How Much Do PPC Agencies Charge to Manage Google Ads?

How Much Does PPC Management Cost?

You’ve come to the right place.  99% of the Google Ads agency pricing models we know of charge fees to manage Adwords accounts for clients using one of the following models:

1. A flat fee of $500-$4000
2. A 15%-30% of your ad spend
3. A performance-based model (i.e. $30 per conversion)
4. A mixture of the above

At Sagapixel, our PPC management services are 15%-22% of your ad spend, with the cost going down as your spend increases, maxing out at $4k. But what is the typical Google Ads management fees are at other PPC agencies?

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From the client’s perspective, what are the advantages and disadvantages of each PPC pricing package?

Flat Fee

Pros

1. You know exactly how much your bill will be each month
2. You won’t have an Adwords manager trying to get you to increase your spend

Cons

1. Less of a motivation for your Adwords manager to get down your cost-per-action and overall account performance.  If your manager is less than stellar, he or she may do just enough to keep from being fired.
2. We often see more complacency as time goes by

Percentage of Ad Spend

Pros

1. You know exactly how much your bill will be each month

Cons

1. Again, you run the risk of having someone unmotivated to get the most out of your account
2. They want you to increase your ad spend so that their revenue goes up.
3. Again, this model can lead to a PPC manager becoming complacent over time

Performance-based

Pros

1. You have a higher chance of having a proactive, motivated manager
2. Much less likely to have the account neglected over time

Cons

1. If your metrics are tied to conversions, they also want you to increase your ad spend
2. Much of the results of an PPC campaign are out of the reach of the person managing it.  If you get a new competitor with a monthly budget of $45k, your results are going to diminish. Since the agency is taking on this risk, they are probably going to charge more than they would for a “safer” option such a flat fee or percentage of ad spend.

How to mitigate some of the cons of each fee structure

Ask a lot of questions

By asking lots of questions and keeping an eye on your numbers, your’

Insist upon having “read” privileges” to the account

This will allow you to log into the account and see what is being done.  You won’t be able to make any changes, but you will be able to see what changes have been made to the account.  Changes signal active management of the account, and the information you see will allow you to discuss the results of the changes with your account manager.

How to check the changes to your PPC campaign

1. Log into Google Ads
2. Click on “Tools”
3. Select “Change History”
4. Set the date range that you want to check changes for in the upper right part of the screen

There you have it.

I hope that this post will make you a little more comfortable about hiring an PPC management agency. If you would be interested in talking to someone on our team about having Sagapixel manage your Google Ads campaigns, please reach out to us through the contact form in the footer or call us