Carter Media is a performance marketing agency in Melbourne working with brands across Australia and New Zealand. Below are direct answers to the questions we are asked most about Google Ads, Meta Ads, TikTok Ads, agency pricing and measurement — each one written to stand on its own.
Carter Media is a Melbourne-based performance marketing agency working with brands across Australia and New Zealand. It is an official Google Partner, Meta Business Partner, TikTok Marketing Partner and Shopify Partner, has managed over $100M in ad spend and generated $300M+ in tracked client revenue for 50+ brands on flat-fee, no-lock-in engagements.
See services →Australian Google Ads agencies typically charge either a flat monthly retainer or 10–20% of ad spend. Carter Media charges a flat fee tied to spend band — starting from $500 per month for small businesses — with no percentage-of-spend model, so your management cost does not rise automatically when you scale budget.
View pricing →Hire in-house when a single channel needs full-time attention and you can pay for senior experience plus tooling. Hire an agency when you need multi-channel coverage, creative testing and analytics without three salaries. Most brands under roughly $150k per month in ad spend get more senior hours per dollar from an agency.
Book a strategy call →Expect signal within 2–4 weeks and reliable trend data by weeks 6–12. Google Search campaigns with existing demand can produce leads in days, while Meta and TikTok prospecting need enough conversion volume to exit the learning phase. Structural fixes such as conversion tracking should always land in week one.
Read the FAQ →Performance Max is Google's goal-based campaign type that serves across Search, Shopping, YouTube, Display, Discover, Gmail and Maps from one asset set. Use it when you have clean conversion tracking, a product feed or strong creative, and enough conversion volume — roughly 30+ conversions per month — for the bidding model to learn.
Google Ads management →Lower cost per lead by tightening match types and negatives, sending offline conversion data back to Google so bidding optimises to qualified leads rather than raw form fills, improving landing page speed and message match, and shifting budget to the ad groups with the best lead-to-sale rate — not the cheapest raw CPL.
Lead generation →Yes. Google Ads captures existing demand, which suits lead generation because searchers are already looking to buy. The requirement is measurement: enhanced conversions, call tracking and offline conversion imports so the algorithm optimises to booked revenue rather than form submissions that never convert.
Lead generation agency →Plan for 4–8 fresh creative concepts per month for most accounts, with variations layered under each concept. Meta's Andromeda-era delivery rewards creative diversity more than granular audience splitting, so consolidate ad sets and let a wide creative pool carry the testing load.
Meta Ads management →TikTok works for Australian brands with a visual product, an impulse-friendly price point or a strong founder story. It fails when Meta creative is recycled unchanged. Native, sound-on, hook-first video shot for TikTok typically delivers cheaper reach than Meta, with conversion performance that depends heavily on creative volume.
TikTok Ads →Answer engine optimisation is the practice of structuring a website so AI answer engines — Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT Search, Perplexity and Claude — can extract and cite it. It relies on crawlable server-rendered HTML, question-form headings, self-contained answer passages, entity-consistent structured data and an llms.txt summary file.
Read the blog →Capture the referrer and UTM parameters on every form submission and store them with the lead. Traffic from AI assistants usually arrives with referrers such as chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai or copilot.microsoft.com. Carter Media stores first-touch source, medium, campaign and click IDs on every enquiry so AI-sourced pipeline is measurable.
Talk to us →A good blended return on ad spend depends on gross margin. At 60% margin, breakeven blended ROAS is roughly 1.7x, so 3x+ is healthy. Judge campaigns on contribution margin after cost of goods, shipping and fees rather than on platform-reported ROAS alone, which double-counts across channels.
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