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    European Search Awards 2026 · Best Small PPC Agency

    Service · Search

    A query tells us what somebody wants. Not what it is worth.

    Search keyword research answers demand. It does not answer whether fulfilling that demand is commercially valuable to your business this quarter.

    Two queries can convert at the same rate and the same cost. One sells a 62% margin product to a first-time buyer who returns twice a year. The other sells a discounted line at 9% margin with a 30% return rate. Google sees two conversions. Your P&L sees two entirely different businesses.

    01 / Query economics

    Four kinds of Search demand, four different jobs.

    Most ecommerce Search accounts run one blended target across all four, then wonder why growth and efficiency keep trading places.

    BRAND

    Demand you already own. The commercial question is not efficiency, it is incrementality: what would have happened without the ad. We separate it, measure it, and hold it to a defence budget rather than a growth target.

    GENERIC

    Demand that does not know you yet. Expensive, slower to convert, and the only reliable route to catalogue growth. Bid against contribution per order and the customer behind it, not the first transaction alone.

    COMPETITOR

    Demand somebody else created. Sometimes worth buying, often not. It earns budget when the conquest customer repeats, and loses it when the click converts once at a discount and never returns.

    NEW CUSTOMER

    The segment most accounts never isolate. New-customer Search carries different economics from repeat demand and should be bid against acquisition payback, not blended account ROAS.

    02 / What we read

    The inputs that decide what a query is worth

    Query economics is a P&L exercise before it is a keyword exercise.

    • 01Contribution per order by query type, not revenue per click
    • 02New versus returning customer split at query level
    • 03Margin band of the products the query actually sells
    • 04Return rate attached to the landing selection
    • 05Payback window on the customer the query acquires
    • 06Auction pressure and where headroom exists at an acceptable cost

    Once contribution is attached to the query, bidding stops being a negotiation about CPCs and becomes a decision about which demand is worth owning.

    03 / Value-based bidding

    Send the bidder a number that means something

    Order value

    What most accounts send. Treats a 9% margin order and a 62% margin order as identical.

    Contribution value

    Revenue after COGS, fulfilment, payment fees and expected returns. The pounds the business keeps.

    Customer-adjusted value

    Contribution weighted for new-customer acquisition and predicted repeat behaviour, uploaded on a weekly cadence.

    04 / Surface overlap

    Search does not operate alone

    Shopping, Performance Max and organic all compete for the same intent. Somebody has to decide who wins which query.

    Search and Shopping

    Both compete for the same purchase-intent query. Left alone, Shopping absorbs the cheap conversions and Search takes credit for the difficult ones, or the reverse. We decide which surface owns which intent, then enforce it structurally.

    Search and Performance Max

    PMax will take Search inventory it was never briefed to take, usually the branded end. Brand carve-out, negative architecture and campaign priority settle who gets what before budget does.

    Search and organic

    Paying for a query you already rank first for is a decision, not an accident. Sometimes correct on contested terms, frequently wasteful on navigational ones. Holdout evidence decides it.

    How we decide

    BOI®

    BOI® (Bid On Intent) gives every SKU one commercial job at a time. Bidding follows that job rather than a blended target that quietly averages winners and leakers.

    • Scale
    • Profit
    • Protect
    • Recovery
    • Gateway

    Verified Case Study

    Thermos

    +94% contribution margin with margin-led Search

    Brand and generic Search separated, conversion values rebuilt on contribution after COGS and returns, and bidding pointed at the queries that sell the products worth selling.

    +94%

    Contribution margin

    1.2× → 2.3×

    POAS

    12 mo

    Engagement

    Google Search management questions

    Yes, but for specific jobs. Shopping and PMax capture product-led demand efficiently. Search earns its budget on category-level and problem-led queries where the shopper has not chosen a product yet, on competitor conquest, and on defending brand terms in contested auctions. The mistake is running Search as an undifferentiated catch-all alongside them.

    It depends on incrementality, not on principle. Where competitors bid on your brand, or where your brand SERP is crowded with marketplaces and resellers, brand Search defends revenue you would otherwise lose. Where the SERP is clean and you rank first, much of that spend buys clicks you would have had anyway. We test it with a holdout rather than argue about it.

    Instead of sending Google the order value, we send a value that reflects contribution: margin after COGS, fulfilment and expected returns, adjusted for whether the buyer is new or repeat. Smart Bidding then optimises toward the pounds you keep. Without it, the bidder is told every £100 order is worth the same, which is never true.

    Our retained engagements start at £15k+/month total Google Ads spend with a £2k/month minimum fixed fee. Below that, segmentation this granular starves each campaign of the conversion volume Smart Bidding needs, and a diagnostic is the honest starting point.

    Brand exclusions on PMax, an explicit intent map deciding which surface owns which query class, campaign priority and negative architecture, then weekly monitoring of the overlap report. Cannibalisation is a structural problem, so it gets a structural fix rather than a bid adjustment.

    We will show you which queries are funding the business and which are funding the report.

    Book a commercial review

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