Service and delivery

The work itself is done inside your own Google Ads account, so the main thing that is delivered is the account as it stands at the end: campaigns, ad groups, keyword and negative lists, ad copy, extensions, location and schedule settings, and the conversion actions that were agreed. You can see all of it yourself at any time, while it is being built and afterwards.

Alongside it, in writing by email:

• for the setup, a handover document saying what is in the account and how it is laid out;
• for a management plan, a report once a month, in a document you can keep.

Nothing is posted to you. There is no physical item in any of this, no disc, no printed anything and no delivery charge, because there is nothing to deliver in that sense.

A turnaround is counted from the day the last of these three has arrived, not from the day you ordered:

• the invoice has been paid;
• the brief has been answered fully enough to work from;
• access to the Google Ads account, and to whatever is needed to put a conversion tag on your website, is in place.

You are told in writing on the day the clock starts, so the date is never something to work out afterwards. A working day is Monday to Friday, not counting bank holidays in Scotland. That list is not the same as the English one: 2 January and St Andrew’s Day are bank holidays here, and Easter Monday and the late-August holiday are not.

The commonest cause of a late finish is waiting on something at your end: access that has not been granted, a tag that cannot be added to the website, or a question about your services that nobody has answered. Where that happens the clock pauses on the day I tell you what I am waiting for, and starts again the day it arrives.

If material or access has still not arrived 30 days after the invoice was paid, the order is closed, you are charged for what had been done by then and the balance is returned. Nothing is kept for work that was not carried out.

If a date passes and you have heard nothing, write to ask@cleanyourads.org and say so. A first answer comes within two working days.

Email is not reliable in the way people assume: a report or a handover can sit in a spam folder or be refused by a mail server without either of us being told. Before anything else is assumed, it gets sent again.

What was agreed in writing is the measure. If what is in the account does not match it - a campaign missing, conversion tracking not set up, ads that are not the ones agreed - tell me and it is put right at no charge.

Where you bought as a consumer, that is not a favour. Section 49 of the Consumer Rights Act 2015 requires a service to be carried out with reasonable care and skill; where it has not been, section 55 gives you the right to have it performed again, and section 56 gives you a price reduction where doing it again is impossible or is not done within a reasonable time. Which of those applies is for you to choose from what the Act allows, not for me to decide for you.

A campaign that runs correctly but does not produce the enquiries you hoped for is a different thing, and it is not a fault in the work. What is and is not promised is set out on the Terms of service page.

Please look over the handover, or the month's report, within 14 days of getting it and say if anything is missing or wrong. That window is there so that a mistake is caught while the account is fresh and while it is cheap to fix.

It is not a deadline after which a fault stops being mine. A consumer's rights under the Consumer Rights Act 2015 last as long as the Act says they do, and nothing on this page shortens them.

Small things - a word in an ad, a town added to the area - are part of the job and are not charged for. Something that changes the size of the work, such as another service needing its own campaign, is quoted separately before it is done, and you decide whether to have it.

Nothing outside the agreed scope is ever done first and invoiced afterwards.

• Search Campaign Setup: 7 to 10 working days from the day the brief, the access and the payment are all in.
• Local Ads Management: Runs by calendar month, invoiced monthly, and stops at the end of a paid month.
• Multi-Service Ads Management: Runs by calendar month, invoiced monthly, and stops at the end of a paid month.

Those days are working days, not calendar days. Where a date matters to you - a seasonal push, a new depot opening - say so in the brief and I will tell you honestly whether it can be met before anything is agreed, rather than agreeing and hoping.

A management plan runs by calendar month. The first month starts on the date we agree in writing, and if that date is part-way through a month, the first invoice is for the part month at the same rate pro rata, so that every month after it lines up with the calendar.

• Invoiced: monthly, in advance, for the month ahead.
• Report: in the first week of the month that follows the one it covers.
• Answers: a first answer to anything you ask comes within two working days.
• Continuing: a plan continues while it is invoiced and the invoice is paid. Nothing renews by itself, nothing is taken automatically from a card, and there is no subscription running in the background: if you do nothing, nothing happens.
• Stopping: tell me before the end of a paid month and it stops at the end of that month. There is no minimum term and no notice period. How that works is on the Refunds and cancellation page.

The two management plans are alternatives, so moving between them takes effect from the start of the next month, at the new rate, and is never backdated.

You are told before the date passes, not after, with the reason and a new date. If a delay is mine and it matters to you, you can have the order cancelled and the money back for anything not yet done, without argument.

Being late is my problem to solve. It does not become a reason to reduce what was agreed.

No website work: pages, hosting and changes to your own site are somebody else's job, and I will say what an advert needs a page to do rather than doing it. No search engine optimisation, no social media, no content writing beyond the adverts themselves.

No advertising budget. That is bought by you from Google, in your own account, and I never hold it or pass it on.

No account in my name. I will not open a Google Ads account of my own and place you inside it, because that would make everything built for you something you would have to ask me for.

Access is asked for at the lowest level that will do the work, through Google's own account sharing, so that you grant it and you can take it away. I do not ask for your password and would rather you did not send one.

Anything you do send me - a document, a spreadsheet of your services, a login you insisted on - is held as described on the Privacy policy page. On the last day of the work I remove my own access from your account without waiting to be asked.

Correspondence and files belonging to work that was done are kept for 24 months after the work ends, so that a question a year later can still be answered. After that they are deleted.

The reports and the handover are yours as well and are in your own inbox from the day they are sent. Keep them: they are what lets anybody after me pick the account up, and they are not something you have to come back to me for.

If illness or anything else stops me finishing, you are told as soon as I know. Work already done is handed over as it stands, in your own account where it already is, with a written note of where it got to, and you are charged only for that part. Anything paid for work not done is returned.

Because everything is built inside an account that is yours and nothing is held back, there is no version of this in which you are left with nothing to show for what you paid.