping it.
Is there a contract?
Month-to-month with 30 days’ notice. Unlike SEO there is no initial commitment, because a paid campaign can be judged inside a month once tracking is correct — so asking you to commit for longer would be asking for time we do not need.