You hire an agency and meet the senior strategist once, during the pitch. Then a junior runs your account and a project manager relays the questions. I am the person who audits, builds and optimises your campaigns, and I am the person you talk to.
A PPC consultant is an independent specialist who plans, builds and manages paid search and paid social accounts for one client at a time, instead of splitting attention across an agency's full book of business. The work covers keyword and audience strategy, campaign structure, bid and budget management, conversion tracking and ongoing optimisation, reported directly by the person doing it rather than relayed through an account manager.
Different industries, same handful of root causes.
Conversion actions counting the same lead three times, GA4 disagreeing with the ad platform, and no one willing to say which number is real.
Clicks are up, cost per click is down, and the sales team says the leads got worse. That is an optimisation target problem, not a traffic problem.
Agency pricing assumes leverage. That means the person with 14 years of experience sold the account, and someone with 14 months is running it.
You are told the landing page is the problem, but changing it is out of scope, so nothing happens for six months.
The title is used loosely enough to mean almost anything. Here is the work, in the order it usually happens.
Where the money goes, which conversions are real, what the search terms report says the account is actually buying. Most PPC consulting engagements that go wrong skipped this and started optimising a number that was never trustworthy.
Call tracking connected to the platform, conversion actions that match the business outcome, geography and negatives tightened. Nothing scales honestly until this part is boring and correct.
Campaigns split by the thing that has different value to you, not by whatever the previous setup inherited. This is where a paid search consultant earns the fee, because platform defaults optimise for volume rather than for your margin.
Search terms, negatives, bids, budget pacing, creative testing. Unglamorous and continuous. The accounts that drift are the ones where nobody senior looks at them between reports.
Closed deals, signed cases, booked jobs, whatever your version is, imported back so the platform optimises toward revenue instead of toward form fills. This is the part almost nobody does and it is the part that changes results.
People search for this role under whatever they were told to call it. The titles overlap almost completely, and knowing which is which saves you from comparing quotes that are not comparable.
The same person. Google retired the AdWords name in 2018 and a large share of searches still use it, which is why you will see adwords consulting and Google Ads consulting sold side by side by the same people. If someone still calls the product AdWords in their own copy in 2026, that tells you something about how recently they updated anything else.
Channel neutral by definition. In practice most PPC consulting engagements are majority Google Ads, with Meta, Microsoft or LinkedIn added where the audience justifies it. The broader title usually signals someone comfortable outside one platform.
Narrower on purpose. Search only, meaning Google and Microsoft, no social and no display. Useful shorthand when the work is genuinely intent driven and you do not want budget drifting into awareness.
Tends to mean platform depth rather than commercial strategy. A specialist who knows every setting is valuable, and it is a different hire from someone who will tell you the account should spend less this quarter.
Accounts are run in a browser and reviewed on a call. Proximity stopped being a useful filter years ago, and screening by it removes most of the people who could help you. Covered in full in why location does not matter.
Two engagements carrying the same label can be very different things. Worth pinning down before money moves.
A fixed scope review of what the account is buying and where it leaks, delivered as findings you can act on with or without me. Detailed on the PPC audit page.
The account gets restructured, measurement gets fixed, campaigns get launched, and your team runs it from there. Right when you have someone capable in house who inherited a mess.
The account is run week to week by the same person who built it. Scope, cadence and what a month actually contains are on the Google Ads management page.
A second senior opinion, without replacing anyone. Useful when you suspect the account is underperforming but do not want to start over to find out.
What each of these costs, and why percentage of spend quietly rewards the wrong behaviour, is in what a PPC consultant costs, further down this page.
Almost nobody puts this on a service page, which is why the question keeps getting asked. Three models exist, and the one you are quoted tells you what the consultant is optimising for.
Usually 10 to 20% of monthly media spend. The fee scales with the budget, which suits an account that is growing, but it quietly rewards spending more rather than spending better.
A fixed fee set by scope, independent of spend. Predictable for both sides, and it keeps the incentive on the work instead of on the budget line.
Billed per hour or per defined deliverable. The right shape for a one-off audit, a build and hand over, or any piece of work with a clear end.
Below $3,000 a month in spend, a flat $750 to $1,500 is normal and percentage models rarely make sense. Between $3,000 and $10,000, expect 10 to 15% of spend or $1,500 to $3,000 flat. Between $10,000 and $50,000, 8 to 12% or $3,000 to $7,000 flat. Above $50,000, 5 to 10% or a custom retainer.
How I work: an audit first, fixed scope and fixed price, so you can judge the thinking before committing to anything ongoing. If it makes sense to carry on, management is month to month, with no twelve month lock-in. What I will not do is quote a number before seeing the account, because a price set off a form submission is priced from averages rather than from your situation. The full breakdown of each model, what is negotiable, and the costs that sit outside the consultant fee is in the guide to PPC pricing models.
A PPC consultation is a working session, not a sales pitch. Before the call, I ask for read access to the ad account and analytics so I show up already knowing what the account is buying, rather than asking you to explain metrics from memory.
Spend by campaign, which conversions are actually firing correctly, and whether the account structure matches how the business sells. Most of what comes up on the call was visible in the data first.
Where the budget is currently going, what looks broken versus what just looks unusual, and whether the timing and spend level make sense for your situation right now. If the honest answer is "not yet," I say so.
A short written summary of what I found and what I would do first, whether or not we work together afterward. A PPC consultation should leave you better informed even if you hire nobody.
Usually 30 to 45 minutes for the call itself. The account review beforehand takes longer on my side, and that is intentional: a consultation built on a real look at your data is worth more than one built on questions alone.
