Google, Meta & Social Ads Management
Search ads, Facebook and Instagram ads, TikTok, LinkedIn — one team manages all of it, decides where your money actually belongs, and reports it in plain English. No platform turf wars, no four separate invoices.
Ads management means a specialist plans, builds, and continuously adjusts your paid campaigns on Google, Meta (Facebook and Instagram), and social platforms like TikTok or LinkedIn — so your budget goes to the channels that actually produce calls and customers. Web Engine manages all major platforms under one flat monthly plan, with landing pages and tracking included in the conversation from day one.
Your customers don’t live on one platform. Your ads shouldn’t either.
Most agencies sell ads the way platforms sell ads: a Google Ads package over here, a “Meta specialist” over there, a social retainer somewhere else. Each one argues their channel deserves more budget, because that’s what they bill on. The question nobody owns is the only one that matters: where should this specific business’s next dollar go?
We manage Google, Meta, TikTok, and LinkedIn under one roof on purpose. When the same team runs every channel, budget can move to whatever is working this quarter — without a renegotiation, without anyone defending their slice. A plumber’s money usually belongs in search. A new restaurant’s usually belongs in Instagram reach. A commercial cleaning company might need LinkedIn. The honest answer is different for every business, and we can give it because we don’t care which platform wins.
Ads are also only half of the machine. Every click lands on a page, and that page decides whether the click becomes a phone call. Because we also build websites, your landing pages and your campaigns are designed together — more on that below.
When each platform fits a local business
There’s no “best” ad platform — there’s a best platform for a given job. The job is defined by two questions: is your customer already searching for this, and where does your customer spend attention? A platform that’s perfect for the med spa down the street can be a money pit for the electrician next door. Here’s how we actually think about the four big ones for local and small businesses — including when each one is the wrong answer.
Google Ads — capture existing demand
Google Ads puts you in front of people who are already searching for what you sell — “emergency plumber near me,” “family dentist,” “estate attorney.” Nobody types those phrases for fun. That makes search the default starting point for urgent, high-intent local services: plumbing, HVAC, towing, legal, medical, repair.
The trade-off: you can only capture demand that exists. If nobody in your city is searching for your service yet, search ads have nothing to catch. And in competitive categories, clicks are expensive enough that a weak landing page quietly burns the budget.
Meta (Facebook & Instagram) — create demand and stay visible
Meta ads reach people who weren’t searching for you — by location, age, interests, and behavior. That’s the right tool when the job is awareness and desire rather than capture: restaurants, gyms, med spas, home remodelers, boutiques, events. Strong photos and video do the selling, and Instagram in particular rewards businesses that look good.
Meta is also the workhorse for retargeting — showing ads to people who already visited your website and didn’t call. For most local businesses, retargeting is the cheapest conversion they’re not running.
TikTok — reach, personality, younger customers
TikTok rewards authentic, fast, personality-driven video — and it can deliver remarkable local reach for businesses whose product shows well on camera: food, salons, fitness, detailing, anything with a before-and-after. If your customers skew under 40 and your work is visual, it’s worth testing.
It’s the wrong first platform if your service is urgent (nobody scrolls TikTok with a burst pipe) or if you have no appetite for video. We’ll tell you plainly when TikTok is a distraction rather than a channel.
LinkedIn — when your customer is a business
LinkedIn targeting by job title, industry, and company size is something no other platform does well — which makes it the channel for B2B services: commercial cleaning, IT support, corporate catering, business insurance, staffing. If your best customer is “the office manager of a 50-person company,” LinkedIn can find that exact person.
Costs per click run meaningfully higher than Meta, so LinkedIn earns its keep only when one new client is worth a lot. For most consumer-facing local businesses, it’s a skip — and we’ll say so.
How to think about an ad budget (without the made-up benchmarks)
You’ll find articles claiming the “average” local business should spend some exact figure on ads. Treat those numbers with suspicion — what’s right for a locksmith in a small town and a med spa in a metro have nothing in common. The honest way to size a budget is to reason from your own business, not someone else’s average:
- Start from customer value, not from the platform. What is one new customer worth to you — first job and repeat business included? A business whose average customer is worth four figures can afford far more per lead than one selling a one-time low-ticket service.
