Say you have two quotes for Google Ads management. One is a flat monthly fee. The other is a percentage of your ad spend. A third option, a freelancer a friend recommended, charges a setup fee and then a smaller amount each month. You can't line them up side by side, so it's easy to end up choosing on gut feel.
Here's how to read them. And since my prices are published, I'll show you my own numbers too.
Two separate bills: your ad spend and the management fee
The money you spend on ads goes to Google. The management fee goes to whoever runs the account. These should be two separate bills, with the ad spend charged to your own card in your own account. A quote that bundles them into one monthly figure makes it impossible to see what you're paying for the work.
You stay in control of the spend side. Google lets you set and change your average daily budget at any time and caps your monthly charge at roughly 30.4 times that daily budget (sourced from Google Ads Help). Keep the account in your name, too: if an agency creates the account under its own manager account, Google makes that agency the owner automatically (sourced from Google Ads Help).
The three fee models and what each one rewards
Flat monthly fee. Easy to budget and doesn't change when your spend does. It rewards efficiency, and the risk is that it can also reward doing the minimum.
Percentage of ad spend. The fee rises as your budget rises. It scales with the size of the account, but it also means the person advising you earns more when you spend more, which is awkward when the right advice is to spend less.
Base fee plus a smaller percentage. A hybrid. The base covers the fixed work every account needs (tracking, reporting, reviewing search terms), and the percentage covers the extra work a bigger budget brings.
Watch for setup fees and minimum contract lengths as well. Neither is wrong in itself, but both belong in the quote, in writing.
What mine costs, with the arithmetic
I use the hybrid model. Ads management is $500 a month plus 12 percent of spend, added to any of my monthly plans, and you pay the ad spend to the platforms directly. Mine are published rather than quoted on a call. Here's what that works out to:
$1,000 a month in ad spend: $500 plus $120, so $620 in management. That's 62 percent of the spend.
$3,000 a month: $500 plus $360, so $860. About 29 percent.
$6,000 a month: $500 plus $720, so $1,220. About 20 percent.
Notice what happens at the small end. On a $1,000 budget, management costs more than half as much as the ads themselves, and that's true of most fee structures with a base fee, not only mine. My honest view: at around $1,000 a month or less, you may get more from one tightly targeted campaign you run yourself, or from putting that money into your Google Business Profile and your website first.
If you're still deciding whether ads are right for you at all, my honest guide to paid ads is a good place to start.
What the management fee should include
Conversion tracking, set up and tested before money is spent. Calls, forms and bookings, so you know which clicks turned into customers.
Search term reviews. Weekly at the start: looking at what people actually typed before they clicked, and blocking the irrelevant ones as negative keywords.
Ads and landing pages that match. The page someone lands on should answer the search they made.
A monthly report in leads, not clicks. Clicks and impressions are inputs. Enquiries, and what each one costs, are the result.
Patience in the first weeks. When a bid strategy changes, Google says it can take a few conversion cycles, typically one to two, for it to calibrate (sourced from Google Ads Help). Anyone judging a campaign on its first week is judging the noise.
Red flags in a Google Ads quote
Ad spend paid through the agency, with no access to the account yourself.
An offer to set up the account for you under their manager account.
A long lock-in with no way out if the results don't come.
Reports that show impressions and clicks but never leads.
Any promise of a guaranteed number of leads or a guaranteed top position.
For the wider picture of what agencies charge and why, the honest agency pricing guide covers retainers across every service line.
So what does your current quote actually include?