Paid search has never been more complicated. Or more valuable, if you know what you’re doing.
We offer full-service paid search management or focused consultancy and audits, depending on what you need. Either way, the starting point is always the same: understanding your business objectives first, and building a search strategy around those, not around what the platforms want you to spend.
Search is changing faster than it ever has. Here’s what that actually means for your brand.
The fundamentals of paid search are not going away. Clear measurement, clean first-party data, well-structured feeds, a proper understanding of how Performance Max actually works. These things matter more than ever, precisely because the platform is getting more complex and more automated.
What is changing is the shape of search itself. Large language models like ChatGPT, Google’s AI Mode, and Gemini are shifting how people discover products and brands. Search is becoming less about simple keyword intent and more about how your brand shows up across an increasingly fragmented discovery landscape. That creates new risks for brands that are only optimising for last year’s version of search, and real opportunities for those that aren’t.
Performance Max is a good example of how this plays out. For years it was treated as a black box, and many agencies were happy to leave it that way. We weren’t. Understanding what’s actually happening inside PMax, from search term visibility to brand exclusions to channel inventory breakdown, is now a genuine competitive differentiator. And it’s the kind of depth that only comes from doing the work, not from taking the platform’s reporting at face value.
There’s also the question of where paid search sits in the wider acquisition picture. YouTube is no longer an afterthought for retail brands. Moving up the funnel to build awareness and consideration is increasingly essential for brands that want to compete for the next generation of customers, not just convert the ones who already know them. We build that thinking into how we manage search from the start.
Lyndsay Harrison - Senior Digital Marketing Manager
Expert paid search management, across every platform that matters.
Here’s what we manage and how we do it.
- Search and AI Max
Core search campaign management built around your commercial objectives, not platform defaults. As AI Max evolves, we’re tracking what actually improves performance and what’s noise, so our recommendations are always grounded in what the data tells us rather than what Google recommends. - Shopping and Performance Max
We manage Shopping and PMax as an integrated system, not as separate campaigns that happen to run in the same account. That means feed quality, bidding strategy, brand exclusions, and audience signals all working together, with full visibility into what’s driving results across channels. - YouTube and Demand Gen
Upper-funnel activity that actually connects to commercial outcomes. We use YouTube and Demand Gen to build awareness and consideration for retail brands in a way that complements and amplifies the performance activity running below it, rather than sitting in a separate silo. - App campaigns
End-to-end app campaign management across Google and Apple app stores, for brands where app acquisition is part of their growth strategy. - Display and programmatic
Targeted display activity for retargeting, prospecting, and brand building, managed to complement your search strategy rather than duplicate it.
From awareness to advocacy, we create comprehensive paid search strategies that meet (and maximise) your business objectives.
Don’t just take our word for it.
We manage paid search for some of the UK’s most ambitious ecommerce and retail brands. Here’s what one of them has to say.
Angela Ward, General Manager
Why Choose Genie Goals?
“Genie manage both our UK and IE PPC activity at Mamas & Papas and we see them as an extension of our digital marketing team. We have a great relationship with Chris, Ainhoa and Amy who provide continuous communication and reporting so we have a full understanding of how our Paid Search is performing. Working together on new initiatives, we continuously deliver high-performing paid search campaigns within budget whilst sticking to our COS model.”
- Lyndsay Harrison, Senior Digital Marketing Manager, Mamas & Papas
Certified at the highest level across every major platform.
Our platform partnerships give us access to beta features, dedicated support, and early visibility of where search is heading next.
Our approach is simple:
spend your money where it achieves your goals and objectives.
Want a paid search audit?
Industville
Driving Incremental New Customer Sales + Increasing Brand Awareness
47% YoY Revenue Growth
Bird & Blend Tea Co
Leveraging Demand Gen to Maximise Q4
47% YoY Revenue Growth
Rodd & Gunn
UK and EU Market Entry for New Zealand Lifestyle Brand
47% YoY Revenue Growth
Paid Search Marketing FAQ’s
PPC stands for 'pay-per-click', and is one of the most important tools in the performance marketing toolkit to drive an action. PPC advertising has grown from humble beginnings as the little search ads in the sidebar of Google, to providing marketing solutions across the whole funnel, utilising machine learning and bidding technology to optimise effectively to your business objectives. Search Engine Marketing benefits from being a channel which helps users find what they are looking for, so it’s vital that brands leverage these tools effectively to be visible throughout the entire research phase of the buying journey.
