Austin · PPC
PPC agency
in Austin
Cost per lead is the metric that makes accounts look healthy while they quietly stop working. We manage against how long it takes a customer to pay you back — and we take no cut of your media.
Get a free account auditWhat does a PPC agency in Austin do?
A PPC agency in Austin plans, builds and runs your paid search and paid social and is accountable for what comes back. The job is deciding which searches are worth buying, proving which clicks became revenue, and being honest about how long that revenue takes to arrive.
is how long a healthy-looking cost per lead can hide the fact that customers are taking longer to pay you back than you can afford to wait
Cost per lead is a leading indicator that stops being informative the moment lead quality shifts. An account can hold its CPA perfectly while the mix moves toward smaller deals, longer cycles and worse retention — and the dashboard reports success throughout. What changes decisions is payback: how many months until a customer has returned what you paid to acquire them. That number is harder to assemble, it needs your CRM rather than the ad platform, and it is the only one that tells you whether to spend more.
Where Austin accounts lose money
Four failure modes. The first creates the others by making them invisible.
Optimising toward leads instead of revenue
Until closed-deal data is fed back into the ad platforms, bidding optimises toward whoever fills in forms most readily. That is rarely your best customer, and the account gets steadily better at finding more of the wrong one.
Fix this before biddingA cost base that moved but a budget that did not
Companies that relocated here often kept acquisition assumptions built for a different cost structure. Your runway changed; the maths on what you can afford to pay for a customer changed with it, and the account frequently has not been revisited since.
Worth recalculatingBuying searches that were never yours
Research queries, job seekers, competitors, students. At national B2B click prices this is a serious monthly line, and disciplined negatives and exclusions remove most of it within the first fortnight.
Recoverable immediatelyLanding pages nobody has touched since launch
You can buy an excellent click and lose it to a page that loads slowly, buries the point, or asks for eleven fields. Ad accounts get reviewed monthly; the pages behind them frequently have not changed in years.
Cheapest lever you own
How we take over an account
Audit, then a written finding
Where the spend went, what it produced once traced past the form fill, and what we would change first. Specific enough to action without us, and yours whether or not you hire us.
Build the payback picture
Conversions wired back from your CRM, deal values attached, and cohorts tracked to the point where they have returned acquisition cost. Only then does bidding get touched, because before that we would be optimising confidently toward the wrong thing.
Concentrate the spend
Budget moves toward the segments that pay back inside your tolerance and away from the ones that do not, with landing pages tested against the terms that matter most.
If your payback period is longer than your runway, the answer is not better advertising — it is a different pricing or packaging decision, and no amount of account optimisation substitutes for it. We would rather work that out with you during the audit than take a year of retainer against arithmetic that was never going to close.
Questions
- What should our cost per lead be?
- It is the wrong question to start with. What matters is what a customer is worth, what proportion of leads become customers, and how long they take to pay back acquisition cost. Those three give you an affordable cost per lead. A benchmark from another company with different economics tells you nothing useful about yours.
- How are you paid, and does it shape what you recommend?
- No. Flat management fee, no percentage of media, and the ad accounts stay yours. A percentage model pays us more when you spend more, which is a poor alignment in any market. If we part ways you keep every campaign and all the historical data.
- How soon will we know if this is working?
- Wasted-spend fixes often show within two weeks. A fair read on the account takes a quarter. Optimising toward payback rather than leads needs at least one full sales cycle of closed data, so for a six-month cycle be sceptical of anyone claiming a definitive verdict earlier.
- Is Google enough or should we add LinkedIn?
- Google first, almost always — it captures demand that already exists, which is cheaper evidence than creating it. LinkedIn reaches precisely the right people and prices accordingly, so below a certain contract value the arithmetic does not work. We will tell you where that threshold sits for your numbers rather than sell it regardless.
- Does the Texas privacy law change how we run ads?
- It changes your configuration rather than your strategy. The Texas Data Privacy and Security Act requires disclosure and an opt-out for targeted advertising, which affects your privacy notice, consent handling and how the ad platforms are set up. It is a compliance task, not a reason to spend differently.
Sources
- Semrush US database, September 2026 — the $35.00 average cost per click cited above.
- Texas Data Privacy and Security Act, in effect since 1 July 2024.
- Google Ads documentation on offline conversion imports, enhanced conversions and Smart Bidding.
- Microsoft Advertising documentation on campaign import and audience targeting.
Related
Find out what your spend actually returned
A free audit of your existing account: where the money went, how long those customers took to pay it back, and the searches quietly draining budget.
Yours whether we end up working together or not.