Your budget is buying one-off tidy-ups when the money is in the round.

Most of the money follows the weather, but the account that wins a season is the one already tuned when it turns. We build and test in the quiet weeks, so you are not paying to learn in your busiest month. Out of season we turn the budget down rather than off, because clearance and design enquiries still come in. It is month to month, so if you want it cut right back for a few weeks you say so and we do it.

That is usually the account, not the market. A tidy-up and a maintenance round are different searches, so we cut the ones that never lead to contracted work, build the negative keyword lists around them, and write ads that say plainly what you take on. We also tighten the radius, so you stop paying for enquiries an hour outside your round.

They do, but people decide slowly. Someone pricing a new garden collects three quotes and thinks about it for weeks, so the click and the signed job are rarely in the same month. We track the enquiry through to the work you actually book, keep you in front of the people who asked and did not decide, and judge the campaign on booked jobs rather than on form fills.

About $2.5k£2k a month in ad spend, on top of the fee. Under that a management fee eats the budget before a click is bought, so we say no and sell you an hour of consulting at $140£110/hr instead. In a seasonal trade it is usually better to put that money into the months that buy than to trickle it across the year. A cheaper agency takes the retainer and lets you find out in month six.

Ask them one question: what did a booked job cost me last month? If the answer comes back in clicks or impressions, they were selling you traffic. Most accounts we inherit fail on the same three things: broad match with no negative list, tracking that counts clicks instead of calls, and nobody touching the account between reports. We fix those first and tie every booked job to the keyword that caused it.

You own all of it. The account is in your name, your card is on it, and the tracking sits in your own containers, so you can check the spend yourself any day of the week. If the cost per booked job is not moving the right way by day 30, you hear it from us first and we tell you to pause rather than spend more. It is month to month, so nothing keeps running that you cannot defend.