Conflict & exclusivity policy

Why this is published

Specialising in one industry is what makes our campaign structures work, what makes our benchmarks mean anything, and what lets us tell you in fifteen minutes what is wrong with your account.

It also means we are working in your sector, on accounts that are not yours. We publish the terms of that rather than hoping nobody asks, because the honest version is a better answer than an evasive one.

1. Exclusivity

Your service category is agreed in writing at signup — boiler installation, or heat pumps, or solar panels, or EV chargers. It describes what you actually sell, not the whole industry. If you trade in more than one, exclusivity covers every category we are actively advertising for you, all of them listed at signup. If you add a category later, we extend it where we can.

Your exclusivity zone is a list of named postcode districts, agreed in writing at signup. We normally start from your working radius or the towns you cover, then convert that into specific districts. We use districts rather than a radius because they are unambiguous — there is no argument later about whether a town sits inside a circle drawn on a map.

It runs from the day you sign until the day the service ends, including any period you spend on our reduced-rate pause plan.

In practice: if a business selling what you sell, inside your postcode districts, approaches us while you are a client, we tell them the area is taken and decline the audit.

2. What exclusivity does not cover

Being straight about the limits is most of the point of publishing this.

• Adjacent trades. We may work with a general plumber, a loft insulation installer or an electrician doing general domestic work in your area. They are not competing for your customer at the point of purchase, and referrals between adjacent trades are one of the ways we grow.
• Businesses outside your zone. We work with your category elsewhere in the country. That is exactly what makes the benchmark worth having.
• Businesses that are not our clients. We cannot stop your competitors advertising. Exclusivity means they are not advertising through us — it is not protection from competition generally.
• Overlap at the edges. Catchment areas rarely stop cleanly. If your districts sit next to another client's, both of you may occasionally appear in the same auction at the boundary. We agree zones with that in mind, and we will not grant overlapping districts in the same category.
• National sellers. Where a business sells nationally rather than to a catchment, geographic exclusivity means nothing — two national brands are in the same auctions everywhere. We do not offer exclusivity in that situation and we say so before anyone signs. Everything in sections 3 and 4 still applies in full.

3. Confidentiality

Our campaign structures come from our own methodology, not from looking at what is working for somebody else. That is deliberate: a business that copies between accounts has to keep doing it, and eventually gets caught doing it to someone.

The one exception is the benchmark dataset below, which is aggregated, anonymised and cannot be traced back to you.

4. Benchmarks

Every monthly summary tells you how your cost per result compares to your industry. "Benchmarked against your industry" means different things depending on how much data sits behind it, so here is exactly what that figure is at each stage:

Stage	What your benchmark line is built from
Now, at launch	Published UK industry averages for your sector, with the source named
Once we manage three or more accounts in a category	The anonymised average across the accounts we manage, described as such
Once a category holds five or more accounts	A PerformanceOS Index™ category benchmark

We will not call a figure a PerformanceOS Index benchmark until the category genuinely holds five accounts. A benchmark built on two accounts is not a benchmark, and a number you cannot trust is worse than no number at all.

How anonymisation works. The Index records category, region, spend band and cost per result. It holds no client names and no personal data. Figures are published only as averages or ranges across a spend band, never as individual account figures, and never in a form that could be worked back to one business.

Your part in it. Early adopters take part in the Index as part of their arrangement, set out in the client agreement. In return they are in the dataset from the start, and their own benchmark line sharpens as it grows.

5. We never coordinate between accounts

We do not coordinate bids, budgets, keywords or scheduling between clients. Every account is optimised solely for its own targets, as though no other account existed.

That matters for two reasons. It is the only honest way to run accounts in the same sector — an optimiser quietly holding one client back to help another is defrauding one of them. And coordinating the bidding of competing businesses could amount to anti-competitive conduct. We do not go near it.

If two of our clients ever end up in the same auction, at a zone boundary or in a national category, both are bid for independently and to the full extent their own targets justify.

6. How we check, before anyone books

Every prospect is checked against our client list and live exclusivity zones before an audit is booked. If the area is taken in their category we tell them, and we tell them when it is likely to free up. We do not run an audit for a business we could not take on.

To find out whether your area is currently open, email support@performanceos.co.uk with your postcode and what you fit.

7. If something changes

You expand your catchment. Tell us. If the new districts are free we add them to your zone at no cost. If another client already holds them, we say so — we will not quietly take them from someone else.

You add a service line. Same process. If we can extend your exclusivity we will, and if we cannot we tell you before you spend money advertising into it.

We get it wrong. If we ever take on a business in breach of this policy, tell us. What happens next is set out in the client agreement rather than here.

8. Changes to this policy

We may update this policy as the service develops. Exclusivity already in place for a client will not be reduced during their term — any change applies from the start of a new term, and we tell them before it does.