Sydney · PPC
PPC agency
in Sydney
Australian paid search is meaningfully less contested than the markets your competitors benchmark themselves against. That is an advantage, and most Sydney accounts are not set up to take it.
Get a free account auditWhat does a PPC agency in Sydney do?
A PPC agency in Sydney plans, builds and runs your paid search and paid social and answers for what it returns. In this market the work is unusually winnable — auctions are thinner than overseas — so most of the value comes from measurement discipline rather than from clever bidding.
What running paid media in Australia actually involves
Five things that differ from the American playbook most agency training is built on. Two are legal, two are calendar, and one is a genuine opportunity.
- Advertised prices must be the total price
- Component pricing is restricted under Australian Consumer LawIf you quote a price in ad copy or on a landing page, the single total including GST has to be at least as prominent. It changes how offers are written.
- Claims have to be substantiated
- The ACCC enforces misleading advertising actively"Best", "cheapest" and "guaranteed" in ad copy are claims you may be asked to prove. This constrains headlines more than most imported templates assume.
- The financial year ends 30 June
- Not 31 DecemberB2B budget release and end-of-year purchasing sit on a different cycle here. Accounts running a northern-hemisphere seasonal strategy are pacing against the wrong calendar.
- Auctions are genuinely thinner
- Difficulty well below the equivalent US and UK termsCategories that would be closed in America are open here. It is the strongest argument for entering paid search in this market rather than assuming it is saturated.
- Google dominance is higher than in the US
- Microsoft Ads is a smaller opportunity hereWorth testing, rarely worth prioritising. Effort that would go to Bing in a US account is better spent on landing pages here.
The first two are compliance constraints on copy. The third is the one that most often explains a seasonal pattern nobody could account for.
Where Australian accounts lose money
Four places. The first matters more here precisely because the auctions are cheap — inexpensive clicks make waste easier to overlook.
Measurement that stops at the form
Cheap clicks disguise bad targeting. If the account cannot see which enquiries became customers, bidding optimises toward whoever fills in forms most readily, and low CPCs mean the resulting waste never looks alarming enough to investigate.
Cheap clicks hide thisPacing against the wrong year
Budgets and promotional cycles built around a December year-end miss the Australian pattern entirely. The run-up to 30 June is when a lot of B2B purchasing decisions get made here, and accounts frequently under-spend straight through it.
Specific to this marketCopy written for a US compliance regime
Imported ad templates make price and superiority claims that are straightforwardly restricted here. Beyond the regulatory exposure, they usually convert worse, because Australian buyers read them as overreach.
Regulatory and commercialLanding pages nobody has revisited
You can win the click and still lose the customer to a slow page with a form nobody wants to complete. The account gets reviewed monthly; the page it points at usually has not changed since launch.
Cheapest lever you own
How we take over an account
Audit, then a written finding
Where the spend went, what it produced past the form fill, whether the copy is compliant, and what we would change. Written so anyone could act on it, and yours either way.
Fix measurement, then structure
Conversions wired back from your CRM to real sales outcomes first. Campaign structure, match types, negatives and bidding after — because restructuring an account you cannot measure is activity rather than progress.
Pace to the Australian year
Budget shaped around when your buyers actually purchase, which for most B2B here means building through the fourth quarter rather than pacing evenly across twelve months.
Cheap clicks are not the same as cheap customers. Australian auctions being thinner than American ones is a real advantage, but it also makes a badly targeted account survive far longer before anyone notices. Low cost per click is the number most likely to keep a failing account alive.
Questions
- Is Google Ads cheaper in Australia?
- Generally yes — auctions here are thinner than their US and UK equivalents, and difficulty scores reflect that. It is a genuine advantage. It is also why underperforming Australian accounts survive so long: when clicks are inexpensive, waste does not produce an alarming enough number to trigger a review.
- Can we advertise prices in our ad copy?
- Yes, with care. Australian Consumer Law restricts component pricing, so the single total price including GST must be at least as prominent as any part of it. Splitting a price into components without showing the total prominently is the common mistake, and it is one the ACCC has acted on.
- How should we handle the June financial year end?
- Plan for it rather than pace evenly. For B2B especially, the run-up to 30 June is when budget gets released and purchasing decisions get made. Accounts imported from a northern-hemisphere strategy frequently under-spend during your strongest quarter and over-spend in January.
- Do you take a cut of our media budget?
- No. Flat fee for management, nothing taken from media, and the accounts remain yours throughout. Paying an agency a share of spend rewards them for spending more of it. Part company with us and the campaigns and their history remain yours.
- Is Microsoft Ads worth running in Australia?
- Worth testing, rarely worth prioritising. Google’s share is higher here than in the US, so the incremental volume is smaller. Campaigns import in an afternoon, so run the test — but the same effort spent on landing pages will usually return more in this market.
Sources
- Semrush AU database, September 2026 — the KD 28 difficulty figure and comparison against UK and US difficulty.
- Australian Competition and Consumer Commission guidance on component pricing and single-price displays under the Australian Consumer Law.
- ACCC guidance on false or misleading claims in advertising.
- Google Ads documentation on offline conversion imports and Smart Bidding.
Related
Find out where the spend is going
A free audit of your existing account: what you are paying for, what it produced, whether the copy is compliant, and how it is pacing against the Australian year.
Yours to keep, whether or not we run the account.