Toronto · PPC
PPC agency in Toronto
A lot of Canadian lead programmes are built on American templates that quietly breach CASL. We build the capture and follow-up to be compliant from the form onward — and take no cut of your media.
Get a free account auditWhat does a PPC agency in Toronto do?
A PPC agency in Toronto plans, builds and runs your paid search and paid social and answers for the pipeline it produces. In Canada the work extends past the click: what you may lawfully do with a lead after capture is materially more restricted here than in the United States.
What happens after the form is different in Canada
CASL is among the strictest anti-spam regimes anywhere and it is genuinely enforced. Most of the breaches we find were imported wholesale from a US playbook by people acting in good faith.
The imported US approach
Capture now, sort consent out later
- Purchased or scraped lists loaded straight into the nurture sequence
- A pre-ticked consent box, or consent bundled into terms nobody reads
- Every downloaded asset treated as permission for ongoing marketing email
- Unsubscribe handled whenever the next batch job runs
- Sender identity and physical address omitted from the template
- No record of when or how any given contact consented
What CASL actually requires
Consent first, recorded, and revocable
- Express consent obtained knowingly, or a documented implied-consent basis
- An unticked, clearly worded opt-in that is separate from your terms
- A defined and time-limited implied-consent window after an enquiry
- Unsubscribe honoured promptly and mechanically, not on a schedule
- Sender identification and a physical mailing address in every message
- Records of consent kept, because the burden of proof sits with you
Penalties under CASL are substantial and the burden of proving consent rests on the sender. This is worth an hour of your compliance team’s attention before it is worth another dollar of ad spend.
Where Canadian accounts lose money
Four places. The first is a legal exposure rather than an efficiency problem, which is why it goes first.
Lead capture that cannot evidence consent
If you cannot show when and how a contact agreed to hear from you, every message afterwards is exposure. It is also a marketing problem: consent you cannot evidence tends to correlate with contacts who do not remember you and do not convert.
Fix before scaling spendMeasurement that stops at the form
When closed deals are invisible to the account, bidding drifts toward the readiest form-fillers. Wire outcomes back from your CRM before touching bidding, or you are tuning efficiently toward the wrong result.
Non-negotiable sequenceCheap clicks disguising bad targeting
Canadian CPCs run well below their US equivalents, which is an advantage and a hazard. Waste that would trigger an urgent review in a US account can sit unnoticed here for years, because the monthly number never looks alarming.
Low CPC hides thisIgnoring French-language demand
If you sell into Quebec, English-only campaigns concede that market to whoever bothered to translate. Competition on French-language terms is consistently thinner, and the cost of testing it is small relative to what it opens up.
Thinner competition
How we take over an account
Audit the account and the capture path
Where the spend went, what it produced past the form fill, and whether your consent handling would survive scrutiny. Documented and yours to keep, whatever you decide.
Fix compliance and measurement together
Consent capture that is lawful and recorded, and conversions wired back to real sales outcomes. These are the same project in practice, because both come down to knowing what actually happened to a lead.
Then concentrate the spend
Budget moves toward what demonstrably returns and away from the rest, with French-language testing where Quebec is in scope, and landing pages tested against the terms that matter.
We are not your lawyers and this is not legal advice. What we will do is flag where your current setup looks exposed and insist it is resolved before we scale spend into it, because scaling a compliant programme is straightforward and scaling a non-compliant one multiplies a liability.
Questions
- What is CASL and does it apply to us?
- Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation governs commercial electronic messages sent to recipients in Canada. It applies based on where the recipient is, not where you are — so a US company emailing Canadian leads is in scope. It requires consent, sender identification and a working unsubscribe, and the burden of proving consent sits with the sender.
- Can we still buy lead lists?
- Practically, no — not for email. A purchased list cannot give you the express consent CASL requires, and you would be unable to evidence it if asked. The workable route is building consent through your own capture, which is slower and produces contacts who actually recall agreeing to hear from you.
- Should we run French-language campaigns?
- If Quebec is a real market for you, yes. Competition on French-language terms is consistently thinner than the English equivalents, and English-only campaigns simply concede that demand. If you cannot service Quebec customers in French after they enquire, do not start — a French ad and an English-only sales process converts badly.
- What do you charge, and do you mark up media?
- No. Flat fee, no percentage taken from media, and you hold the ad accounts. Percentage fees give the agency a reason to want your budget higher. If we stop working together, nothing about the account leaves with us.
- What is a realistic timeframe for results?
- Removing obvious waste tends to register within two or three weeks. You need about a quarter before the account can be judged fairly. Compliance work does not improve performance directly — it removes a risk — though in practice cleaning up capture usually improves lead quality as a side effect.
Sources
- Semrush CA database, September 2026 — the $8.88 average cost per click cited above.
- Government of Canada guidance on Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL), including consent and record-keeping requirements.
- Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada guidance under PIPEDA.
- 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, and whether your lead capture would stand up to CASL scrutiny.
Yours to keep, compliance findings included.