A budget and a keyword list will get a campaign running. Getting relevant traffic out of it is a different job: search terms, bids, ads, landing pages and conversion tracking all have to agree with each other.
Davnoot manages PPC for businesses selling into Montreal and into other markets, with the plan built from what you sell, who you want to reach, and what the campaign has to produce.
Request a PPC consultation →The account gets shaped by three answers: what you sell, who you want walking through the door, and what a good month looks like in numbers. Change any one of them and the keyword list, the structure and the bidding change with it.
Campaigns run against one objective at a time. Lead generation, sales, phone calls, quote requests, website traffic, local service work and ecommerce each pull the account in a different direction, and an account asked to do all seven at once does none of them cheaply.
If your paid search is running specifically on Google, the platform-level detail lives on our Google Ads agency Montreal page. This page is about how the account is managed, whichever platforms the budget ends up on.
A PPC campaign is a set of settings that only make sense against each other. Move the bids without reading the search terms and you have changed a number, not fixed anything. The order matters more than the frequency: search terms, then structure, then bids.
The keyword list is a guess. The search terms report is what people actually typed. We work both: tightening match types where the list has drifted, and adding the terms that were already converting before anyone chose them.
Campaigns get split by service, by product, by location or by search intent. Once they are separated, budget can move toward the part of the account that is earning and away from the part that is not, which nobody can do while everything shares one pot.
Irrelevant searches arrive on their own and they spend real money. The exclusion list is what holds a campaign on searches that have something to do with your business, and it needs adding to every month.
We test headlines, descriptions, offers and calls to action, then check the page the ad points at. A click on a good ad still goes nowhere if the landing page answers a different question than the search asked.
Contact forms, phone calls, quote requests, bookings, purchases and lead forms each get tracked as their own action. Without that, the account is being managed on traffic and nobody knows which keyword produced the enquiry.
Click-through rate, cost per click, conversion rate, cost per lead, cost per acquisition, conversion volume, revenue and return on ad spend, read together rather than one at a time. Bids, keywords, ads, audiences and budgets then move against what those numbers said.
Location is a structural decision before it is a bid adjustment. When your customers are in Montreal, or in a few specific areas around it, most of the work is making sure the budget never leaves that footprint.
Businesses covering more than one region get a campaign per service area. One region usually carries the enquiries while another quietly carries the spend, and neither shows up while both sit in the same ad group.
Campaigns run in English, French, or both. The two audiences search with different words and rarely at the same cost per click, so they belong in separate campaigns rather than one campaign translated into the other.
Clicks tell you an ad was interesting enough to press. They tell you nothing about whether the campaign brought in business. Every number below gets read next to the others, because almost any one of them will move on its own without a single extra enquiry arriving.
Reading them produces a list of changes: bids, keywords, ads, audiences, budgets. A monthly report that ends without one of those is a screenshot, not management.
The ad has to match what the person typed, and the page behind it has to be an obvious next step. We test headlines, descriptions, offers and calls to action, then look at whether the landing page is holding up its end of that.
A campaign will collect clicks and produce nothing when the landing page answers a different question than the search did. Raising the budget on that campaign buys more of the same outcome at a higher price.
Paid search buys the demand that already exists this quarter. Ongoing search engine optimization lowers the share of that demand you have to keep paying for, and Meta Ads management reaches people who have not started searching yet.
Most of what makes a PPC account work is the same everywhere. What changes is the price of a click, what counts as a qualified lead, and how tightly the campaign has to be fenced. Nine industries where that gap is wide enough to have earned its own page:
PPC covers the searches happening this week. The channels below either reach people before they start searching or lower what the same enquiry costs you next quarter.
Keyword research, campaign setup, search-term analysis, conversion tracking, testing, ongoing optimization: that is the sequence, and Davnoot runs it for businesses in Montreal. Book a free 30-minute call and we will go through the account you already have and what we would change in it first.