Google Ads Agency Switzerland.

Four blocks of work: measurement, account structure, ongoing sharpening, and reporting that shows enquiries rather than clicks. Only the second one is visible from outside, which is why so many proposals describe campaign setup in loving detail and stay vague about everything that happens afterwards.

• Measurement first. Before the first franc is spent, conversion actions have to exist and fire on something real — a submitted form, a call, an order — not on a page view. Without that, bidding automation is aiming at nothing and your reporting cannot answer the only question that matters. How that foundation is laid is described on conversion tracking.
• Account and campaign structure. Campaigns built around how people actually search, split so that budgets can be steered per offer rather than as one lump. If everything sits in a single campaign, nothing can be switched off individually — and the first thing you will want, once the data arrives, is to switch something off.
• Search terms and exclusions. The search terms report shows what people really typed to reach your ad, as opposed to what you asked to bid on. In neglected accounts a substantial share of the spend goes to phrasings no customer would ever use. Removing them is unglamorous, never finished, and usually the single biggest lever in the first quarter.
• Bidding and reporting. Automated strategies are pointed at a defined conversion goal and then watched, not left to run. The monthly report names enquiries and cost per enquiry. Impressions and clicks rise reliably the moment you spend money; they prove nothing.

Notice what is not on that list: creativity. Paid search is a measurement discipline with a writing task attached, not the other way round. The parts that decide the outcome — what you exclude, what you measure, where the click lands — are all checkable, which is why the rest of this page is about arithmetic and evidence rather than about promises.

Four models are common in the Swiss market: a percentage of media budget, a fixed monthly retainer, hourly billing, and performance-based pay. They differ less in price than in the incentive they create, and that is the standard you should hold them to.

• Percentage of media budget. The fee grows with your spending. The incentive points the wrong way: an agency that earns more when you spend more has no economic reason to advise a smaller budget. The model is defensible where budgets swing hard and the workload genuinely swings with them — seasonal e-commerce running Shopping campaigns across thousands of items is the honest example.
• Fixed monthly retainer. The price is tied to the amount of work, not to the size of your budget. That is the normal case for an SME with a stable, manageable account, and it is our model: from CHF 300 per month, agreed before the first campaign runs. The drawback deserves saying out loud too — when the workload grows, the retainer has to be renegotiated rather than growing by itself.
• Hourly rate. Clean and easy to follow for bounded pieces of work: an account audit, an initial build, a migration, a training session. For ongoing management it is impractical, because nobody wants to renegotiate scope every month.
• Performance-based. It sounds best and is the hardest to keep honest. Whoever earns from measured success tends to control the measurement — and conversion definitions can be widened until a page view counts as a result. If you want this model, insist that the counting happens in your analytics property, and that the definition of a countable conversion is written down before anything starts.

The question that decides every model: are the fee and the advertising budget shown as two separate lines on the invoice? Where the two merge into one number, you can check neither what Google received nor what the agency kept. Ask for two lines — from us as much as from anyone else.

The threshold can be calculated rather than asserted. The fee is a surcharge on your advertising budget. For management to carry its own cost, it has to cut your cost per enquiry by exactly that surcharge share — in formula terms, by fee divided by (fee plus media budget). With our entry retainer of CHF 300 per month it looks like this:

Read the last column for what it is: the hurdle at which you are merely as well off as you were without an agency, before a single franc of advantage appears. At CHF 500 of media budget, management has to push your cost per enquiry down by more than a third before it starts earning its keep. At CHF 5,000, just under six per cent does it. That single fact is why the same agency is a good idea for one account and a bad idea for another.

Two qualifications belong with it. First, the retainer grows with the workload on larger accounts — but usually more slowly than the budget, which is why the arithmetic keeps improving as you scale, and why the percentage model gets worse in the same direction. Second, the hurdle is easy to clear when an account is currently being run badly: no conversion tracking, no negative keywords, everything on broad match. If the account is already tidy, twenty per cent of improvement is a great deal to ask.

