Alderstone Media runs the part of Google Ads most agencies quietly avoid: YouTube, Demand Gen and Display. Planned for reach and frequency, built with creative made for the format, and proved with Brand Lift studies rather than view counts.
Bristol & London
Google Ads only
No percentage of spend
No undisclosed margin
Search agencies are usually uncomfortable above the funnel, and brand agencies rarely know their way around a Google Ads account. We sit in the gap: media planning rigour applied to Google's own inventory.
Audience work grounded in Google's reach planner, your first-party data and category search trends, translated into a channel mix with a defensible reach-and-frequency rationale. Every plan states what it is designed to do and how we will know whether it worked.
Skippable and non-skippable in-stream, in-feed, Shorts and bumpers, bought against incremental reach rather than duplicated impressions, with frequency capped across the whole video plan rather than per campaign.
Discover, Gmail and the YouTube feeds, run as a genuine prospecting channel with customer-match and lookalike audiences. Kept structurally separate from Search so its contribution can be isolated instead of assumed.
The Google Display Network has earned its reputation honestly, and it still works when inventory is curated rather than accepted. We exclude aggressively, monitor placement reports weekly and publish what we cut.
Video written for a skippable format, not a thirty-second television advert trimmed to fit. We produce and adapt assets in-house so the campaign is never waiting on an external edit suite.
Google Brand Lift studies, geographic holdout tests and search lift analysis, run by our own analysts. If a campaign cannot demonstrate lift across two consecutive periods, we recommend stopping it — including campaigns we built.
Our method is deliberately repeatable. Repeatability is what lets us compare this quarter's plan honestly against the last one instead of relitigating it.
We rewrite the brief. Most video briefs describe an activity rather than a commercial problem, and that difference is usually worth more than any bidding change.
Audience, reach curves, format mix and phasing, with two alternative scenarios and an explicit statement of what each one sacrifices.
Campaigns constructed, creative cut for each format, exclusions applied and the measurement study designed before a single impression is served.
Brand Lift and search lift read within ten days of a burst ending, contribution analysis each quarter, and a documented recommendation to keep, cut or change.
Selected engagements. Client names withheld under commercial confidentiality; figures come from Brand Lift studies, geo tests and client sales data rather than from platform-reported view metrics.
The account was spending heavily on generic search terms against an audience that did not yet know the brand. We moved 44% of budget into YouTube and Demand Gen, and branded search volume did the rest.
The client had run the same Display schedule since 2017. Our lift study found no measurable effect on consideration. We reinvested in YouTube in-stream and tracked the difference across two full quarters.
Applications cluster in a six-week window. We rebuilt phasing around the real decision period, concentrated YouTube on sixth-form catchments by postcode, and ran Demand Gen through revision season.
A challenger brand with £340k to launch nationally. Shorts, in-feed YouTube and a tightly geo-fenced Display plan around 900 stockist stores delivered listed distribution ahead of forecast.
They recommended cutting the campaign they were earning fees on. That is when we stopped shopping around.
An agency paid a percentage of your Google Ads spend has an obligation that is invisible on the plan: its own revenue rises when your budget does. That is not a scandal, it is simply an incentive — and incentives shape which campaigns get recommended and which get quietly left running.
Alderstone charges a fixed fee, agreed before we build anything, which does not vary with the plan we produce or the budget you approve. When we recommend YouTube over Search, or recommend spending less, the only reason is that the evidence supports it.
We also publish our position. Every client receives an annual disclosure letter confirming that we take no rebate, commission or non-monetary benefit from Google or from any third-party tool, and that no vendor has paid for a recommendation during the period.
The planner and the campaign manager on your business are named individuals with a stated allocation of time. Substitutions require your written agreement.
Every burst gets a written read within ten working days, whether it went well or not. Underperformance is reported, not buried in an appendix.
If we think the brief is measuring the wrong thing, we say so before we plan against it. Clients tell us this is the most useful thing we do.
“The first plan they showed us was smaller than the one we asked for, and it worked better.”
Head of BrandFinancial services
“Their placement audit found £40,000 going to mobile game inventory our previous agency had signed off.”
Marketing ManagerMulti-site hospitality
“We finally have a YouTube conversation our finance director wants to be in.”
Commercial DirectorConsumer goods
A free plan review: two of our planners spend a day with your Google Ads account, your video assets and your measurement, then give you an hour of blunt feedback. No obligation, no pitch deck, and you keep the analysis either way.
Request a plan review