What to spend, where the budget actually goes, and how to check the account yourself rather than take a report on trust.
Guide
Your ads platform and your analytics will report different numbers for the same month, and neither is broken. They count different things on purpose. Here is which one to believe, for which question.
3 min
Guide
The Ad Grant gives an eligible non-profit $10,000 a month in free Google Search ads. Most granted accounts go quiet because of a click-through rate rule that runs in the background and deactivates accounts that fall below it.
3 min
Guide
Smart bidding is Google Ads setting your bids automatically toward whatever your conversion actions count. It is genuinely good on clean data, and it fails in three predictable ways: fed fake conversions, starved of data, or judged too soon after a fix.
2 min
Guide
Plain definitions of remarketing and audience decay, and the reason a broken tracking tag is an urgent problem rather than a cosmetic one: every untagged day shrinks an audience you can never rebuild.
2 min
Guide
A conversion action is the event you tell Google Ads to count as a success, and every report and bidding decision hangs off it. Here is how it works, how the counting setting should be set, and how to check yours in ten minutes.
2 min
Guide
Nobody in this market publishes prices, which is exactly why this page exists. What Google Ads itself costs against what a manager costs, my own management fee of R6,500 to R10,500 a month, the three ways agencies charge, and the media budget below which you should pay nobody a fee.
6 min
Guide
How to use Google's Ads Transparency Center, the Sponsored label in live results, the Meta Ad Library and third-party tools to see what any company is advertising, plus the two public page checks that show whether those ads are actually measured.
6 min
Guide
How to inherit a Google Ads account: the access levels and the invitation that get you in without swapping logins, then the fixed order to work in. Secure ownership, snapshot everything, read the change history, audit measurement before campaigns, change slowly.
6 min
Guide
Google Ads management is priced the same three ways in every market, and the numbers only make sense against one piece of arithmetic. Here are my published August 2026 rates as concrete reference points, and the one-customer test that tells you whether any fee is worth paying.
4 min
Guide
Work your budget out from the leads you want, then check it against two floors. The arithmetic takes five minutes and tells you when the right spend is zero.
3 min
Guide
When Google Ads reports conversions your inbox never saw, the conversion action is usually firing on a page load instead of a real enquiry. Here is the ten-minute check, and what a healthy setup looks like.
4 min
Guide
Five causes explain almost every sudden cost per click increase, in a rough order of likelihood, and each has a self-check you can run inside your own account in minutes.
3 min
Guide
Search campaigns quietly opt into the Display Network through default checkboxes, and automated bidding spends there because the clicks are cheap. Here is how to see the leak in your own account and shut it off in ten minutes.
3 min