More leads. Sharper cost price.

Short answer: advertising for the short term, search visibility for the long term — and in practice both, in a shifting ratio.

They serve different purposes. Advertisements deliver traffic tomorrow and stop the day you turn off the tap. Search visibility takes months before anything happens and then largely remains in place. Therefore, weighing one against the other is the wrong question.

The distribution that usually works:

• First few months: the focus is on advertisements to bridge the period while organic positions are still growing. At the same time, SEO work begins, as it needs those months to develop.
• After about six months: the first organic positions start coming in, and the advertising budget can be reduced for the keywords where you are beginning to rank yourself.
• Thereafter: use advertisements specifically for what is difficult to win organically, or for campaigns and peak moments.

What you want to avoid is only advertising for years. In that case, you are renting traffic without ever building anything, and every euro you do not spend immediately results in one less visitor.

Short answer: enough to learn what works within a month. Below that threshold, you are buying noise instead of insight.

How much that is depends on the cost-per-click in your market. The calculation that matters: you need several dozen clicks per month per keyword group before you can draw any meaningful conclusions. If you are in a market where a click costs three euros, you will end up with a different amount than at thirty cents.

What we advise in practice:

• Start narrow. One service, one region, and keywords with the clearest purchase intent. It is better to do three keywords well than thirty halfway.
• Expect it to take two to three months before the account has finished its learning phase. The first month is almost always the most expensive per lead.
• View advertisements as rent. As soon as you stop, the traffic stops. Therefore, build your search visibility at the same time; otherwise, you will continue to rent year after year.

And if the budget is too tight to do both: then search visibility is the investment that lasts.

Short answer: because Google Ads is designed to make it easy to spend money and difficult to achieve a return.

The interface steers you toward broad settings and automated campaigns. This works well for Google, but rarely for a small budget. Most self-managed accounts we take over share the same three problems: keywords that are too broad, a lack of negative keywords, and inaccurate conversion tracking.

The latter is the most critical. Without reliable conversion tracking, you focus on clicks instead of leads, leading you to optimize in exactly the wrong direction.

What outsourcing delivers:

• Cost per lead instead of cost per click as the primary metric
• Growing negative keyword lists, ensuring you don’t keep paying for search queries that never result in customers
• Ad copy that aligns with the landing page, as that is where the greatest gains are made
• Monthly adjustments instead of ‘set it and forget it’

What it doesn’t solve: an unconvincing landing page. Sending paid traffic to a page that doesn’t convert is the most expensive way to discover that your page isn’t converting.