Genie Goals offers support across the full range of products in the Google Ads (formerly Adwords) and Microsoft Advertising (formerly Bing Ads) platforms, including shopping, search, demand gen, video and more.
Auditing your account should be a regular part of your PPC strategy. Best practices change constantly, Google releases new features every other day, and what good looks like today, might not tomorrow. So reviewing how your account structure is laddering up to your overall objective is essential.An audit should answer a very specific challenge, and typically these are;
- A clear lack of understanding of how PPC campaigns should be set up to achieve optimum results
- A strong reluctance to work with AI and adopt smart features like Performance Max or smart bidding
- The account is in a good shape but there is a clear lack of strategic direction with a strong focus on immediate sales at a high return on ad spend (or ROAS).
- An account health check. Many brands out there are doing a great job with their PPC activity and they simply want to make sure they still have their finger on the pulse
If we drill down into the details of the audit, we would focus our attention on;
- Business objectives
- Measurement
- Account Structure
- Use of AI
- Best practices
Performance max is a relatively new campaign type which was introduced to replace the formerly known Smart Shopping campaign. However, the key difference here is that Performance Max - or Pmax - targets multiple placements like Shopping, of course, but also Search, YouTube, Gmail, Discovery, and Maps. Another key factor is that marketers do not have the full visibility over which search terms they are appearing but instead have visibility over Searched Themes - multiple search terms grouped under a similar theme. Because of this Pmax disrupted the industry.
As an agency, we initially A/B tested Pmax versus smart and standard shopping and very quickly realised that the vast majority of our merchants traffic was still going towards the Shopping inventory. Google won’t tell you that but many open Google Ads scripts have been widely shared within the industry.
Aside from inventory monitoring and brand versus non-brand segmentation, Pmax works in a similar way to smart shopping and can only work with the data that you feed the tool with. This means that we would still recommend that you mirror your product categories and reflect that in the number of Pmax campaigns you want to launch. If you are a Fashion retailer think of what’s your bread and butter category and whether it warrants its own Pmax campaign. Everything else might fall under one other campaign. In any case, ensure that you have as many asset groups as possible, again mirroring your product categories.
Of course, as with all feed-driven activity, the quality of the feed is important. Great feed optimisation allows you to segment the campaigns in the most impactful way, and maximises the amount of pertinent information you are feeding into the Google AI.
In the UK, Google holds a 93% market share (December 2024) meaning that our prime focus should always be about driving growth on the platform and maximising spend there. Having said that, Bing still holds a 4% market share which does represent an opportunity for growth. This is typically recommended when retailers have larger budgets and are already able to maximise performance on the Google platform. But launching on Bing will help expand your reach.
If we look beyond the UK, and turn to the US, Bing market share is about 7%, and considering the size of the market there, it is once again a good opportunity to acquire new customers.
In general, CPCs can be cheaper due to the environment being less competitive and the audience tend to be more mature. So some verticals might be performing better than others. In any case, our approach would be to test the platform and see whether it is able to drive the results you’re after.
A comparison shopping service is essentially a website that allows users to compare products from multiple retailers. Think of it as the world’s biggest shopping centre in the palm of your hand.
But let’s rewind and go back to 2017 when The European Commission fined Google €2.42 billion for breaching EU antitrust rules. The Commission concluded that Google has abused its market dominance as a search engine by giving an illegal advantage to another Google product, its comparison shopping service.
In other words, Google had the monopoly over the search results with all shopping ads served by Google Comparison Shopping Service.
Following the EU ruling, Google opened its CSS programme giving the opportunity to other Comparison Shopping Services, or CSSs, to enter this ecosystem and place shopping ads on Google, on behalf of merchants.
And that is the important message. Although ads from all retailers will be displayed on Google Shopping Ads, products will be listed with a different Comparison Shopping Service, like the Genie Shopping Network.
It is widely known that before an ad enters the auction, and is being displayed on Google Shopping, Google takes a 20% margin. Let me say it again. Before your ad enters the auction, Google takes a 20% cut, which means that out of a full pound, roughly £80p goes into the auction itself.
So the main benefit for ecom brands is to get more out of their already squeezed marketing budget. By placing their products on Google Shopping Ad, via a CSS other than Google, they know that their full pound goes into the auction. This will automatically give you a competitive advantage over your competitors still placing their ads on the Google CSS.
Want to know if your paid search is performing as well as it should?
Bring us your account and your objectives. We’ll give you a straight assessment of what’s working, what isn’t, and what we’d do differently. No flattery, no jargon.
Request a paid search review