Most consulting firms don't have a traffic problem. They have a lead quality problem.
You can spend £4,000 a month on Google Ads and end up with forty form fills — thirty-two from students writing dissertations, five from people looking for jobs, and three from businesses too small to afford your minimum engagement. The reports look healthy. The pipeline stays empty.
Our Google Ads packages for consulting firms are built around that exact problem. We don't optimise for clicks or even for form fills. We optimise for the meetings that actually get booked, and the proposals that actually get signed — and we wire your CRM into Google Ads so the bidding algorithm learns the difference too.
Whether you run a management consultancy in London, an IT advisory practice in Bengaluru, a financial consulting firm in Toronto, or a strategy boutique in Singapore, the mechanics are the same: thin search volume, expensive clicks, long sales cycles, and a buyer who compares three or four firms before replying to anyone.
If you've read generic PPC advice, most of it was written for e-commerce or local services. Almost none of it survives contact with a B2B consulting account. Four things make this category its own discipline.
"Change management consultant for manufacturing" might get 40 searches a month in your entire country. An e-commerce advertiser would call that a dead keyword. For you, those 40 searches may represent the only people actively shopping for what you sell. The strategy isn't reach — it's owning a small, precise set of queries completely, at the top of the page, every single time.
Business and professional services sit near the top of the CPC table across every market we work in. Competitive B2B consulting terms regularly run into double-digit dollar or pound clicks, and specialised finance, legal-adjacent or enterprise technology advisory terms go higher still. With that cost structure, a 2% wasted-spend rate isn't a rounding error — it's a meaningful slice of your monthly budget gone.
A consulting buyer might click your ad in March, book a call in May, and sign in August. Default Google Ads conversion windows and last-click reporting simply cannot see that. If you don't fix measurement first, you'll end up cutting the campaigns that produce your best clients because they look slow.
Every consulting keyword is also being searched by job seekers, students, course shoppers and competitors doing research. Without aggressive filtering, they will consume the majority of your budget — because there are far more of them than there are buyers.
Every package is built on the same core framework. What changes between tiers is depth, campaign count, market coverage and reporting cadence — not quality of work.
Before we touch a single bid, we audit what exists: account structure, historical search terms, conversion setup, landing page performance, competitor ad copy and auction insights. If you've never run ads, we audit the market instead — real query volumes, real CPCs, and an honest view of what a realistic cost per qualified lead looks like in your niche and geography.
We don't build one campaign called "Consulting". We build campaigns around the way you actually sell — one per service line, with its own budget, its own landing page and its own acceptable cost per lead. ERP implementation advisory, process improvement, compliance consulting and interim CFO services do not share an economic model, so they don't share a campaign.
This is where most consulting accounts are won or lost. We build a layered negative keyword architecture on day one — job and salary terms, education and certification terms, free-template and PDF terms, DIY and definition queries — then we review search term reports weekly and keep extending it. On a mature account we're typically blocking hundreds of query patterns that would otherwise look like relevant traffic.
A consulting buyer will not fill in a form on a page that reads like a brochure. We build or advise on landing pages that lead with the specific problem, prove capability with named outcomes and sector experience, name the people who'd actually do the work, and offer a low-friction next step — a scoping call, not "request a quote".
This is the single highest-impact change we make. We import offline conversions from HubSpot, Salesforce, Zoho, Pipedrive or your own system, so Google Ads sees which clicks became qualified opportunities and which became junk. Smart Bidding then optimises toward the real outcome instead of the form fill. Firms that make this change usually see cost per qualified lead fall even while cost per raw lead rises — which is exactly the trade you want.
Standard CRO advice says remove form fields. For consulting, that's wrong. We add qualifying fields — company size, budget band, timeline, decision role — because a form that takes ninety seconds filters out the people who were never going to buy, and hands your team a lead they can actually prepare for.
Impressions and CTR appear at the bottom of the report, not the top. The top shows leads, qualified leads, cost per qualified lead, pipeline value influenced and the trend across months. You'll always know exactly what you spent and exactly what it produced.
These carry the majority of budget. Exact and phrase match on your commercial terms, tightly themed ad groups, and ad copy that pre-qualifies by naming your sector, your engagement model and your minimum scope.
PMax can work for consulting firms, but unmanaged it will spend your budget on cheap, irrelevant placements and report them as conversions. We only run it with a clean conversion signal from your CRM, strict brand exclusions, account-level negatives applied, and a defined asset strategy — and we're happy to tell you when it isn't the right fit for your budget level.
These cover the long middle of the funnel. Since a consulting buyer takes months to decide, we keep your firm visible across YouTube, Discover and Gmail with content assets — a framework, a benchmark report, a case study — rather than hard sell.
Competitors and directories will bid on your firm's name. A small, cheap brand campaign protects the traffic you've already earned and keeps aggregators from intercepting buyers who were looking for you specifically.
We're asked this in almost every discovery call, so here's our honest position.
Someone typing "supply chain consulting firm for FMCG" has already recognised the problem and started shopping. Intent is high, volume is low, and cost per click is high — but conversion rates are strong.
