PPC in London: decide the catchment before you write the keyword list

Before you brief a London PPC agency, settle one question: is this account selling to London, or selling to the United Kingdom from an office in London? That answer sets the location targeting, the keyword list, the budget floor and the fee you should agree to. Get it wrong and you pay central London competition for clicks from people you cannot serve, or you fence a national business inside the M25 and wonder why volume stalled.

The short version of what follows: fix the catchment, write the keyword list in British English with the negatives that belong to it, target by postcode district rather than by a circle on a map, keep price claims clear about VAT, and agree a fee that does not reward spending more.

The catchment question, and the three honest answers

Almost every London advertiser is one of three things, and very few accounts are built as though their owner had decided which.

• A genuinely local business. Trades, clinics, restaurants, nurseries, lettings, repairs. The customer has to be near you or you cannot serve them. The account is small, tightly targeted, and judged on calls and booked jobs.
• A London business selling nationally. A software firm, a recruiter, a wholesaler, an online retailer. The office is in EC1 and the customer is in Carlisle. The account should be national, and the only London thing about it is your cost base.
• A hybrid. A service you deliver in person across Greater London plus a product you ship anywhere. That is two catchments and it needs two campaign sets with their own budgets, because mixed into one campaign the national half eats the local half's budget on cheaper clicks.

If you are	Target	Judge it on
Local only	The postcode districts you actually serve, people present in the area	Calls answered, booked jobs, cost per booked job
National, based in London	The United Kingdom, with London split out only if its numbers differ	Cost per qualified enquiry or order, reported by region
Hybrid	Two campaign sets, two budgets, two conversion actions	Each set on its own, never blended into one figure

What London does to the price of a click

London concentrates the buyers for nearly every category in the country, so the head terms attract national advertisers, comparison sites and lead resellers who resell the enquiry rather than fulfil it. The competition is also competent, because in house teams and agencies here are well staffed. The effect is that the broad category word is the most expensive and least qualified thing in the account, and the money sits further down the list, on phrases that name the specific job, product or problem. If the margin on one sale will not cover a London click plus the clicks that do not convert, that term is not yours to buy.

British English is a targeting decision, not a style note

A keyword list built from American data quietly mistargets a London account, because the words are different and so is the intent behind them.

• Solicitor, not lawyer or attorney. Estate agent and letting agent, not realtor. Heating engineer alongside plumber. Takeaway, not takeout. Mobile, not cell. CV, not resume. Nursery, not daycare. Flat, not apartment.
• Hire means rent here. A van or plant hire advertiser needs the employment sense of hire in its negative list, and a recruitment advertiser needs the equipment sense in its.
• Negatives worth adding on day one: jobs, salary, course, training, free, template, meaning, wiki, DIY, and the names of your own suppliers.
• Make the search terms report a standing weekly habit while the account is young. The negatives it produces are the clearest evidence anybody is actually working on your behalf, so ask to see last week's additions.

Target by postcode district, not by a circle on a map

Greater London is not one place and a radius does not describe it. The central districts run EC and WC, then come the compass areas E, N, NW, SE, SW and W, and around those sit postcode areas such as BR, CR, DA, EN, HA, IG, KT, RM, SM, TW and UB. Plenty of customers who call themselves Londoners live in the outer areas, and some sit beyond the Greater London boundary altogether, so a target set to the city misses them while a radius drawn from your office picks up districts your van will never reach by nine in the morning.

Two settings matter more than the shape. First, whether you are reaching people who are in the area or people merely showing an interest in it, because the broader option pulls in searches from outside your catchment. Second, whether you are actively excluding the areas you cannot serve rather than simply not including them.

VAT, price claims and the ASA

If you advertise a price to consumers it has to be the price they pay, with VAT included. Business audiences normally see prices excluding VAT, said so plainly. Non broadcast advertising in the United Kingdom is governed by the CAP Code, which the Advertising Standards Authority enforces, and price and availability claims are among the things complained about most often. A "from" price has to be genuinely available, not the price of a job nobody buys. Keep the advert, the landing page and the quote consistent on the figure and on whether VAT is inside it, because the gap between them is a compliance problem and a conversion problem at once.

The fee, and the clause that matters more than the fee

Three shapes are normal: a fixed monthly fee, a percentage of media spend, or a fixed fee with a percentage above a threshold. A percentage of spend pays your agency more when it spends more, and a flat fee pays the same whether anybody opened the account that month, so neither shape corrects itself. Fix that in the contract rather than in the number: agree the work that happens every month, the reporting that shows it happened, and the notice period, which is worth asking about before the price.

Then take ownership out of the argument. The Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising accounts should belong to your limited company, with the agency linked as a manager and that link removable by you. The conversion tracking, the analytics property and any call tracking numbers should be yours too. Look the agency up at Companies House while you are there; it takes two minutes and tells you how long the company has traded and who stands behind it.

The paperwork that should exist by the second month

• Conversion tracking that records enquiries, calls and orders rather than page views, with values you actually believe.
• Call tracking if the telephone is where the sale happens, and somebody rostered to answer it while your adverts run.
• A search terms report you have read yourself, and a negative list that grew in each of those weeks.
• Cost per enquiry reported by campaign, not one blended figure for the whole account.

The London PPC decisions buyers get stuck on

Should a London business target London or the whole country?

Target where you can deliver and get paid. If you ship nationally, run nationally, and split London out only if its conversion rate or order value is different enough to deserve its own budget. If you serve customers in person, the catchment is the area your people can reach inside the time you promise.

We have a London quote and a cheaper one from outside the city. What decides it?

Paid search is done in the account rather than in the room, so geography counts for less here than it does for production or events. What should decide it is who has run your category before and who will be doing the daily work, not where the desk is. Ask both firms to name the person and show a recent search terms report they acted on.

How much media does an account need before the data is useful?

Enough for a steady flow of conversions each week, because a bidding system and a human both improve on conversions rather than on clicks. Work it out from your own conversion rate and the click cost on the terms you want. If the answer lands beyond your budget, narrow the keyword list until it does not.

Who should own the advertising account?

You should. An account created inside an agency's own structure and never handed over is the most expensive thing to unwind when you change supplier, because the history goes with it and a fresh account starts cold.

Does paid search help organic rankings?

Not directly. It helps another way: the search terms report shows the exact phrasings people use and which lead to money, which is the best keyword research a website can be handed.

The shortlist being drawn up without you

A fair number of the people shortlisting a paid search agency this month will start by asking an assistant to name a few, in those words, and will walk into the first meeting with three or four names already in mind. Those replies get assembled from third party pages, directories and roundups rather than from your own site or your case studies, which is how a firm with genuinely good results ends up absent from all of them. Finding out what those replies currently say when somebody asks for a PPC agency in your part of London, and which pages produced them, is the job AI Knows Us does.