Some people search for a "PPC consultancy" expecting a small team rather than one person. In practice, most independent PPC consultants and small PPC consultancies run the same way: one senior person owns the account, and any additional hands are specialists brought in for a specific piece, not a layer of account management.
Four ways to solve the same problem, and they fail in different places. Worth knowing which failure you can live with.
Wins on breadth, cover during holidays and having a team when something breaks at scale. The cost is that the senior person you met in the pitch is rarely the person in your account afterwards. That trade is laid out in full further down this page.
One senior person, direct access, no relay. A small PPC consultancy is the same trade with a second pair of hands. The limit is capacity: a consultant cannot take unlimited accounts, and there is no bench if you need five channels built simultaneously.
Cheapest per hour and the widest quality range. Fine for a defined task, risky as the owner of an account that carries revenue. If that is the route, the freelance Google Ads specialist page covers what separates experience from availability.
The right answer once spend justifies a full salary and the role has enough work to stay interesting. Below that threshold you get someone junior learning on your budget, or someone senior who leaves out of boredom.
Saying this costs me work, and saying it is why the people who do hire me tend to stay.
If enquiries already arrive and go cold, more of them will not help. Intake is the constraint and paid media will only make the leak more expensive.
Advertising accelerates whatever is already true. If the pricing, the reviews or the site cannot win on their own merits, paid search buys you a faster look at that.
Below a certain spend the account never collects enough conversions to optimise on, so every decision stays a guess. In expensive verticals that floor is higher than most people expect.
Some engagements are really about having a name attached when results are questioned. That works better with an agency, and I am not the right fit.
Four questions that separate someone who runs accounts from someone who reports on them. Ask me the same ones.
Ask for a name and a cadence. The gap between the person selling and the person executing is the single most common complaint about agency work, and it is answerable in one sentence.
A Google Ads consultant who answers "form fills and calls" without asking what a good lead looks like for you is going to optimise toward the cheap ones. The right answer starts with a question about your business.
Everyone selling management has an incentive to keep the account running. Someone who can name the conditions under which they would advise pausing is worth more than someone who cannot.
You should own the Google Ads account, the analytics and the tracking, not rent them. If leaving means starting over, that is not a service, it is a lock.
One person accountable for the whole conversion path, from the auction to the form submit.
Before anything gets scaled, the data has to be right. GA4 and Google Tag Manager audited and rebuilt where needed, conversion actions deduplicated, Meta CAPI or server-side tagging where it applies, and offline conversion import so the platform optimises toward revenue instead of form fills.
Account structure, keywords, negatives, bidding, ad copy and audiences. Built and maintained by me, not handed to a junior after onboarding.
Paid traffic dies on a bad page. I build and iterate the landing pages the campaigns point to, so the conversion path is one system instead of two vendors blaming each other. Fixed scope, tied to the campaigns, not open-ended web design.
You message me, not a ticketing system. Fewer clients than an agency roster by design, which is the whole reason the model works.
A Looker Studio dashboard tied to your real conversion data, plus a written read on what changed and why. No 40-tab spreadsheet, no vanity metrics, no 'impressions are up' as a headline.
I am one person, so I take a limited number of engagements. If I do not think I am the right fit for your situation I will say so on the first call.
Some engagements have verified public numbers. Others are longer-running or confidential roles where I can speak to scope and approach but not exact percentages. I would rather show you the real mix than invent a case study.
Roughly $20K per month in Google Ads spend, in a market with $45 to $80 CPCs.
Alongside consulting I hold a senior in-house paid media role in healthcare. Nothing from that work is published anywhere on this site: no employer named, no budgets, no results, no internal detail. It is listed only because it is where a large part of my healthcare experience comes from.
I go through the account, the tracking and the conversion path and tell you what is actually broken. You get the findings whether or not we work together.
Tracking, conversion actions and structure get corrected first. Optimising on top of bad data just makes you confidently wrong.
Campaigns, ad copy, audiences and landing pages built around how your buyers actually search.
Weekly optimisation against the metric that matters to your business, with a monthly written read on what moved and what is next.
Long-form writing on this topic from the blog.
Companies that want the senior consultant on the account, from the first call to the reporting.
Not a fit: Companies that need a full-service creative and social team under one contract.
A PPC consultant is an independent specialist who manages Google Ads and paid social accounts directly for one client, rather than an agency team splitting attention across many. They handle strategy, campaign builds, tracking and optimisation, and report on the work themselves instead of through an account manager.
Usually the retainer is lower, because there is no account management layer, no sales team and no office to fund. But that is not the main argument. The main argument is that the senior person is the one doing the work.
I prefer a standalone audit first, which is fixed scope and fixed price. If it makes sense to continue after that, ongoing management is month to month. I do not do twelve month lock-ins.
Google Ads, Meta Ads and LinkedIn Ads, plus Microsoft Ads where the audience justifies it. I would rather run two channels properly than five badly.
Yes. Most of my work is with US, Canadian and European companies, and the whole engagement runs remotely. See the guide on why location does not matter for this kind of work.
I review your account and tracking before the call, then we spend 30 to 45 minutes going through what the data actually shows, what looks broken, and whether now is the right time to spend more. You get a short written summary afterward regardless of whether we work together.
Not in practice. Most small PPC consultancies are one senior person with occasional specialist help, run the same way an independent consultant runs an account: direct access, no account management layer, and the same person doing the work who sold it.
A short form beats a long discovery call. Give me the basics and I will come back with a straight read on whether I can help, usually within one business day.
Rather book a time directly? Schedule a call.