You can target a Head of Operations at a 500-person manufacturer who isn't searching for anything yet. Volume of reach is high, intent is low, and cost per lead is usually higher — but you can reach people Google will never show you.
For most consulting firms under a certain budget, we recommend starting with Google Ads, because capturing existing demand is cheaper than manufacturing it, and it gives you real data on which service lines convert. Once cost per qualified lead is stable and predictable, adding LinkedIn for account-based reach makes sense. We'll tell you if we think your budget is better spent elsewhere — that conversation costs you nothing.
Each one gets its own keyword set, its own negative list and its own landing page logic. A tax advisory firm and an ESG consultancy attract completely different unqualified traffic, and the filtering has to be built for the specific noise in that niche.
The most competitive and most expensive consulting auction anywhere. State and metro-level targeting matters, and campaigns are usually split by region because CPCs in New York and Chicago behave nothing like the Midwest.
Strong London concentration with sharply different economics outside it. We often run separate London and regional campaigns so one doesn't drain the other.
Bilingual considerations in Quebec, and a market small enough that broad national targeting frequently outperforms tight geo-splits.
Concentrated demand across Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth, with sector clusters (mining and resources advisory in WA and QLD) that reward specialised campaigns.
Small geography, high buyer sophistication, heavy regional-HQ demand. Campaigns often need to serve both Singapore-based buyers and APAC decision-makers researching from Singapore.
Far lower CPCs but much noisier traffic, with heavy course, job and training query overlap. Negative keyword discipline matters more here than anywhere else, and lead qualification has to be tighter at the form stage.
Currency, business-hour scheduling, ad extensions and landing page proof points are localised per market. We don't run one global campaign and hope.
Final pricing is quoted only after audit, because a firm running a single service line in one city and a firm running six service lines across three countries are not the same job.
For consulting firms new to paid search or running a single service line in one market. Includes account setup or cleanup, one to two search campaigns, conversion tracking, foundational negative keyword architecture, landing page recommendations and monthly reporting.
For established firms running multiple service lines or markets. Everything in Starter, plus multi-campaign structure by service line, remarketing, CRM offline conversion import, ongoing A/B testing of ad copy and landing pages, competitor monitoring and fortnightly reporting with a monthly strategy call.
For multi-office or multi-country consultancies. Everything in Growth, plus market-by-market campaign builds, Performance Max with full guardrails, Demand Gen and YouTube support, advanced audience layering, custom dashboards, and a dedicated strategist with a weekly working session.
We've managed paid search for professional services firms across six markets. We've seen the accounts where 60% of budget was going to job seekers, and we've seen what happens to pipeline when that stops.
Your account is handled by people who work on B2B lead generation daily — not by whoever is free that week.
Our team holds Google Ads certifications across Search, Display and Measurement, and we work inside a fast-moving platform where policy, bidding and campaign types change constantly. Staying current is part of the job, not a badge on a footer.
If your budget is too low to compete in your auction, if your landing page will undo the campaign, or if your sales cycle needs SEO and content before paid search makes sense, we'll say so during the audit. We'd rather lose a retainer than take money for something that won't work.
You own your Google Ads account, your data and your conversion history. If you leave, you leave with everything.
We review your account, CRM, landing pages and competitors, and agree what a qualified lead means for your firm.
Campaign structure, keyword architecture, negative lists, ad copy, tracking and CRM integration go live.
Search term review, bid adjustment, ad testing, and the first honest read on lead quality.
Once cost per qualified lead is stable, we expand into additional service lines, markets or campaign types.
It depends entirely on your CPCs and how many service lines you want to run. As a working rule, you need enough monthly budget to generate a statistically meaningful number of clicks per campaign — otherwise you're paying for data you can't learn from. We'll give you a realistic figure for your specific keywords during the audit, before you commit to anything.
Expect meaningful lead flow within four to eight weeks and reliable cost-per-qualified-lead data by month three. Because consulting sales cycles are long, the true revenue picture usually becomes clear between months four and six.
No, and we'd be cautious about any agency that does. Lead volume depends on search demand you don't control. What we do commit to is transparent reporting, disciplined spend and continuous improvement against agreed targets.
Usually yes — because the relevant comparison isn't cost per click, it's cost per client against contract value. A £40 click looks expensive until you place it against a £60,000 engagement. The risk isn't expensive clicks; it's expensive clicks from unqualified people, which is what the filtering work exists to prevent.
Yes. We prefer it. Historical data makes optimisation faster, and keeping your account preserves your conversion history and quality score.
We provide detailed recommendations in every package, and full landing page copy and build in Growth and Enterprise tiers or as an add-on.
That's standard for us. We build separate campaigns per market with localised keywords, currency, scheduling and proof points, and report on each market individually so you can see which one deserves more budget.
Send us your account access or just your website, and we'll come back with a straight assessment: what your real keyword demand looks like, what your competitors are paying, where your current spend is leaking, and what a realistic cost per qualified lead should be in your market.
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