The client
Anuncia is a PPC agency based in Leicester, run by founder Oscar Ford. Like most agencies at a certain size, they'd built up a roster of accounts, a way of working, and a nagging sense that "good" meant something slightly different depending on who was running the account that week. Russell was brought in to fix that — not with a rulebook, but with an audit and a conversation.
The problem
"What does good look like for a PPC agency?" is a question every agency owner asks themselves eventually, and almost none can answer cleanly. Every account manager has their own instincts. Every client has a different goal, a different budget, a different definition of success. Without a shared standard, quality becomes whoever's watching that account, not a property of the agency itself.
That gets harder still on accounts where the goal isn't a clean number. Anuncia's charity accounts didn't have the luxury of a simple cost-per-sale target — the real goal was often fuzzier, leaning on soft metrics and offline conversions that never show up cleanly in a dashboard. A one-size-fits-all standard would have either ignored that nuance or been too vague to act on.
What we did
Not a framework imposed from outside. A standard built with the people who'd have to run it.
- Audited every account. Before setting any standard, Russell went through Anuncia's full client roster to see what "good" and "not good" actually looked like in practice, account by account.
- Worked with the team, not at them. The standards weren't handed down — they were agreed, so the people running the accounts day-to-day understood the reasoning and would actually keep to it.
- Built a practical next-steps matrix per client. Because there's no single template for paid search, each account got its own concrete direction rather than a generic checklist.
- Solved for the hard cases first. The charity accounts — with soft metrics and offline conversions instead of clean sales data — were treated as the test of whether the standard actually worked, not an edge case to bolt on afterwards.
- Guided the migration to ClickUp. Honest, throughout, about what he'd seen fail at other agencies — which is exactly why this migration held.
The results
A shared, practical answer to what "good" means at Anuncia — agreed by the team that has to deliver it, not imposed on them. A next-steps matrix for every client, including the ones where success was never going to be a single tidy number. And an operational migration to ClickUp that worked because it was built on the lessons of previous failures, not despite them.
"We brought Russell into Anuncia to answer a deceptively hard question: what does good actually look like for a PPC agency? He audited every one of our accounts and, working with the team rather than lecturing at them, helped us agree a set of standards and a practical next-steps matrix for each client — because he understood from day one that there's no one-size-fits-all in paid search. That mattered most with our charity accounts, where often the account goal is fuzzier and relies on soft metrics and offline conversions to get answers. He also guided our migration to ClickUp, honest about what he'd seen fail elsewhere, which is exactly why it worked here. Russell thinks in full paths to conversion and profit, not just platform metrics. He's raised the bar for how we work."
Oscar Ford · Founder, AnunciaThe point
"Good" isn't a fixed number you can copy from one account to the next — it's a standard the whole team has to agree on and be able to apply, especially on the accounts where the metrics won't do the defining for you. That's as true inside an agency as it is on a single client's account.
That's the whole method. Money in the till, applied to the agency itself.
Anuncia is a PPC agency based in Leicester, led by founder Oscar Ford. Compulsion is Russell Anson's independent paid-search consultancy — 18 years in, pointed at the only metric that matters. compulsion.agency