- Budget enough to learn. Ad platforms need a steady flow of clicks and conversions before their optimization gets smart and before you know what’s working. A budget spread too thin across platforms teaches you nothing; concentrated on one channel, the same money produces a real answer.
- Expect a calibration period. The first weeks of any account are tuition: testing search terms, audiences, and ad creative. Performance usually improves as losing variations get cut. An account judged in week two is being judged mid-experiment.
- One platform first, then expand. We’d rather make a single channel clearly profitable, then add the second, than launch four at once and wonder which one moved the needle.
- Management and media are separate costs. Your ad spend goes to Google or Meta; management is what you pay for the strategy, build, and weekly tuning. Keeping them separate keeps the incentives clean — we never profit by inflating your spend.
As for the market: professionally managed ad campaigns from traditional agencies typically run to a mid-to-high three-figure monthly management fee or beyond, before any ad spend. We productize it instead — flat plans, published scope, the same approach we take with our websites.
Landing pages decide whether your clicks become customers
Here’s the uncomfortable math of paid traffic: the ad only buys the visit. What happens in the ten seconds after the click is decided entirely by the page — and most local businesses send expensive clicks to a generic homepage that mentions twelve services and buries the phone number.
A landing page built for the campaign changes the economics of the whole account. Same ads, same spend, more calls — because the page matches the ad’s promise, loads fast on a phone, shows real reviews, and asks for exactly one action. When the conversion rate rises, your effective cost per customer falls, which means the same budget suddenly buys more business. Improving the page is frequently the single highest-leverage move in an ad account — bigger than any bid tweak.
This is why we won’t manage ads while ignoring the destination. Every campaign we run comes with a landing page review, and when the page is the bottleneck we build the right one — that’s our home turf. See how we build conversion-first pages at web design, and what ongoing care looks like at website support.
Ads are the faucet. SEO is the well.
Paid ads start producing visits the day they launch and stop the day you pause them. SEO is the opposite: slow to build — months, honestly — but it compounds, and the traffic doesn’t switch off with the budget. Smart local businesses run both, in sequence: ads carry the lead flow now, while SEO builds the asset that gradually lowers how much you need to spend.
They also feed each other. Search ads reveal — in weeks — which keywords actually produce phone calls, which tells the SEO work exactly which pages to build. And a site that ranks and advertises occupies more of the results page than either alone. We run them as one strategy because they are one strategy.
What “managed” actually means here
Plenty of “management” is set-and-forget: build the campaign, bill monthly, glance at it quarterly. Ours is a working loop, and you can see every part of it:
Strategy before spend
We start with your numbers — what a customer is worth, which jobs you want more of, where you operate — and pick the one platform with the best odds. You see the plan and the reasoning before anything launches.
Build: campaigns, tracking, landing page
Campaign structure, ad copy and creative, audience or keyword targeting, and conversion tracking that counts the things that matter — calls, forms, direction requests. The landing page is reviewed or built as part of the launch, not bolted on later.
Weekly tuning
Search-term and audience pruning, bid and budget adjustments, testing new ad variations against the current winners. Small, constant corrections are where managed accounts beat abandoned ones.
Plain-English reporting
A monthly report that says what we spent, what it produced, what we changed, and what’s next — in sentences, not a 40-tab dashboard export. You should never need a glossary to know if your ads worked.
Reallocate without drama
When the data says a channel has peaked — or a new one is ready — budget moves. Because every platform sits under the same flat plan, shifting your money is a strategy decision, not a contract renegotiation.
What we need from you
Less than you’d expect: access to your accounts (or we create them), your real numbers in the kickoff conversation, photos or footage when a campaign calls for fresh creative, and an honest answer each month to one question — did the phone ring more? Platform metrics tell us what the campaigns did; only you can confirm what the business felt. That feedback loop is part of the system, not a courtesy.
Pick your starting platform
Not sure which fits? Start with the one matching how your customers find you today — searching for the service (Google) or discovering businesses like yours in their feed (Meta). We’ll confirm or redirect the choice in your kickoff strategy session, and you can compare every plan on our products page.
Google Ads Management
For businesses people search for: urgent services, professional services, anything with “near me” demand. Search campaigns, keyword strategy, call tracking, and weekly optimization — managed end to end.
