Clay Vault Zone helps small and medium-sized businesses in Japan run Google Ads campaigns that generate real leads, calls, and sales. No guesswork, no wasted budget.
One Search campaign, up to 3 ad groups, keyword research, ad copy for two variants per group, conversion tracking setup via Google Tag...
Up to four campaigns across Search and Display or Shopping, full negative keyword management, A/B ad copy testing, audience layering,...
Unlimited campaigns, Performance Max management, remarketing audiences, Shopping feed optimization in Google Merchant Center, custom GA4...
Full account build from scratch: keyword research, campaign structure, ad copy, bidding strategy, conversion tracking, and a handover...
Kenji Matsumoto spent six years managing paid search accounts at a mid-size digital agency in Shibuya before starting Clay Vault Zone in 2019. The agency work was good training, but the model frustrated him. Accounts were handed to junior staff after the pitch, reporting was designed to look impressive rather than be useful, and clients rarely spoke to the person actually managing their campaigns. He left in the spring of 2019 with two clients who asked to come with him, a laptop, and a desk in a shared office in Shinjuku.
The name came from a conversation about how most ad budgets are treated like clay that gets thrown at a wall. The vault part was the intention: to build something structured, something that holds. In the first year, Clay Vault Zone worked exclusively with local service businesses in Tokyo, mostly dental clinics, renovation contractors, and a handful of tutoring schools. The early lesson was that conversion tracking was almost always broken or missing, and that fixing it before touching bids was the single highest-use thing you could do for a struggling account. That principle still drives how every new engagement starts.
Google Ads that bring real customers in
Get a Free AuditYou get a plain-English report every Monday showing exactly where your budget went, which keywords converted, and what we are doing next. No black-box dashboards.
We build every campaign around your cost-per-lead or cost-per-sale target. If a keyword is not pulling its weight after two weeks, we cut it and reallocate the budget.
Google Ads rewards accounts that are actively managed. We review bids, search terms, and ad copy every week, not once a month when the damage is already done.
Conversion tracking is the foundation of every Google Ads account. Without it, you do not know which keywords, ads, or campaigns are generating real business outcomes. You are bidding blind. Yet in the majority of accounts we audit at Clay Vault Zone, conversion tracking is either missing, misconfigured, or counting the wrong things. This article explains how to set it up correctly.
Read more →Most e-commerce businesses in Japan start with a single Shopping campaign that contains all their products. It is the easiest way to get started, and Google's setup wizard encourages it. The problem is that a single campaign treats a ¥500 product and a ¥50,000 product identically, which means the algorithm will spend your budget wherever it sees the most click volume, not wherever you make the most money.
Read more →Performance Max is Google's most automated campaign type, running across Search, Display, YouTube, Gmail, and Maps from a single campaign. The automation is real and can be effective, but it requires specific inputs to work well. Launch PMax without those inputs and you will spend money generating impressions and clicks that do not convert. This guide covers what you need to have in place before you go live.
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Kenji Matsumoto founded Clay Vault Zone in 2019 after six years managing paid search at a digital agency in Shibuya, Tokyo. Before that, he worked in-house at a mid-size e-commerce retailer in Yokohama, where he first learned how much money a poorly structured Shopping campaign could waste in a single month. He holds Google Ads and GA4 certifications and reads every Google Ads release note the day it drops. Outside work, he plays shogi on Saturday mornings and keeps a small vegetable garden on his apartment balcony in Shinjuku.