PPC management that buys customers, not clicks.
Run Digital manages paid search for Utah businesses as an arithmetic problem rather than a monthly report. Accounts, conversion tracking, keyword history and landing pages stay in your name, and every decision is checked against what a customer is actually worth to you.
Three things we will put in writing.
Every agency says they are different. These are the three we will be held to, on every engagement, from the first month.
The accountability factor
A standing meeting cadence, real project management, and deliverables with dates on them. You always know what shipped, what is in flight and what slipped.
You decide if we earn our seat at your table every month. There is no contract asking you not to.
A customized solution
Not a bid-management retainer with a keyword count attached. What you can afford to pay for a click decides the structure, the match types and the budget, and that number is yours.
Ask for something specific and the answer is usually yes, built for you rather than pulled off a shelf.
Actual technicality
Not a sales rep, then a success manager, then an account manager relaying your question to someone who can answer it.
You talk to the person writing the ads and setting the bids.
Paid search is not hard. Knowing when to stop is.
Google will spend whatever you give it. It is very good at that, and it is not the part anybody needs help with. The difficult part is deciding what a click is worth before you start, and then holding the account to it when the platform recommends otherwise.
Almost every underperforming account we inherit has the same shape. Broad match left on, automated bidding pointed at a conversion action that is not a sale, search terms nobody has read in months, and a landing page the ads were never written for.
None of that is exotic. It is what happens when an account is managed against spend and impressions rather than against the number in the calculator below.
Paid search that pays
- A break-even cost per click, written down
- Search terms read and negatived every week
- Conversion tracking pointed at revenue
- Landing pages built for the ad that sent them
- Match types chosen on purpose
- Budget moved toward what converts, not what clicks
Paid search that burns
- Bidding to a target the platform suggested
- Broad match left running unsupervised
- Form fills counted as if they were sales
- Every ad pointing at the homepage
- Automated campaigns nobody can see inside
- Reports measuring activity instead of customers
The one number every account is really run on.
Before match types, bid strategies or ad copy, there is a maximum you can pay for a click. Work it out here, with your own figures, and most paid search decisions answer themselves.
What is a click actually worth to you?
Every paid search account is really one number wearing a disguise: the most you can pay for a click and still make money. Four inputs, all of which you already have.
Your numbers.
The reading below is our judgement, not a published finding. The arithmetic is not. It is the same calculation every profitable paid search account is quietly running, and the reason most unprofitable ones have never written it down.
You can rent the management. Never rent the account.
Hiring somebody to run your ads is normal and sensible. The problem is whose Google Ads account the work happens in while they do it.
A mature search account is years of accumulated evidence: what converts, what never did, every negative keyword somebody learned the hard way, and the conversion history the bidding algorithms are trained on. None of that transfers. An account handed back empty is a business starting its paid search from zero, with the learning period to serve again.
We build in accounts registered to your business, with your billing and your admin access. Leave us and the history, the negatives and the tracking are untouched.
In your name, from day one
- Google Ads and Microsoft Ads accounts in your name
- Years of conversion history and machine learning
- Every negative keyword list built along the way
- Ad copy, extensions and assets in source
- Landing pages on your own site
- Conversion tracking in your own analytics
What you find out you were renting
- Ads running inside an agency MCC you cannot see
- Conversion history that stays behind when you leave
- Negative lists rebuilt from nothing
- Ad copy delivered only as screenshots in a report
- Landing pages on the agency's page builder
- Tracking you cannot audit or verify
Do you want to manage five marketers?
Running paid search properly is a media buyer, a copywriter, a landing page developer, an analytics person to make the tracking trustworthy, and somebody senior deciding what the account is allowed to pay for a customer. Most businesses hire one person and hope.
We built our careers inside in-house teams before we built this one. Brian has twenty years in agencies. Quinn came up in-house at large publishers. That is the team you are renting time on, without the recruiting or the payroll.
Building it in-house
Five hires- Recruiting, onboarding and managing every one of them
- Salaries, benefits, payroll tax and software seats
- Your time spent reviewing search term reports
- A single point of failure when that person leaves
- Tracking nobody senior ever verified
Run as your team
One monthly fee- Media, copy, landing pages and analytics from day one
- A flat package price, not a percentage of your ad spend
- Thirty years of combined marketing experience
- No contract, no notice period, no hiring risk
- Everything built stays in accounts you own
Two of the five seats you would otherwise be recruiting for.
A small market where the auction gets crowded fast.
Paid search costs are set by how many people are bidding on the same intent. In a market this size, that number moves quickly. Every figure below is published and linked.
small businesses in Utah, and a large share of them are bidding on the same few hundred commercial keywords in their category.
SBA Office of Advocacy, 2025population growth over the past decade against 6.2% nationally, second fastest of any state. Demand grows, and so does the number of advertisers chasing it.
USAFacts, US Census dataof Utah businesses are small businesses. You are usually bidding against other owner-operators rather than national budgets, which cuts both ways.
SBA Office of Advocacy, 2025of Utah employees work at a small business, about 690,069 people. Search demand here is local and specific rather than broad.
SBA Office of Advocacy, 2025We have deliberately not published an average cost per click for Utah. The honest answer is that it varies by category from under a dollar to well over fifty, and any single figure on a page like this would be a guess dressed up as data. The calculator above tells you what you can afford, which matters more than what anybody else is paying.
