Digital Ads in Dorset
We plan and manage paid advertising for businesses across Dorset and Somerset, from a studio on South Street in Sherborne. Google Ads and Meta Ads, including the creative. The accounts are set up in your name so you keep the data and the history, our fee doesn't rise with your budget, and we'll tell you before you start whether your spend is large enough for this to work.
What we run
- Strategy. Which platform, which audiences, what the budget split is, and what a realistic cost per enquiry looks like before anything goes live.
- Google Ads. Search campaigns targeting people actively looking for what you sell, shopping campaigns for product businesses, display ads placed across the websites your audience already visits, and remarketing to people who've been to your site.
- Meta Ads. Facebook and Instagram, including feed, Stories and Reels placements. Prospecting to cold audiences, retargeting warm ones, and catalogue ads for product businesses.
- Campaigns. Structure, tracking and launch, set up so performance can actually be measured rather than guessed at.
- Creative. The ads themselves, shot and designed here rather than assembled from whatever images you already have.
- Optimisation. Ongoing testing, negative keywords, audience refinement, budget reallocation. Paid advertising is not a thing you switch on.
Google or Meta, and when each one works
They do genuinely different jobs and the right answer depends on your product, not on which platform is fashionable.
Google captures demand that already exists. Someone types what they want and you appear. That makes it excellent when people actively search for your product or service, and useless when they don't. If almost nobody searches for what you sell, there's nothing to bid on and no amount of budget changes that.
Display is the exception inside Google. Rather than waiting for someone to search, it places image and banner ads across Google's network of websites, apps and YouTube. Google has a detailed picture of where people spend time online and what they've been looking at recently, so it can put your ad in front of the right person on a site that has nothing to do with what you sell. That behaves far more like Meta than like Search, and it earns its place on awareness and remarketing rather than on capturing someone ready to buy today.
Meta creates demand that wasn't there. Nobody on Instagram is looking for you, so the job is interrupting the right person with something worth stopping for. That works when the product is visual, when it's an easy decision at the price, or when the audience is definable by interest and behaviour rather than by what they're searching.
For a lot of Dorset product brands, Meta ends up doing more of the work. The products photograph well, the price points suit an impulse decision, and the local search volume for a candle, a cider or a piece of homeware is thin. For trades, professional services and anything urgent, Google is usually the stronger of the two, because people search when they have a problem.
Plenty of businesses run more than one. Where budget allows, the usual pattern is Google Search carrying the high-intent queries, with Display and Meta building awareness and bringing back people who didn't convert first time. The split gets reviewed as the numbers come in rather than fixed at the start.
Your account, your data
We set campaigns up inside your own Google Ads and Meta Business accounts, with billing in your name, and we work in them as a managed user.
The alternative arrangement is common and worth avoiding. Some agencies run client campaigns inside their own manager account, which means the entire performance history, the conversion data, the audience lists and the learning the algorithms have accumulated all belong to the agency. Leave, and you start from zero with new accounts that perform worse for months.
Anything built during our time working together stays with you. Accounts, history, audiences, pixels, creative files, all of it.
What you need to spend before this works
Paid advertising has a floor, and below it the money is mostly wasted rather than partly wasted.
The reason is data. Campaigns need enough clicks and enough conversions for the platform's bidding to learn what a good customer looks like. Spread a small budget across several campaigns and audiences and none of them gather enough signal to optimise, so you pay full price for the learning phase indefinitely.
We won't take on an account below £200 per month (for a local campaign) in media spend, because we'd be charging you a management fee to run something that can't perform. If you're below that, the honest answer is usually to put the money into search, photography and video or organic social instead, and come back to ads when there's more to work with.
How the fees work
Management fee separate from media spend, and you see both.
Media spend goes directly from your account to Google or Meta. We never invoice you for it, mark it up, or take a rebate on it. Our fee is for the work, and it's the same whether the platforms have a good month or a bad one.
That matters because percentage-of-spend fee models create a quiet incentive to increase your budget rather than improve your results. Ours doesn't.
Advertising to a rural county
Targeting Dorset and Somerset is a different problem from targeting a city, and default campaign settings handle it badly on both platforms.
The population is spread out and the total search volume for most local services is genuinely small. On Google, a radius drawn around Sherborne covers a lot of fields. Draw it wider to find enough people and you start paying for clicks from Bristol and Southampton, where you probably can't compete on price and may not want to travel.
Broad match keywords are the other budget drain. Left unchecked they'll show your ads for searches that are related in the algorithm's judgement and irrelevant in yours, and in a small market a handful of wasted clicks a day is a meaningful share of the budget.
Meta has its own version of the problem. Audiences that are too tightly drawn around a small population never gather enough data to optimise, so the campaign stays expensive. The fix is usually to widen the geography and let the targeting narrow itself on behaviour, which feels counterintuitive but works better than drawing a ten mile circle and hoping.
What actually works locally: tight keyword lists on Google with aggressive negative keywords reviewed weekly at the start, location settings restricted to people physically in the area rather than people interested in it, broader audiences on Meta with the creative doing the qualifying, and campaigns split so a town you actually want isn't competing for budget against one you don't.
What we'll tell you before you start
Roughly what a click costs in your category, because in some sectors it's under a pound and in others it's over fifteen, and that changes the entire calculation.
What you need a customer to be worth for the numbers to work. If a click costs £4 and one enquiry in ten becomes a sale, you're paying £40 a customer before our fee. That's fine for a kitchen fitter and impossible for a £12 candle.
Which platform your product actually suits, including when the answer is neither.
Whether your website can convert the traffic. Sending paid clicks to a page that doesn't answer the question is the most expensive mistake in this whole discipline, and we'd rather fix the page first than spend your budget proving the point.
Whether the first two months will look bad. They often do. Campaigns need a learning period, and reading the first fortnight's numbers as a verdict is how good accounts get killed early.
Creative is the variable people underspend on
On Meta particularly, the creative does more to determine performance than the targeting does. The platform is good at finding the right people. It cannot make a dull image interesting.
Running new campaigns on whatever photography already exists is the most common reason they underperform, and it's the cheapest thing to fix. We shoot and edit in house, so ads get made for the placement rather than cropped down from something built for a different purpose. Vertical for Stories and Reels, square for feed, and enough variations to test properly rather than one execution running until it stops working.
Creative also fatigues. The same ad shown to the same audience for two months stops performing, which means an ongoing supply of new material matters more than getting the first one perfect.
How it's reported
Monthly, in plain numbers. What was spent, what came back, cost per enquiry, and which campaigns are worth keeping.
Impressions and click-through rates are diagnostic rather than results, and we'll show them where they explain something. The number that matters is what a customer cost and whether that's less than a customer is worth.
Conversion tracking gets set up properly before launch, including calls, form submissions and purchases, because a campaign that can't measure outcomes can't be optimised and neither of us will know what's working.
See the work
Paid campaigns and creative for businesses across Dorset, Somerset and further afield. View our work.
