Google Ads agency · Melbourne · Google Partner
A Melbourne Google Ads agency that bids on margin, product by product.
Melbourne's online retailers and hospitality groups run into the same Google Ads trap: Google sees revenue, not what the revenue was worth. We give Shopping, Performance Max and Search the margin behind each order or booking, then manage the account week to week, with fortnightly on-site sessions in Melbourne where the engagement warrants them.
30 min · No pitch · Senior operator on the call
Engagement intake, currently open
Google Partner
Google Partner agency, serving Melbourne from our Sydney HQ
$1.42M
Recovered for a Melbourne apparel brand in year one, once the tracking was rebuilt
Fortnightly
On-site sessions in Melbourne, travel from Sydney included where the engagement warrants it
Context
Why Melbourne retailers and venues get poor value from Smart Bidding.
The standard ecommerce setup sends Google the order value and nothing else. To the algorithm, a large order on a thin-margin product beats a smaller order on a fat-margin one, so Shopping and Performance Max drift toward whatever sells most rather than whatever pays most. Add discount codes, returns and free shipping, and the revenue Google reports can sit a long way from the profit you keep.
Hospitality has the opposite problem. The click works, but the booking is completed inside a reservation widget or on another domain, and the conversion never makes it back. Function and event enquiries, often worth far more than a table booking, arrive by phone or email and are not counted at all.
Both are fixable, and both start with the numbers. In one Melbourne engagement, Google had been under-reporting revenue by about 18 percent while Meta over-reported it. Neither figure could be trusted until the orders were reconciled, and that is where we begin.
Deliverables
What a Melbourne Google Ads engagement covers.
01
Conversion values rebuilt around margin for ecommerce, using product cost or margin bands, so value-based bidding favours the orders worth having.
02
A Merchant Center feed review: titles, attributes, disapprovals and the custom labels that let Shopping and Performance Max split products by margin and stock.
03
Booking and enquiry tracking for venues, with a plan for reservations made in third-party widgets and function enquiries that arrive by phone or email.
04
Orders and bookings reconciled each month against Shopify, your reservation system or the CRM, so the revenue Google claims is checked rather than assumed.
05
Weekly management of bids, budgets, search terms and feed changes, with every decision and its reasoning written down.
06
Fortnightly on-site working sessions in Melbourne for engagements that warrant them, with travel from Sydney included.
Services
The Google Ads work we run for Melbourne businesses.
Retail and hospitality need different campaign mixes, so the mix is set on the audit call once we have seen how your sales and bookings are recorded.
Shopping
Standard Shopping where you want control product by product, with feed fixes and margin labels doing the heavy lifting.
Performance Max for retail
Run with margin-based asset groups and brand exclusions, and checked against Shopify orders rather than taken on trust.
Search for venues and events
Bookings, functions and private events targeted by intent, each enquiry type valued by what it is usually worth to the venue.
Value-based bidding
Conversion values that reflect margin, so Target ROAS chases profit instead of turnover.
More on Value-based biddingEnhanced conversions
Hashed first-party data sent with each order or booking, so Google can match conversions that cookies miss.
More on Enhanced conversionsOrder-matched reporting
Google's revenue beside Shopify, the booking system or the CRM in one Looker Studio report, every month.
More on Order-matched reporting
Product photography and video stay with your team or a specialist we recommend. We write the ads and the feed titles, and brief the rest.
Side by side
How we differ from a typical Melbourne Google Ads agency.
Typical Melbourne setup
- Bids on order value, whatever the margin
- Performance Max left to find its own way
- Bookings lost inside the reservation widget
- Reports Google's revenue as fact
- Fee rises with your spend
Profit Geeks
- Bids on margin, product by product
- Performance Max fenced in with brand exclusions and margin groups
- Bookings and function enquiries tracked back to the ad
- Reports Google's revenue against your orders
- Fixed fee for the agreed scope
Who this is for
- Melbourne or Victorian business spending $20K or more a month on Google Ads (trade businesses from about $1,500)
- Online retailer whose Shopping or Performance Max revenue looks healthy while the margin does not
- Venue or hospitality group whose bookings and function enquiries never reach Google Ads
- Wants senior operators in the room in Melbourne, not only on video calls
Who it isn't
- Wants turnover at any margin
- Expects Performance Max to be switched on and left alone
- Needs a Melbourne-based team in the office every day
- Under about $2M in revenue and still testing whether the product sells
Proof, in numbers
Numbers from a Melbourne engagement.