Eight disciplines of pay-per-click management.
This is the list you would be hiring five people to cover.
Campaign structure and account hygiene
Campaigns and ad groups organised around intent and margin rather than around whatever the previous agency left behind.
Keyword research and search terms
Search terms read every week and negatived. This is the least glamorous job in paid search and the one that saves the most money.
Bid strategy, smart bidding and quality score
Automated where it earns its place, manual where it does not, always pointed at a conversion action that means revenue.
Ad copy, A/B testing and Performance Max
Written for the search that triggered it, tested against the thing people actually decide on rather than a headline variant.
Landing pages
Built on your own site, for the ad that sent the click. The single biggest lever on the conversion rate in the calculator above.
Conversion tracking
Verified end to end, with enquiries and sales separated. Bidding against the wrong conversion is how accounts lose money profitably-looking.
Microsoft Ads
Cheaper clicks and a different audience. Usually worth running and usually neglected because it is smaller.
Reporting on ROAS and cost per lead
Cost per customer against what a customer is worth. Not impressions, not click-through rate, not a dashboard screenshot.
Buying customers, not clicks.
The difference is one piece of arithmetic done before the budget is set rather than after the quarter ends.
Things we give away.
We would rather be useful before you hire us than persuasive. Take any of these whether or not we ever work together.
Free PPC audit
We go through your account, your search terms, your tracking and your landing pages, and write down what is being wasted. Yours to keep.
FreeBreak-even CPC worksheet
The same calculation as above, written out for your own categories so your team can run it without us.
FreeTap to review cards and stands
Physical NFC cards and counter stands that send customers straight to your review page. We print them and send them to you.
FreeWebsite migrations
Stuck on a platform you do not own? We will move the site for free. Getting you onto your own infrastructure is the point.
The first ninety days.
Paid search can be turned on in an afternoon and left losing money for years. This is the order we work in instead.
Accounts and tracking in your name
Google Ads and Microsoft Ads registered to your business, with conversion tracking verified end to end before a single bid changes. If your account sits inside somebody else's MCC, that is step one.
Your account, your historyWork out what a click is worth
The arithmetic above, done properly with your real margins and close rates, before we decide what the account is allowed to spend.
Cut the waste first
Search terms, match types and placements. In most inherited accounts the first month is mostly subtraction, and the results come from that rather than from anything clever.
Fix the landing page, not just the bid
The conversion rate in the calculator is the cheapest number to move. Doubling it halves what every customer costs you without touching the auction.
Report cost per customer
Against what a customer is worth. When that number stops working we will tell you to spend less, including when it makes our own line look smaller.
The findings get written down. You keep them either way.
Thirty-five clients. Four years. One roof.
Those are counts, not projections. We have not printed a return on ad spend figure anywhere on this page, because the honest version of that number depends entirely on your margins and your close rate, which is exactly why the calculator uses yours.
Ask on the call and we will walk through a real account instead of a graphic.
Salt Lake, Utah County, and the rest of the Wasatch Front.
We run Google and Microsoft Ads for businesses in Salt Lake City, Provo, Orem, Lehi, Ogden, West Jordan, St. George and across the state. Local search intent here is specific enough that tight geographic and keyword targeting usually beats the broad campaigns the platform keeps recommending.
If the arithmetic says paid search cannot work at your margins yet, we will say so on the first call and talk about what would change that.
Paid search is the fastest channel, not the only one.
It buys demand that already exists. Everything below either creates that demand or makes each click worth more.
Display and retargeting
Stays in front of the people who came, looked and left without getting in touch.
Paid social
Reaches people before they start searching, based on who they are rather than what they typed.
Organic social
Builds the proof that makes every other channel cheaper to convert.
Email and SMS
The cheapest channel you own outright, and the one most often left running on autopilot.
PPC questions we get every week.
You do. It is registered to your business with your billing and your admin access, and we work inside it. Years of conversion history and negative keywords cannot be exported, so an account in an agency’s name is one of the most expensive forms of lock-in in marketing.
A flat monthly package rather than a percentage of ad spend, with current pricing on the packages page. Charging a percentage means your agency earns more when you spend more, which is a strange incentive to build into a paid search relationship.
Start from the calculator above. Once you know what a click can be worth, the budget is a question of how many customers you can handle rather than a number picked in a meeting.
Clicks arrive the same day. Useful data takes a few weeks, and automated bidding needs conversion volume before it is trustworthy. Anybody promising a transformed account in week one is describing spend, not results.
Usually yes. Clicks are generally cheaper and the audience is different. It is smaller, which is why it is so often ignored, and that is also why it is often the better cost per customer.
Sometimes, deliberately, with somebody reading the search terms every week. Left running unsupervised it is the single most reliable way to spend a budget on people who were never going to buy.
Yes, and we would rather do that than start again, because the history is worth keeping. If it sits in another agency’s account we will help you get your own set up and move what can be moved.
There is no contract, so you leave whenever you want and keep the account, the history and the landing pages. If the arithmetic says the channel cannot work at your margins we will tell you to stop rather than keep a billable line running.
Start with the free PPC audit.
We go through the account, the search terms, the tracking and the landing pages, and write down what is being wasted and what it is worth. You keep the audit either way, and if paid search is the wrong channel for your margins we will say so. Prices are published, so you can see what this costs before you speak to anyone.