What PPC Management Fees Cover

PPC management gets priced two ways, and the one you pick changes how your agency behaves.

The common model charges a percentage of ad spend, usually 10% to 20%. The other charges a flat monthly fee. We charge flat. Paid search is included in the $1,600/month tier, and you pay the ad budget directly to Google or Microsoft from an account you own.

The problem with percentage pricing

If your agency earns 15% of what you spend, every recommendation it makes about budget touches its own revenue. That doesn’t make anyone dishonest. It does mean you can never fully judge the sentence "we should increase spend."

It also punishes efficiency. Say the agency halves your cost per click. You now need half the spend for the same result, and the agency’s fee drops by half along with it. The work that helps you most costs them the most.

When the fee moves with the spend, nobody in the room gets paid to spend less.

Flat fees can fail too. An agency on a flat fee can quietly stop working, since the invoice goes out regardless. You protect yourself with a report that shows what changed, and that same report guards against most of the other problems in this industry.

The work, week to week

You can’t set up paid search and walk away, because the inputs keep changing. Competitors change their bids and Google changes how match types behave. Seasons turn over, and your own search terms drift.

Search term mining

Every week, read what people typed to trigger your ads. Those search terms differ from your keyword list, and the gap has grown as match types have loosened. This is where you find out a third of your budget went to searches for free advice, DIY instructions, or jobs in a city you don’t serve.

Negative keyword maintenance

This is acting on what the search terms show. In a mature account the negative list is the most valuable asset, and it gets built one wasted click at a time.

Bid and budget allocation

Move money toward the campaigns and hours that produce calls. Most local accounts have a handful of hours a week when a call costs half the average, and the budget isn’t weighted toward them.

Ad copy testing

Run variants long enough for the results to mean something. Patience matters here. Most "winners" declared after a week are noise, and plenty of agencies report them anyway because they have nothing else to show.

Landing page and conversion tracking

An ad that sends people to your homepage converts worse than one that lands on a page about the exact thing the ad promised. Without call tracking, every decision in the account rests on clicks, which is a proxy for a proxy.

The audit questions that expose a neglected account

Ask your current manager these. Each takes about a minute to answer, and the answers tell you a lot.

1. When did you last add negative keywords, and how many?
2. What does a phone call cost us, counting calls only?
3. Which single search term spent the most last month, and did it produce anything?
4. Are calls tracked as conversions, or only form fills?
5. Who owns the Google Ads account, us or you?

The ownership question is the one people get wrong. If the agency owns the account, leaving means losing its whole history: every conversion signal, every learned optimisation, every negative keyword. The business should own the account and grant the agency access.

What a sensible monthly report contains

• Spend, calls, and cost per call, in that order, on the first page.
• Which campaigns produced the calls and which didn’t.
• What we changed this month and why.
• What we’re testing next month.

Impression share, quality score and click-through rate are working metrics, and they belong in the appendix. A report that leads with them is leading with the numbers that are easiest to dress up.

Paid search runs alongside organic in the $1,600 tier for a reason. The search terms your ads pay for tell you exactly which pages are worth writing, and you lose that when the two run separately.