PPC in Leeds: when head office already runs the account, stop bidding against yourself first

In Leeds the first paid search saving is usually not a better bid or a tighter keyword list. It is stopping two of your own campaigns turning up to the same auction. The city's advertising money sits with financial, legal and professional services firms, with large back office operations and with multi site businesses, which means the person buying paid search locally very often does not own the ad account. A head office campaign, a regional campaign, a reseller campaign and an agency built account can all be live at once, aimed at overlapping places and words. Settle ownership and overlap first, because every other improvement is measured through them.

This page covers the three ownership shapes, the overlap audit in the order to run it, a brand term policy, what counts as a conversion when the sale takes months, and the rules on the ad copy itself.

Who owns the account, and what that allows

Shape	What you can change	What to settle in writing
Head office account, regional campaign inside it	Budget and geography within limits somebody else sets	Which geography is exclusively yours, which keywords you may run, who may edit your campaign
Your own account, group billing	Everything in the account	That it is in your organisation's name, that conversion tracking sits in your own analytics property, and that audience lists stay with you
Agency held account	Whatever the agency grants	Move it into your name with the agency given access that can be withdrawn, and take the history with it

This is not an administrative question. Conversion history, audience lists and the learning in a campaign are the assets you are paying to build, and in somebody else's account you are renting them. Make the transfer a condition of starting.

The overlap audit, in order

Run these five checks before changing a single bid. Each takes an afternoon and each tends to find money.

• Geography. List every live campaign that can serve an impression in West Yorkshire, including national campaigns with no exclusions. A national campaign with no Leeds exclusion and a Leeds campaign are two bids for the same person. Decide which one owns the area and exclude properly rather than relying on bid differences. Settling the catchment itself, before the keyword list, is covered in our note on deciding the catchment first.
• Keywords across campaigns and accounts. Pull the search terms report for every account that can reach your customers and look for the same term served from two places. Your own two ads will not both appear, and the competition between them still raises what you pay and splits the data bidding relies on.
• Brand terms. Count who bids on your name: head office, your campaign, resellers, affiliates, recruiters advertising your vacancies, comparison sites. This is the most common source of wasted spend in a group.
• Location assets. Check the addresses, phone numbers and location extensions on each campaign point at the right office. A Leeds campaign carrying a Manchester address converts worse for reasons nobody notices for months.
• Audiences and exclusions. Existing customers and past applicants targeted as new prospects is the quiet version of the same problem. Exclude them and the cost per genuine enquiry falls without touching a bid.

Record the result as a one page map: who owns which geography, which keyword themes and which brand terms, and circulate it. Most groups have never written it down, and the writing down is what stops the overlap reassembling in six months.

A brand term policy worth having

Decide three things and publish them internally. Who may bid on the company name and its variants, usually one campaign in one account. What partners, resellers and affiliates may not bid on, written into their agreement with the negative keyword list attached. And what you do about competitors bidding on your name, which is permitted when their advert does not use your trade mark in the text, and a complaint to the platform when it does.

Keep a single brand campaign live rather than switching it off. It is cheap, it holds the space above your own listing against competitors and comparison sites, and it is the cleanest read on how much demand for your name exists.

What a conversion is when the sale takes months

Leeds advertisers mostly sell considered, high value services. A form is not the sale, and an account optimised toward form fills will cheerfully buy more of the cheapest ones. Define the stage that indicates value and feed that back instead.

• Agree the stage names with the people who handle enquiries: enquiry, qualified, meeting held, instructed.
• Record the stage on every enquiry in the same field, with the source carried through from the click.
• Import the later stage back into the ad account so bidding optimises toward qualified enquiries rather than form fills, and give each stage a value if your finance team can support one.
• Where calls matter more than forms, which in professional services they do, measure answered calls by hour and by campaign. An unanswered call at half past five is a paid click thrown away.

Report cost per qualified enquiry beside cost per click every month. The second moves constantly and explains nothing; the first decides next quarter's budget.

The copy itself, and the rules on it

Paid search copy is advertising, so the CAP Code reaches it exactly as it reaches a poster, and three lines of copy cause most of the trouble: a price shown to consumers that leaves VAT out, a from price the service is not really available at, and a comparative claim with no dated evidence behind it. Treat every headline as a claim somebody may ask you to prove, keep the proof filed with the headline, and name the person who signs a new one off.

Regulated firms have one more step in front of publication. A financial promotion has to be approved by an appropriately authorised person before it is communicated, and it has to be fair, clear and not misleading. That decides how the account is run: copy cannot be iterated weekly if every variant waits in an approval queue. Build a bank of pre approved headlines and descriptions in one sitting, sign them off together, and let the account test inside the approved set. Law firms carry their own publicity duties, which reward the same approach.

What the fee should look like

Ask for the management fee and the media spend as separate numbers, both net of VAT. The fee as days a month by grade of person, or as a stated percentage of spend with a floor, with the people named. The spend held in your own account on your own billing. Then ask the two questions that get skipped: what the fee covers in a month when spend is paused, and who owns the account, the conversion data and the audience lists when the engagement ends.

Questions Leeds advertisers ask about paid search

Head office will not give us our own campaign. What can we do?

Ask for three things rather than for an account: an exclusive geography for your office, a named set of keyword themes that are yours, and a monthly report filtered to your area. All three can be granted inside a national account and together they give you most of what a separate one would. Send the request with the overlap map attached, because that document makes the case.

Should we bid on our own brand name?

Keep one brand campaign, in one account, and make sure nobody else in the group or your partner network bids the same terms. It defends the space above your listing cheaply and reads demand for your name clearly.

We get plenty of enquiries and almost none convert. What changes?

Change what the account optimises toward before you change the adverts. Feed back the qualified stage rather than the form fill, exclude the search terms producing unqualified enquiries, and check the landing page answers the question the keyword asked. Volume falls and cost per instruction falls with it.

Do we need separate campaigns for each office?

Separate campaigns where the geography, the service mix or the sign off differ, which is usually the case across offices. One campaign per office with exclusive areas reads more clearly and defends itself better internally than one campaign with overlapping targeting.

How do we handle recruitment advertising in the same account?

Keep hiring in its own campaigns with its own budget, conversion definition and reporting, and exclude careers terms from the customer campaigns. The two compete for budget and for attention in reports, and their measures of success have nothing in common.

What paid search cannot buy you in a shortlist

In a professional services purchase the shortlist is often built before anybody searches. A finance director asks an assistant which firms in Leeds handle a particular kind of work, or how two compare, and the reply names three or four with a line of reasoning for each, drawn from the firms' own pages, directories, legal and financial listings and press coverage. No advert appears in that answer and no budget buys a place in it. What earns a place is having written down in public what you do, for whom, and with what evidence. Read those answers for your own practice areas and you can see who is being named today and which sources the assistant trusted. AI Knows Us does that reading for a list of practice areas and reports the firms named alongside the pages behind them.