- Search & local campaign builds
- Keyword and search-term curation
- Call & form conversion tracking
- Landing page review included
- Monthly plain-English report
Meta Ads Management
For businesses people discover: restaurants, fitness, beauty, home improvement, retail. Facebook and Instagram campaigns built on creative that earns attention — plus retargeting for visitors who didn’t convert.
- Facebook & Instagram campaigns
- Audience & retargeting setup
- Ad creative direction
- Landing page review included
- Monthly plain-English report
Running on TikTok or LinkedIn instead — or alongside? Those campaigns are managed under the same plans; tell us in your kickoff and we’ll scope the channel mix. And if organic posting is the gap rather than paid, see social media marketing.
Run them yourself, hire a traditional agency, or go managed?
All three are legitimate paths, and the right one depends on your time, your budget, and how expensive mistakes are in your market. Here’s the trade-off laid out plainly:
| Web Engine managed | Doing it yourself | Traditional agency | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cost structure | Flat monthly plan, published scope | Just your ad spend — plus your hours | Quoted retainers, often spend-based |
| All platforms, one strategy | ✓ Google, Meta, TikTok, LinkedIn together | Only what you have time to learn | Often separate teams per channel |
| Landing pages included in the work | ✓ Reviewed or built in-house | On you | Usually a separate engagement |
| Weekly optimization | ✓ Standing rhythm | Whenever you remember | Varies by retainer tier |
| Reporting | Plain English, monthly | Whatever the dashboard says | Often dashboards without interpretation |
A word in defense of DIY: the platforms genuinely want you to succeed at spending money, and their setup wizards have improved. Where self-managed accounts typically leak is the unglamorous middle — search terms nobody prunes, audiences nobody refreshes, the “recommended” automated settings that quietly broaden targeting, and a landing page nobody questions. None of it is hard; all of it is weekly. Management exists for owners whose week is already full of the business itself.
New Business Website
A professional website built for your business — design, hosting, security, and reviews handled for you.
- Custom professional design
- Hosting & security included
- Mobile-first & fast
- Live review widget built in
Website Support
Already have a website? We keep it updated, secure, fast — and make your changes for you.
- Updates, backups & security
- Content edits done for you
- Speed & uptime monitoring
- Works with sites we didn’t build
Ads management questions, answered straight
Should my business use Google Ads or Facebook ads?
It depends on how customers find you. If people search for your service when they need it — plumbing, dental, legal, repair — start with Google Ads, because it captures intent that already exists. If customers discover businesses like yours while browsing — restaurants, gyms, salons, boutiques — start with Meta, where strong visuals create demand. Many businesses eventually run both: Google to capture, Meta to retarget the visitors who didn’t convert.
How much should a small business spend on ads per month?
There’s no honest universal number — it depends on what a customer is worth to you, how competitive your market is, and how fast you want to grow. The reliable principles: spend enough on one platform to generate real data rather than spreading thin across several, expect the first weeks to be calibration, and judge the budget by cost per actual customer, not by clicks. We size a recommendation to your numbers during the kickoff strategy session.
How long until paid ads start working?
Traffic starts the day campaigns go live — that’s the appeal. Efficient results take longer: the first several weeks involve testing keywords, audiences, and ad variations, and performance typically improves as losing combinations are cut and platform optimization accumulates conversion data. A fair evaluation of an account is measured in months of iteration, not the first fortnight.
Do I need a special landing page for my ads?
Almost always, yes. A page built for the campaign — matching the ad’s promise, loading fast on mobile, showing reviews, asking for one clear action — reliably converts paid clicks better than a general homepage. Since the page determines how many clicks become calls, it directly sets your cost per customer. Landing page review is included with our management, and when a new page is needed, building it is what we do all day.
Is it better to invest in ads or SEO?
They solve different problems on different clocks. Ads produce visibility immediately and stop when you pause them; SEO takes months to build but compounds and keeps working without per-click cost. The practical answer for most local businesses is sequence, not either/or: ads carry lead flow now while SEO builds the long-term asset — and the keyword data from your ads makes the SEO work smarter.
What does ads management actually include?
Strategy and platform selection, campaign and tracking build, ad copy and creative direction, weekly optimization (search terms, audiences, bids, creative tests), landing page review, and a monthly plain-English report covering what was spent, what it produced, and what changes next. Your ad spend is paid directly to the platforms and stays separate from the management plan, so the incentives stay clean.