Google Ads Management — Hamilton, Ontario
Performance Max hides it. Percentage-of-spend billing rewards your agency for hiding it. We run Hamilton ad accounts on a flat fee, in your name, with the reporting that puts the spend back in view.
Google Ads works. That isn't in question. What's broken is how the service around it is usually structured — and every one of these problems is fixable by choice, not by cleverness.
Performance Max spends across Search, Shopping, Display, YouTube, Gmail and Discover, then reports the total as one conversion number. Some of that spend goes to people already searching your business name — customers you were getting for free. The campaign counts those as conversions it produced.
If the management fee is a percentage of ad spend, raising your budget raises the agency's revenue. Recommending a cut costs them money. That's not an accusation about any particular firm — it's just what the incentive does, and most clients are never told the fee is structured that way.
Costs per click keep rising in competitive categories. When results soften, the reflex is a budget increase. Usually the real constraint is the landing page, the offer, or how fast leads get called back — all cheaper to fix than to outbid.
Fees and ownership
Most agency pages don't have this section. Here's ours, before you ask for it.
Percentage-of-spend is the most common agency pricing model in paid search, and it creates a direct conflict: the agency earns more when you spend more, and earns less when it recommends restraint.
We charge a flat monthly management fee, quoted before you sign, that doesn't move when your budget does. If the right advice is to cut your spend in half, we can give it without taking a pay cut for being honest.
Ask any agency you're considering these four questions before signing. The answers vary more than you'd expect.
How management runs
Running ads into broken conversion tracking is the fastest way to waste a budget, and it's more common than not. We don't launch until the measurement holds up.
Campaign structure decides how much visibility you have later. We separate Search from Performance Max deliberately so you can see what each is actually doing, rather than accepting a blended number.
Brand terms get excluded from Performance Max unless there's a specific reason not to. Otherwise you pay for clicks from people already looking for you, and the campaign takes credit for revenue you'd have earned anyway.
Negative keyword lists get built early and reviewed weekly. In Hamilton, that usually means filtering out job seekers, DIY searchers, and — depending on your category — traffic from outside your actual service radius.
Landing pages matter more than bids. If a click lands on a slow page or a general homepage, no amount of bid management rescues it. Often the highest-return change in the first month has nothing to do with the ad account.
Search term review, negative keyword additions, bid and budget adjustments, ad copy testing, and asset group refreshes for Performance Max — weekly, because search terms drift fast and wasted spend compounds quietly.
Reporting comes monthly and leads with cost per lead and where budget was wasted, not with impressions. Every report names at least one thing that underperformed and what we changed because of it.
Proof
Working with Melo Digitals transformed our online presence.
Client testimonial · Togetha
Paid search and the site it points at are one system, not two. We built and launched Togetha's site, which means when we run traffic to a page we can fix the page — most agencies can only report that the landing page is underperforming and wait for someone else to act on it.
See the full portfolioQuestions we get asked
Roughly $1,500 a month in ad spend. Below that, management fees consume too much of the return to make sense.
If you're under that figure, you're usually better served by putting the money into your Google Business Profile and local search, where a Hamilton business can compete on relevance rather than budget. We'll tell you that on the first call rather than taking the work.
No. We charge a flat monthly management fee, quoted before you sign, that doesn't change when your budget does.
Percentage-of-spend billing means the agency earns more when you spend more and loses income when it recommends cutting back. That conflict shapes advice whether anyone intends it to or not.
You do. It's created under your billing, in your business name, and you hold admin access throughout.
If we stop working together, we remove our access and the account stays exactly as it is — with all its conversion history, audience lists and campaign structure. That history is worth real money, because a new account starts the learning process from zero.
Sometimes, and only alongside a Search campaign you can actually see into — not instead of one.
Performance Max spends across Search, Shopping, Display, YouTube, Gmail and Discover and reports it as a single number. It can perform well, particularly for e-commerce. The risk is that it absorbs your brand traffic and claims credit for it. We exclude brand terms, segment asset groups, and report channel breakdowns so you can judge it on what it actually added.
Clicks arrive immediately. Reliable cost per lead takes about six to eight weeks.
That gap is the algorithm learning and us cutting waste from the search terms. Judging performance in week two is judging the least optimized version of the account you'll ever have.
Only if your economics survive Toronto click costs, which are meaningfully higher for the same terms.
For most Hamilton service businesses the better play is to saturate Hamilton, Burlington and the surrounding communities first, where you have proximity and relevance working in your favour. If you can already convert every lead Hamilton produces, expanding the radius makes sense. If you can't, it just costs more per lead.
They answer different questions. Ads buy visibility now; SEO earns it over months and keeps producing after you stop paying.
If you need leads this quarter, start with ads. If you're building something for the next three years, SEO compounds. Most businesses eventually run both, using ad data to find which terms actually convert before committing content effort to them — our SEO page covers that side.
Working in Hamilton
Hamilton advertisers sit in an awkward position. Toronto firms bid into overlapping search results with budgets local businesses can't match, and Google's location targeting doesn't respect the QEW as a boundary the way your business does.
The practical consequence is that loose targeting bleeds budget. A Hamilton contractor targeting "Ontario" or even "Greater Toronto Area" pays Toronto rates for clicks from people they'd never drive out to serve. Tight radius targeting around Hamilton, Ancaster, Dundas, Stoney Creek and Burlington usually cuts cost per lead before a single ad gets rewritten.
The second local factor is seasonality. Hamilton's trades, home services and outdoor categories swing hard between winter and summer, and a budget that made sense in June is wrong by November. Flat-rate annual budgets quietly overspend in the slow months and underspend when demand peaks.
We're based in Hamilton, Ontario, and we'd rather review your existing account before proposing anything. If it's already working, we'll say so.
If you're already running ads, we'll go through the account and show you where the spend is going. You keep the findings regardless of what you decide.