terms & conditions

1. Who we are

Brass Tacks is a trading name of Colossal Search Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales.

• Company number: 08531647
• Registered office: Quarry Hill House, School Street, Farsley, Pudsey, West Yorkshire, LS28 5EY
• Contact: ads@colossalsearch.com

References to "Brass Tacks", "we", "us" or "our" in these terms mean Colossal Search Ltd. References to "you" or "your" mean the business using our website or services.

2. What these terms cover

These terms cover two things:

• Use of our website (martins-fantastic-site-b5cb80.webflow.io and any domain it moves to) — sections 3 to 5 apply to everyone who visits.
• Our services — the free profit audit and our Google Ads management service — sections 6 onwards apply when you take up either.

Our services are provided to businesses only. By engaging us, you confirm you are acting in the course of a business and not as a consumer.

If we agree separate written terms with you (for example a signed engagement letter), those take priority over these terms where they differ.

3. Using our website

You may use our website for lawful purposes only. You must not attempt to gain unauthorised access to the site, the server it is hosted on, or any connected system; introduce malicious code; or scrape, copy or republish substantial parts of the site's content without our permission.

4. Website content

The content on our website — including text, case studies, graphics and the Brass Tacks name and branding — belongs to Colossal Search Ltd or its licensors. You may not use it commercially without our written permission.

The website's content is provided for general information. It is not financial, investment or legal advice. Case study figures (revenue, return on ad spend and similar) are historical results achieved for specific clients in specific circumstances. They are examples, not promises. Past performance of any advertising account is not a guarantee of future results, including yours.

5. Links to other sites

Our website may link to third-party sites (for example Google's documentation). We don't control them and aren't responsible for their content.‍

6. The free profit audit

What it is. A free, no-obligation analysis of your advertising profitability. You send us two exports — a standard report from your Google Ads account and a spreadsheet of your product costs — and we build a profit picture (gross and net by category) and walk you through it on a call.

What it is not. The audit is a good-faith analysis based solely on the data you send us. It is not an audit in the statutory or accountancy sense, and it is not financial advice. Its accuracy depends on the accuracy and completeness of your exports.

Your data. You keep ownership of everything you send us. We use your audit files only to prepare and present the audit (and, if you become a client, to deliver our services). We treat them as confidential — see section 13. If you decide not to work with us, we will delete your audit files on request.

No obligation. Taking the audit does not commit you to anything, and does not commit us to accepting you as a client.‍

7. The management service

Our management service includes, as a single package:

• Management of your Google Ads account (Search, Shopping and Performance Max);
• Access to our profitability platform, showing live profit by category (see section 11);
• Your profit audit kept current; and
• A direct line to your Brass Tacks strategist.

The service is delivered on a rolling monthly basis. We will agree the starting scope, targets and account access with you before work begins.‍

8. Fees and payment

• Standard plan: £1,500 per month, billed monthly in advance.
• Quarterly plan: £1,000 per month when three months are paid up front (£3,000 per quarter, billed in advance).

All fees are exclusive of VAT, which will be added where applicable.

Ad spend is separate. Our fee covers management only. Your advertising budget is paid by you directly to Google (or any other advertising platform) using your own billing details. We never hold or handle your media budget.

If an invoice is not paid when due, we may suspend work (including platform access) until it is paid, and may charge interest and compensation under the Late Payment of Commercial Debts (Interest) Act 1998.‍

9. Pausing and cancelling

No lock-in. You can pause or cancel at any time by emailing us.

• Monthly plan: cancellation takes effect at the end of the monthly billing period already paid for. There is no refund for the current month, and nothing further to pay.
• Quarterly plan: cancellation takes effect at the end of the prepaid three-month period. The service continues (or can be paused) until then. Prepaid quarters are not refunded pro-rata.
• Pausing: we'll agree the pause length with you. While paused you won't be billed, and active management and platform access are suspended.

We may end the engagement by giving you at least 30 days' written notice, or immediately if you materially breach these terms (including non-payment) and do not put it right within 14 days of us asking.

When the engagement ends: your ad accounts, your data and your customer relationships remain entirely yours — we remove our access rather than the other way round. Your access to the platform ends. Each side returns or deletes the other's confidential information on request, subject to anything we must keep by law.‍

10. Your responsibilities

To let us do our job, you agree to:

• Give us accurate, complete and current data (including product costs and returns data) and let us know when it changes materially;
• Provide and maintain the access we need (Google Ads, analytics, and any store or order-data connections we agree);
• Own, or be authorised to operate, the accounts and websites we work on;
• Make sure your products, claims, landing pages and business practices comply with the law and with the policies of the advertising platforms we use on your behalf;
• Set and take responsibility for your advertising budgets; and
• Pay our fees on time.

