Carter Media is a performance marketing agency in Melbourne working with brands across Australia and New Zealand. Below are direct answers to the 28 questions we are asked most about Google Ads, Meta Ads, TikTok Ads, agency pricing and measurement — each one written to stand on its own, with a full answer page behind it.
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.
Read the full answer →Hire in-house when one channel needs full-time attention and the budget covers a senior salary plus tooling. Hire an agency when you need multi-channel coverage, creative testing and analytics without three salaries. Most brands spending under roughly $150,000 per month on ads get more senior hours per dollar from an agency.
Read the full answer →Expect early signal within 2 to 4 weeks and reliable trend data by weeks 6 to 12. Google Search campaigns targeting existing demand can produce leads within days. Meta and TikTok prospecting need enough conversion volume to exit the learning phase, usually 50 conversions per ad set within a week.
Read the full answer →Australian Google Ads agencies typically charge a flat monthly retainer of $500 to $5,000, or 10–20% of ad spend. Carter Media charges a flat fee tied to a spend band, starting from $550 per month for small businesses, with no percentage-of-spend model, so management cost does not rise automatically when budget scales.
Read the full answer →Average Google Ads cost per click in Australia sits between $1.50 and $6.00 depending on industry, with legal, finance and trades bidding highest. Most small businesses start at $1,500 to $3,000 per month in ad spend. Cost per lead commonly lands between $40 and $180 for services and $15 to $60 for e-commerce.
Read the full answer →Meta Ads in Australia typically cost $8 to $20 CPM, $0.60 to $2.50 per click and $20 to $90 per lead, depending on industry and creative quality. E-commerce brands commonly see $25 to $60 cost per purchase. Creative quality moves Meta costs more than audience targeting does.
Read the full answer →Most Australian small businesses should start at $1,500 to $3,000 per month in Google Ads spend, plus management. That range buys enough clicks in a focused suburb or service niche to generate 15 to 30 conversions monthly, which is the volume smart bidding needs before it can optimise reliably.
Read the full answer →Performance Max is Google's goal-based campaign type that serves across Search, Shopping, YouTube, Display, Discover, Gmail and Maps from one asset group. Use Performance Max when conversion tracking is clean, a product feed or strong creative exists, and the account produces roughly 30 or more conversions per month for bidding to learn.
Read the full answer →Lower cost per lead by tightening match types and negative keywords, importing offline conversions so bidding optimises to qualified leads rather than raw form fills, improving landing page speed and message match, and shifting budget toward the ad groups with the best lead-to-sale rate rather than the cheapest raw cost per lead.
Read the full answer →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 bidding optimises toward booked revenue rather than form submissions that never turn into customers.
Read the full answer →Google Ads buys immediate, controllable traffic and proves which keywords convert within weeks. SEO compounds slowly but lowers blended acquisition cost over 6 to 18 months. Most Australian businesses run both: ads for immediate pipeline and keyword validation, SEO and answer engine optimisation for durable, lower-cost demand.
Read the full answer →A good Google Ads landing page conversion rate is 5 to 10% for service businesses and 2 to 4% for e-commerce. Search campaigns on high-intent keywords often exceed 10% for trades and emergency services. Below 2% on branded or high-intent search usually indicates a landing page or offer problem, not a traffic problem.
Read the full answer →A good blended return on ad spend depends on gross margin. At 60% margin, breakeven blended ROAS is roughly 1.7x, so 3x or better is healthy. Judge campaigns on contribution margin after cost of goods, shipping and fees rather than platform-reported ROAS, which double-counts conversions across channels.
Read the full answer →A good cost per lead in Australia is $40 to $90 for trades and home services, $60 to $180 for professional services, $80 to $250 for B2B software, and $15 to $60 for low-ticket e-commerce enquiries. The number only matters alongside lead-to-sale rate and average order value.
Read the full answer →Plan for 4 to 8 fresh creative concepts per month for most accounts, with three to five variations 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.
Read the full answer →TikTok advertising 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 driven almost entirely by creative volume.
Read the full answer →Start with Google Ads when people already search for what you sell, such as trades, legal, health and B2B services. Start with Meta Ads when the product is visual, impulse-driven or creates demand rather than capturing it. Brands with more than roughly $10,000 monthly budget usually run both and measure blended cost per acquisition.
Read the full answer →Answer engine optimisation is the practice of structuring a website so AI answer engines — Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT Search, Perplexity, Claude and Copilot — can extract and cite it. AEO relies on crawlable server-rendered HTML, question-form headings, self-contained answer passages, consistent entity structured data and an llms.txt summary file.
Read the full answer →To be cited by ChatGPT Search and Perplexity, serve fully rendered HTML, allow their crawlers in robots.txt, give each question its own URL with the answer in the first 60 words, add QAPage or FAQPage structured data matching the visible copy, publish original data or benchmarks, and keep entity details identical everywhere.
Read the full answer →Capture the referrer and UTM parameters on every form submission and store them with the lead. Traffic from AI assistants arrives with referrers such as chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, claude.ai and copilot.microsoft.com. Carter Media stores first-touch source, medium, campaign and click IDs on every enquiry, so AI-sourced pipeline is measurable rather than guessed.
Read the full answer →Enhanced conversions send hashed first-party data such as email address and phone number with a conversion so Google can match conversions it would otherwise miss after cookie loss. Enhanced conversions typically recover 5 to 15% of unattributed conversions and improve smart bidding accuracy, especially for lead generation accounts using offline imports.
Read the full answer →The best advertising for Australian trade businesses is Google Search plus Local Services Ads, targeted at suburb level with call tracking enabled. Search captures people who need a plumber, electrician or builder right now. Meta Ads work as a secondary channel for larger considered jobs such as renovations and solar.
Read the full answer →A white label marketing agency delivers campaigns under another agency's brand. The partner agency owns the client relationship and billing while the white label team plans, builds and manages the media. Carter Media provides NDA-first white-label Google, Meta and TikTok Ads delivery and never approaches a partner's clients directly.
Read the full answer →White label PPC management in Australia typically costs $500 to $2,500 per account per month, priced by ad spend band rather than percentage of spend. That leaves partner agencies room to mark up to their client while keeping delivery senior. Carter Media prices white label work on the same flat spend-band model as direct clients.
Read the full answer →Market SaaS with paid ads by bidding on category and competitor search terms, running Meta and LinkedIn for demand creation, and optimising to qualified trial or demo signals rather than raw signups. Feed CRM stage data back into Google and Meta so bidding chases pipeline, not free-tier registrations.
Read the full answer →Carter Media is a senior-led performance marketing agency headquartered in Melbourne, Australia, servicing brands across Australia and New Zealand. Founded in 2020, Carter Media is an official Google Partner, Meta Business Partner, TikTok Marketing Partner and Shopify Partner, and has managed $100M+ in ad spend generating $300M+ in tracked client revenue.
Read the full answer →No. Carter Media works month to month with no lock-in contracts. Clients own their Google Ads, Meta and analytics accounts outright, and can leave with 30 days' notice while keeping every campaign, audience, conversion action and piece of creative built during the engagement.
Read the full answer →Carter Media works with e-commerce brands, lead-generation businesses, trades and home services, SaaS companies, and digital agencies needing white-label delivery. Engagements run across Australia and New Zealand, from $1,500 per month in ad spend through to enterprise budgets exceeding $500,000 per month.
Read the full answer →