From our Melbourne DTC ecommerce case study, a sixteen-week rebuild for an apparel brand. The method and the sources are in the case study itself. These are one business's results, not a promise for yours.
$1.42M
Recovered ad spend, year one
About 18%
Revenue Google under-reported before the rebuild
16 weeks
From kickoff to handover, with peak season protected
8 to 18%
Typical attributable revenue recovered in year one, across our work
What you actually buy
We fix the measurement, then we run the account. It starts with a free call.
Which of these sounds like your week?
- Meta says one number, Google says another, the CRM says a third, and the bank says something else again.
- The leads come in and most of them are rubbish.
- Traffic is fine. Not enough of them buy.
- You cannot spend more without losing margin.
- Something is wrong and you cannot say what.
All five are the same job. We fix the measurement first, then the same senior operators run the spend against it. The free call is where we work out which part you need first.
00 · Free
Run your own numbers
Six calculators and an attribution reference. Work out your break-even ROAS, your CAC payback, and whether the spend is structurally profitable, before you talk to anyone. The calculators need no signup.
01 · Free · 30 minutes
The profit audit call
A senior operator looks at your real spend, revenue and attribution gap on a call. You leave with a written fix list you keep, whether or not we ever work together. No deck, no follow-up sales sequence. We reply within one business day with three times to choose from.
02 · Optional · Two weeks
The two-week diagnostic
Read-only. We change nothing in your accounts. Every tag, event and consent rule mapped and written up: 20 to 35 pages, every issue rated P0 to P3 with an engineering-day estimate, and a 90-minute walk-through on day twelve. Yours to hand to us, your own team, or your existing agency. About a third of clients run this first, then decide.
03 · The engagement · Ongoing
The rebuild, then we run it
The first twelve weeks rebuild the measurement server-side so the reports reconcile to the bank, and work the funnel where the leak actually is. From there the same senior operators keep running Google Ads, Meta and search, with budget, bids and creative decided weekly against contribution margin and the reasoning written down. If your measurement is already sound, management starts straight away.
What it costs
Four things set the number
- The size of your stack
- How many ad platforms are live
- The state of your CRM integration
- How many service lines and locations you run
Two things do not
- Your industry
- How much you spend on ads
Revenue only matters because a bigger business is usually a bigger scope. We do not price off a percentage of it. We charge for the work, not for what you look like you can afford.
How it is billedThe rebuild is fixed scope, paid in instalments. Ongoing management is a fixed fee for the agreed scope. Both are quoted in one written proposal after the call. No hourly billing and no percentage of ad spend.
Included at no extra costThe written playbook and decision log, yours to keep whether we run the account or your team takes it in-house.
Where to go next
The rest of the work, by service and by city.
Most engagements pull from more than one of these. If you're not sure where you fit, the free profit audit is the right starting point. We'll tell you on the call.
Same city, different lens
Melbourne · Marketing consultant →
Want a senior plan and advice rather than us running the account? Same team, consulting engagement.
Related services
Other locations
Sydney
Brisbane
Perth
Adelaide
National
Proof, with the working shown
We'd rather show you the maths than the buzzwords.
“Profit Geeks rebuilt our whole sales engine, and not just the ad accounts. They went after the systems sitting behind them too. Sales are up 140% and we've pushed past $25M. Honestly the bit I didn't see coming was the operation running leaner than it did back when we were half the size.”
“We were quietly bleeding about a thousand dollars a week and had no idea why. They found the leaks, sorted out the measurement and the offer, and now we'll do more than $10K in a single day. Same product. Completely different business.”
“We went from scraping together two installs a week to running four crews and fifteen-plus jobs a week, north of $10M turnover. The clever bit was they tied the scaling to what we could actually deliver, so growth never broke the operation. Booked jobs, not vanity leads.”
“After iOS, our Meta numbers stopped matching the bank, and we'd basically been writing the gap off as “just tracking.” Profit Geeks rebuilt our measurement server-side and reconciled it straight back to the P&L. Turned out about $1.42M of ad spend in year one had been working all along. They're the first team that showed me the maths instead of a dashboard.”
“We didn’t spend a dollar more on ads. What they did was fix how we counted a booked job versus a platform “conversion,” cut the wasted spend, and by week twelve our blended ROAS had more than tripled. Revenue went from $4.8M to $9.1M. Same senior bloke on every call too. No juniors, no relay race.”
Reasonable questions
What you're probably thinking.
01
We've been burned by an agency before.
