What targeted advertising should be

A user sees an ad for something they already wanted, at a moment they can act on it. That is the job of a performance campaign.

Paid campaigns usually disappoint for three reasons: untargeted creative, broken tracking and audiences that were too broad from the first day. We fix those three before we change the bid strategy.

What we run

Search ads

Google Ads, Bing Ads. Brand defense, non-brand high-intent, competitor terms where they make sense. We focus heavily on negative keyword discipline — a Google Ads account without a maintained negative list keeps paying for irrelevant searches.

Paid social

Meta, TikTok, LinkedIn, Pinterest. Creative testing in weekly cycles. Cold/warm/hot funnel structure. Lookalike audiences seeded from your actual customer list.

Performance Max and Advantage+

Used when the data supports them, and left off until it does. Their results depend on feed quality and brand-exclusion lists, so we check both before switching them on.

YouTube and video

Bumpers, in-stream, and Demand Gen. We measure these against revenue and brand-lift surveys.

Retargeting

First-party and pixel-based, with frequency caps that respect your audience. We exclude converters automatically.

PPC management for Ottawa and Canadian companies

Campaigns for a local market need settings a national account does without:

  • Geo targeting for Ottawa–Gatineau. Location targeting is set to the cities, postal areas or radius you serve, with the location option that counts people in or regularly in the area. Ontario and Quebec sides of the river get their own campaigns when the offer or the language differs.
  • Separate English and French ad groups. Each language gets its own keywords, ad text and landing page, so a French search lands on a French page.
  • Conversion tracking through server-side events. Form submissions, calls and booked appointments are sent to Google Ads and Meta from the server as well as the browser, with deduplication, so the platforms optimise on enquiries that arrived.
  • Search terms review. The search terms report is read every week and irrelevant queries go to the negative list.

Instagram and Facebook ads

Meta campaigns for Ottawa audiences run on location targeting for the area you serve, with placements on Instagram and Facebook chosen by where the conversions come from. We test creative in weekly cycles, build retargeting from site visitors and customer lists you are allowed to use, and send leads either to a landing page or to an instant form connected to your CRM.

For short-video campaigns on TikTok, see TikTok ads. The Ottawa office and local cases are on the Ottawa marketing agency page.

How we operate

  • Week 1. Tracking audit, GA4 events, server-side container, conversion mapping.
  • Week 2. Audience mapping, creative brief, account structure.
  • Weeks 3–4. Launch with two budget tiers — a test bucket and a stable bucket. Test bucket rotates weekly.
  • Ongoing. Weekly check-ins, monthly strategy review, quarterly creative refresh.

Pricing

Start with a 30-minute marketing strategy session for €100: we look at your situation and agree on the next step. Everything after that is quoted for your scope. How it works: Pricing.

What we won't do

  • Promise a specific ROAS in writing before a 30-day data baseline.
  • Run ads to a landing page we haven't reviewed.
  • Skip server-side tracking because "the pixel still works".
  • Keep running a campaign after it misses the stop rule agreed before launch.

For moving companies, see the full playbook: Moving company & home services marketing: SEO, Google LSA, Meta ads. For SEO alongside paid search: SEO services in Ottawa.