There is also a data problem that has nothing to do with money. At CHF 500 of budget and a CHF 5 click price you are buying roughly 100 clicks a month. At a five per cent conversion rate that is five enquiries — too few for an automated bidding strategy to infer anything reliable, and too few to detect a real difference inside a single month. So we treat CHF 500 as the absolute floor for a media budget, and consider the case for ongoing management clearly sound from about CHF 1,500 to CHF 2,000 a month. Below that, a one-off build with training is almost always the more honest offer than a retainer.

Run it yourself if you have the time and the budget is small; hire a freelancer if one person is enough; hire an agency when tracking, landing page and campaign have to be thought about together.

Running it yourself costs no fee but real hours — realistically two to four a month once things are running, plus a steeper start. If you have those hours and a budget below CHF 1,000, you will often do better than with any external option. The price is the learning curve: the classic beginner mistakes — no negative keywords, the conversion goal pointed at the wrong event, Google's own recommendations accepted unread — usually cost more in the first months than a proper build would have.

A freelancer is cheaper than an agency and, for a single clearly bounded account, frequently the best fit. The trade-off is availability: one person who can fall ill, take holiday or shift focus. Ask what happens in that case before it happens, and make sure the account and the analytics property are in your name so the answer is never dramatic.

An agency earns its place when the work reaches beyond the account itself: when the landing page has to be built or rebuilt, when tracking spans several systems, when paid search has to be coordinated with organic and local visibility. That is exactly our shape — we build the page and the campaign in one hand rather than coordinating two suppliers, which is also why the destination of every ad is something we can fix rather than merely complain about. The organic counterpart is described on SEO Agency Zurich, and the role of the person actually touching the account on Google Ads Specialist.

Five signals, all of which you can check without knowing anything about paid search. None of them requires access to a dashboard or an explanation from the person being checked.

• The account is not in your name. History and learning data stay behind when you leave, and a new account starts from zero. This is the one to settle first, because it is the only item on the list that gets harder to fix with time.
• No active conversion action. Without measurement nobody is optimising; they are guessing with your money. Ask which conversion actions exist and what event each one fires on. "Page views" is not an answer.
• The report shows impressions and clicks. Both rise reliably the moment you spend more. A report worth reading names enquiries and cost per enquiry, and says which search terms produced them.
• The negative keyword list is not growing. If it has stayed the same for three months, nobody has opened the search terms report. That report changes every week, because the way people phrase searches changes.
• Guarantees. Position one, a fixed number of enquiries, a promised cost per lead — none of these can be assured inside an auction that reprices continuously and includes competitors nobody controls. A guarantee here is either meaningless or hiding a definition you have not read.

The general version of this checklist — what to ask any digital supplier before signing — is collected on choosing an agency in Switzerland. If your existing account needs assessing before you decide anything, that is a bounded piece of work rather than a retainer, and it is the right first step in most takeovers.

In four situations we actively advise against it, even though it costs us the engagement.

When the margin cannot carry the enquiry. Do the sum once: at a CHF 8 click price and a three per cent conversion rate, one enquiry costs around CHF 265. If one order comes out of every four enquiries, that order carries over CHF 1,000 of advertising cost. If your contribution margin per order sits below that, no setup and no optimisation will rescue it — paid search is structurally the wrong channel for that offer, and more budget only makes the loss bigger.

When nobody is searching for what you sell. Search ads capture existing demand; they do not create it. For a genuinely new product with no established search term, the budget runs into empty space. There, written content, specialist articles and direct outreach do the work, and the search terms appear later on their own. The channel decision itself is what digital marketing consulting is for.

When the target area is small and purely local. For a shop with a catchment of a few kilometres, a well-kept Google Business Profile usually returns more per franc than paid clicks. Start with local SEO and Google Maps, and only add ads once that is exhausted.

When the destination page is the problem. Ads amplify what already exists. If your site loads slowly, does not name the offer plainly, or has no form that works, you are buying expensive traffic for a page that cannot use it. The order is always the same: fix the page, then raise the budget. Where to start is what a website audit answers; how paid and organic compare over a longer horizon is set out in Google Ads vs. SEO.