Most of our intake has. The difference is structural. A senior operator runs your account, not a junior hidden behind a dashboard, and you leave the first call with written findings you own even if we never work together. No relay race, no account manager translating between you and the people doing the work.
02
How do I know it'll actually work for my business?
You don't yet, and neither do we until we've seen your numbers. That's why the first step is a diagnostic, not a contract. We've documented this in DTC and home services (the case studies show the full working) and run the same playbook in professional services. If the maths isn't there for you, we'll tell you on the call.
03
What if there's nothing worth fixing?
Then you've spent thirty minutes and walked away with a second opinion that cost you nothing. We'd rather say no than take on an engagement we can't earn, so we turn away intake that isn't a fit. There's no pitch and no follow-up sales sequence.
04
What does it cost, and what am I signing up for?
A fixed fee for the measurement rebuild, then a fixed fee for ongoing management, both quoted in writing after the call. No per-channel markup and no percentage of your ad spend. The same senior operators handle measurement, media and margin, and scaling is tied to your contribution margin, so spend only climbs when the numbers say it's working.
Frequently asked
What operators ask before booking the call.
How much should I pay someone to manage my Google Ads in Melbourne?
Expect one of two models. A percentage of ad spend, typically 10 to 20 percent and lower as spend rises, or a flat monthly retainer, commonly $1,500 to $3,000 for small accounts and $3,000 to $8,000 for mid-sized ones. For an online store, measure the fee against the margin on the extra orders it brings in, not against revenue. Our fee is a fixed amount for the agreed work rather than a slice of spend, quoted in writing once we have had the free audit call, and we will tell you on that call if your spend is too small for it to make sense.
How much a Google Ads agency costs in AustraliaHow do I choose a Google Ads agency in Melbourne?
Before you ask about results, ask how they would set conversion values for your products or bookings. An agency that bids on revenue will happily grow turnover while margin shrinks. Then ask who does the weekly work, how often you will see them in person, and whether the account stays in your name. Case studies that show their method and sources are worth more than a wall of client logos.
Is $10 a day enough for Google Ads?
For an online store, it is enough to learn something and not enough for the algorithm to learn much. Ten dollars a day is about $300 a month. Performance Max and Smart Bidding learn from conversion data, and Google's guidance for Target CPA is about 30 conversions in 30 days per campaign, which a $300 budget rarely produces. Put a small budget into Standard Shopping on your best-margin products, track every order properly, and scale only when the numbers hold.
Do you have a Melbourne office?
No. Our offices are in Sydney, where we are headquartered, and Hamilton in Brisbane. Melbourne engagements run on weekly calls and shared documents, with on-site working sessions every fortnight for engagements that warrant them. Where they do, travel from Sydney is included.
Do you manage Shopping and Performance Max for ecommerce brands?
Yes, and the feed matters as much as the bids. We fix product titles and attributes in Merchant Center, add custom labels for margin and stock, and split campaigns so your best-margin products are not starved by your busiest ones. Performance Max runs with brand exclusions, so it cannot take credit for customers who were already searching for your brand.
Can Google Ads work for a restaurant, bar or hospitality group?
Yes, once the bookings can be counted. Many booking systems complete the reservation inside a widget or on another site, so the ad that drove it never gets the credit. We work out what your system can pass back, give function and event enquiries their own value, and report bookings by campaign rather than by click.
Do you run Meta and SEO in Melbourne as well?
Yes. Retail brands in particular need Google and Meta working from the same order data, with search alongside them. Our Melbourne digital marketing agency page covers the wider service.
Our Melbourne digital marketing agencyWhat happens after you book
Three steps. No mystery.
Step 01 · Within 1 business day
30-minute audit call
A senior operator on the call. We look at your real numbers, spend, revenue, attribution gap, and tell you on the call whether the rebuild is worth doing for you and where it would start. No pitch deck.
Step 02 · Within 1 week
Written proposal
Fixed scope, fixed number, written up. The proposal names deliverables, timeline, the people involved, and the price. No hourly billing, no retainer drift.
Step 03 · Within 2 weeks
Engagement starts
Senior operators from day one. The measurement rebuild starts, we take over day-to-day buying on the channels we can measure, and the first working session lands. Inside two weeks of the call.
Next step
Bring one product report and one month of orders.
The free 30-minute profit audit runs on a video call with a senior operator. Bring a Shopping or Performance Max product report and the matching orders from Shopify or your booking system. We will show you, in writing, where Google's revenue and yours part ways, and the findings are yours to keep.