A Google Ads agency that stops you paying for the wrong clicks

A Google Ads agency plans, builds and manages paid campaigns across Google Search, Shopping, Display and YouTube, and is judged on what those campaigns cost per customer. Firewater has run paid search for South African advertisers for 26 years, from an office in Sandton, Johannesburg.

With PPC advertising you pay each time someone clicks your advert. What you pay is decided in an auction against every other bidder on that keyword, and relevance pulls the price down. Two advertisers can bid the same amount and pay very different prices for the same position. Google documents how keywords work in Search campaigns if you want the underlying rules.

What we run

Search campaigns: keyword research, ad copy, match type strategy and negative lists
Shopping and Performance Max: feed setup, product grouping and bid control
Remarketing: audience segments across Display, YouTube and search
Landing pages: built and tested for conversion before spend scales
Conversion tracking: calls, forms and purchases counted separately and passed to your CRM
Budget management: weekly pacing against an agreed target cost per lead
Reporting: one monthly report written in plain language

Most accounts we inherit are built for the person who built them. Ad groups hold forty loosely related keywords, the search terms report is full of traffic nobody would have chosen, and conversion tracking counts a page view as a sale. Those three faults waste more budget than any bidding decision, and all three are fixable inside a month.

Measurement, tracking and where we stand with Google

Tracking is as much of the job as the campaign. Before a single advert runs, Firewater agrees the commercial targets with you. Conversion tracking is then wired so that a form fill, a phone call and a sale are never counted as the same event. Reports then say what worked and what changes next month.

A Google Ads agency should be able to show you the account, the search terms report and the spend, on request and without notice. You own the account, not us. That holds whether we build it from scratch or take over one someone else left behind.

[[VERIFY: current Google Partner status — and whether the R900 voucher offer still stands]]

What each campaign type is for

Campaign type	Use it when	Primary metric
Search	People are already searching for your product	Cost per qualified lead
Shopping	You sell physical products online	Return on ad spend
Display remarketing	Visitors left without converting	Assisted conversions, frequency
YouTube	The offer needs showing rather than describing	View rate, cost per view, lift
Local and Maps	Buyers come to a physical address	Calls, direction requests, store visits

Google remarketing

Remarketing shows your adverts to people who have already visited your site, while they browse elsewhere. Most first visits never convert, which makes remarketing the cheapest revenue in a well-built account. It also goes wrong faster than anything else, because one advert chasing the same person for six weeks does more harm than silence.

Firewater builds audience segments around behaviour: viewed a product, abandoned a basket, read three articles, bought last year. Each segment gets its own message, frequency cap and exclusion rules. Someone who sees the same banner every day for a month will remember the brand for the wrong reason. Google’s documentation on audience data segments explains how those audiences are assembled. Segments also decide how long someone stays in the pool: seven days for a basket abandoner, ninety for a researcher. Where the sales cycle runs long, the audience is handed to lead generation and mirrored in Meta campaigns so the follow-up stays consistent.

Google Business Profile

Google Business Profile is the free listing tool that controls how your business appears in Google Maps and in the local results pack. Google renamed the product in 2021, so older guides and agency decks still use its previous name. The profile carries your hours, photos, products, reviews and call button. For any Johannesburg business with a physical address, it is the highest-return hour of work in local search.

Linking the profile to your ads

Firewater sets up and optimises the profile, then connects it to your Google Ads account so location assets and Maps placements reinforce each other. Google’s guidelines for representing your business set the rules, and breaking them gets listings suspended. Reviews sit inside the same profile and feed the local ranking, so a routine for answering them is part of the setup. Photos, categories and product listings all affect which searches the profile surfaces for, and most profiles are missing at least one of them. We build profiles properly and repair the ones that were built badly.

YouTube advertising

YouTube reaches people who chose to be watching, and its campaigns are bought inside Google Ads. That means the same audiences, the same budgets and the same conversion tracking as your search work. Formats run from skippable in-stream through six-second bumpers to in-feed placements. Skippable in-stream charges only once a viewer watches a meaningful portion of the advert, which makes it a cheap way to test a message before committing to a bigger production.

Firewater picks the format around the job: bumpers for recall, longer in-stream when the product needs explaining. YouTube documents every video ad format and where each one appears. A campaign for KFC and one for Remington call for very different production standards, and we scope the shoot before the media plan. If the site behind the advert cannot carry the traffic, our web development team fixes that first.

Paid search sits inside our wider digital marketing services and alongside the rest of our digital advertising work. Our offices are in Sandton and the coffee is good. Call +27 11 262 6056, email info@firewater.net, or send us your brief.

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