If you've been shopping around for Google Ads management, the chances are at least one of the quotes you've had back was a percentage of your monthly ad spend, so the more you spend on ads, the higher the management fee. It looks tidy and it makes quotes easy to compare, but I don't think it's a particularly fair way to pay for PPC.
I price PPC management on the number and type of campaigns in your account, because in my experience that's what actually drives the work each month. I also like to hold off agreeing the fee until we both know what your budget can properly support.
What a Percentage of Spend Gets Wrong
Generally speaking, the size of your budget doesn't tell me much about how much time your account needs each month, and that's where a percentage goes wrong for small accounts and big ones alike.
If you've got a small account, it still needs the same groundwork as a big one. I still need to research the keywords, write the ads and check your conversion tracking, and throughout each month I'll be reviewing the search terms, keeping an eye on bids and budgets and reporting it all back to you. A percentage of a small budget works out as a small fee and it can't cover that time, so something ends up giving. That might be fewer checks, being slower to react when performance dips or the account being left to more or less run itself.
It goes wrong the other way too. Say a well-built campaign is working nicely and you decide to put more money through it. The structure, keywords and ads will stay largely the same, so there's not much more work to do. Under a percentage model the fee goes up anyway, and you end up paying more each month for work that hasn't grown to match.
What Actually Drives the Work in a PPC Account
When I'm working out how much time an account needs, I start with how many campaigns there are, as each one has its own targeting, ads, budget and results to keep an eye on. The type of campaign makes just as much difference though, because they all need something slightly different from me:
- Search campaigns are all about the keywords, match types and ad copy, and I'll regularly be going through the search terms triggering your ads
- Shopping campaigns run from a product feed, so as well as the campaign there's the feed to look after
- Display and remarketing campaigns need the right audiences, plus creative that suits wherever the ads are showing
- Local Services campaigns have their own setup and their own way of handling leads
- Performance Max campaigns need assets and audience signals, and I regularly check where the budget is actually going
I've worked on all of these campaign types in Google Ads, and the same skills carry over to Microsoft (Bing) Ads. In my experience two accounts with the same budget can need very different amounts of time. A single Search campaign for one service is a much smaller job than an online shop running Search, Shopping and Performance Max side by side.
I also build campaigns up gradually, starting with your highest-margin ones, so pricing on campaigns keeps the fee in line with whatever's actually running in your account at the time.
How I Work Out a Management Fee
Like all of my projects, it starts with a free discovery call where we chat through your goals, budgets and timeframes. After that I work out the fee in the same order every time.
- You set your ad spend budget first. It's your money, so you decide what you're comfortable spending on ads each month.
- I then work that budget against real cost-per-click data for your market to see how many clicks it can actually buy.
- We agree which campaign types, and how many of them, your budget can comfortably support. If a budget gets spread across more campaigns than it can fund, each one ends up short, so I like to get this right before anything goes live.
- I confirm the management fee based on what's actually going to run. All of my pricing is bespoke to the project, so the fee reflects the campaigns we've agreed on.
The fee is fixed each month and there's no long-term contract. You keep full ownership of your ad account and data the whole way through, and each month I'll send over a custom Looker Studio report and we'll have a meeting to go through it. Everything that's included is on my PPC management page.
What This Means for You
If you're comparing a few PPC freelancers and agencies, I'd look at how they price just as closely as what they charge. These are the questions I'd be asking whoever you go with:
- What is the fee tied to? Is it your ad spend, the work in the account or something else entirely?
- What happens to the fee if my ad spend changes? This one's worth knowing if you're planning to scale up or down.
- What work does the fee cover each month? It's worth checking setup, optimisation, reporting and meetings are all in there.
- Which campaign types, and how many, will my budget support? A clear answer is a good sign they've looked at the cost-per-click data for your market.
- Who owns the ad account and the data? It's good to know before you start, so there are no surprises if you ever move on.
- Is there a minimum contract term? Find out how long you're committing to before you sign anything.
If you've already got an account running and you're not sure its structure suits your budget, a PPC audit is a good place to start. I'll go through the whole account and then run through my findings with you in priority order, biggest savings or gains first.
Or if you'd just like to talk through your budget and what it could support, drop me a message and we can have a relaxed chat about your goals before any numbers come up.