We are not responsible for underperformance, delay or loss to the extent it results from inaccurate data, withheld access, platform policy breaches on your side, or budget decisions you make against our advice.

11. The platform

The platform is our proprietary profitability engine. While you are a paying client, we grant you a non-exclusive, non-transferable licence to access and use it for your own internal business purposes. Platform access is included with the management service and cannot be bought separately.

You must not share your access with third parties, resell it, or attempt to copy, reverse-engineer or extract the software or its methods.

We aim to keep the platform available at all times but do not guarantee uninterrupted access — like any hosted software, it may be down for maintenance or due to faults. The platform's outputs depend on the data feeding it: figures shown are our best computation from the connected sources, and are decision-support, not accounting records or financial advice.‍

12. Data protection

Each of us will comply with UK data protection law (the UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018).

For enquiries and our own client records, we are the data controller — see our Privacy Policy for how we handle that data.

Where we process personal data on your behalf (for example, if your order data connected to the platform contains your customers' details), we act as your processor, and the following applies:

• We process such data only on your documented instructions and only to deliver the services;
• We keep it confidential and ensure anyone we authorise to access it is bound by confidentiality;
• We apply appropriate technical and organisational security measures;
• We may use sub-processors (such as hosting providers) and will remain responsible for them; we'll tell you on request who they are and give you the chance to object to changes;
• We will help you, at your reasonable request, with data subject rights requests and your own compliance obligations;
• We will tell you without undue delay if we become aware of a personal data breach affecting your data; and
• When the engagement ends, we will delete or return that personal data at your choice, unless the law requires us to keep it.

13. Confidentiality

Each side will keep the other's confidential information confidential, use it only for the purposes of the engagement, and not disclose it except to those who need it to deliver or receive the services (or where the law requires disclosure). Your audit files, cost data, margins and performance data are your confidential information. Our platform, methods, processes and pricing structures are ours.

We may use anonymised, aggregated data — from which neither you nor your customers can be identified — to improve our services, our benchmarks and our platform, and in anonymised case studies. We will not name you in marketing without your permission.‍

14. Intellectual property

• The platform, our methods, processes, templates and know-how remain ours, including anything we improve while working with you.
• Your data, brand, product information and customer relationships remain yours.
• Ad copy, campaign structures and creative work we produce specifically for your account belong to you once the fees covering the period in which they were produced have been paid. They stay in your account when you leave.

15. Our service standard — and what we don't promise

We will provide the services with reasonable skill and care, using senior, experienced people.

However, advertising outcomes depend on factors outside anyone's control — auction competition, seasonality, platform algorithm changes, your pricing, stock and site conversion among them. We therefore do not guarantee any particular level of sales, revenue, profit, ROAS or other performance. Historical results described on our website or in our materials are not commitments.

We are also not responsible for the acts and decisions of the advertising platforms themselves — for example ad disapprovals, account suspensions, tracking changes or policy changes by Google or Meta — except to the extent caused by our failure to exercise reasonable skill and care.‍

16. Liability

Nothing in these terms excludes or limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be excluded.

Subject to that:

• Neither side is liable to the other for indirect or consequential loss, loss of anticipated profits or savings, loss of business, or loss of goodwill; and
• Our total aggregate liability to you arising out of or in connection with the services in any 12-month period is limited to the fees you actually paid us in that period.

For the avoidance of doubt, your advertising spend is paid by you to the platforms and is a cost of your business — it is not a loss recoverable from us simply because a campaign underperformed.

17. General

• Entire agreement. These terms (with our Privacy Policy, Cookie Policy and any written engagement terms) are the whole agreement between us regarding their subject matter.
• We may update these terms from time to time. For existing clients, material changes take effect at the start of the next billing period, and we'll give you notice — if you don't accept them, you can cancel as set out in section 9.
• Neither side may transfer the agreement without the other's consent, except we may transfer it to a company that acquires our business, on the same terms.
• No waiver. Not enforcing a right straight away doesn't mean it's given up.
• If part of these terms is found unenforceable, the rest still applies.
• Third parties. These terms don't give rights to anyone else under the Contracts (Rights of Third Parties) Act 1999.

18. Governing law

These terms, and any dispute arising out of them (including non-contractual disputes), are governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have exclusive jurisdiction.

‍Questions about these terms? Email ads@colossalsearch.com - you'll get a straight answer.

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