What PPC Management Should Cost, and the Spend Floor Under It

Management of a single paid channel for a direct‑to‑consumer store runs from about $1,500 a month at the low end to $7,000 and up where somebody is owning the whole marketing function. That is the answer, and the rest of this page is about why the range is that wide and which end of it you belong at.

I read the pages ranking above this one before writing it. They name the same four fee models, they each quote a range collected from other agencies, and not one of them publishes what it charges. They also all measure the fee against your ad budget, which is the agency’s denominator, not yours. The number that decides whether to hire anybody is the fee as a share of the gross profit the channel produces, and that sum appears nowhere on any of them. It is below, with figures you can substitute your own margin into.

How much does PPC management cost?

For a store spending $5,000 to $100,000 a month on ads, management of one channel starts around $1,500 a month and a full multi‑channel engagement lands somewhere between $4,000 and $10,000. Percentage‑of‑spend deals are usually quoted as a share of the monthly budget, and hourly work is billed in the same bracket as any other senior specialist.

Those are prices for the work of running the account. They do not include the ad spend itself, which goes to Google or Meta and never touches the person managing it. That distinction sounds obvious written down and it is the single most common misunderstanding on a first call: a quoted $2,000 fee against a $10,000 budget means $12,000 leaves the business, not $10,000.

What I charge, and what the number is based on

I publish the prices, so there is no reason to be coy here. Channel Management starts at $1,500 a month for one platform, with additional channels at $500 each, and it carries a minimum ad spend of $5,000 a month. Growth Partner, where I own paid strategy across every channel and SEO is included, starts at $4,000 a month against a $10,000 minimum spend and includes 25 hours a month. Fractional CMO starts at $7,000 against a $20,000 minimum spend and includes 40 hours.

It is a flat fee. It does not move when your budget moves. That is a deliberate choice and the next two sections are the argument for it.

The reason I can publish a number at all is that the work is roughly the same size whichever store it is. Shurhold is a seven‑year relationship with $112,278 managed over 24 months at a 3.6x blended return, and the monthly labour of running it does not scale with the budget — the account history is published if you want to see the shape of it. The build is front‑loaded, the ongoing work is search terms, feed, creative rotation and reading the numbers, and none of that gets twice as hard because the budget doubled.

The three ways agencies price, and what each one pays them to do

There are three structures in real use, plus performance deals that are mostly a variation on the first. Each one is honest and each one quietly pays the agency to behave in a particular way. Read the right‑hand column as the thing to watch for, not as an accusation.

Nothing above says one model is correct. It says that if you do not know what your agency’s fee does when your budget changes, you do not yet know what you have agreed to.

Why does percentage of spend get criticized?

Because the arithmetic rewards spending more, and the reader can check it in one line. At 15% of spend, a $10,000 monthly budget produces a $1,500 fee. Move that budget to $20,000 and the fee is $3,000. The agency’s revenue from the account doubled, and nothing in that sum asked whether the second $10,000 earned anything.

This is not a claim that agencies inflate budgets on purpose. Most do not. It is a claim about which direction the structure leans when a judgement call is genuinely close, and those calls come up every month: hold the budget or push it, keep the broad campaign running or cut it, add the new channel now or wait. A percentage deal puts a small thumb on the scale in every one of them, and it puts it on the same side every time.

The mirror image is the part rarely mentioned. When you cut spend — a bad quarter, a stock problem, a tariff — the fee falls at exactly the moment the account needs the most attention. The structure pays least for the hardest month.

Am I being overcharged?

Work out what the fee costs as a share of the gross profit the channel produces, not as a share of your ad budget. Every pricing page uses ad spend as the denominator, and it flatters the fee at high budgets while hiding the real problem at low returns.

Here is the sum. Take a store spending $10,000 a month at a 3x return, so $30,000 of revenue. Put your own gross margin in — say 60% for the shape of it. Gross profit on that revenue is $18,000. Take out the $10,000 of ad spend and the channel contributed $8,000 before anybody was paid to run it. A $2,000 management fee is a quarter of that $8,000. Measured the usual way, against spend, the same fee reads as 20% and looks cheaper than it is.

Now change one input. Same $10,000 of spend, same 60% margin, but a 2x return: $20,000 of revenue, $12,000 of gross profit, minus $10,000 of spend leaves $2,000. The identical $2,000 fee now consumes the entire contribution. The fee did not move. The return did, and a fee that was reasonable became the whole margin.

The sum also tells you when to stop negotiating the fee and start fixing the account. If the channel is at 2x and your margin is 60%, no fee is affordable, because there is nothing to pay it out of. Whether Google Ads is viable for you at all is a separate question from what management should cost, and I have written about when the channel is worth running and about the acquisition cost your margin can carry elsewhere.

What ad spend can support a management fee at all?

Below roughly $5,000 a month in ad spend, the honest answer is that no management fee works and you should run it yourself. At $2,000 of monthly spend, a $1,500 fee is three quarters of the budget again. There is no version of that arithmetic where the fee earns itself back, however good the person is.

That is why my own minimum spend is $5,000 a month rather than a polite preference. It is the level at which a $1,500 fee is a manageable share of the money at work, and below it I turn the work down. Somebody will always take a $500 retainer to run a $1,500 budget. The maths has not changed for them; they have just stopped showing it to you.

• Under $5,000 a month in spend. Run it yourself, keep the campaign structure boring, and buy a one‑off audit when you want a second opinion rather than a retainer.
• $5,000 to $20,000. One channel, one specialist, a flat fee. This is the band where a single competent person beats a team, and where most of the market’s waste lives.
• $20,000 to $100,000. Channel mix starts to matter more than in‑channel optimisation, and the question turns into strategy and allocation rather than management.
• Above that. You are hiring in‑house and the outside question becomes who directs them. I have written up the in‑house against agency against consultant comparison at each of these levels.

Who should not hire me

Do not hire me if you are spending under $5,000 a month, if you need somebody in a chair during your working hours, or if what you actually want is more ad creative rather than better buying. One person cannot be a design department, and pretending otherwise is how retainers end badly.

Also skip me if you want a percentage deal so the cost falls automatically in a quiet season. That is a legitimate thing to want and my pricing does not do it. And if you have a marketing team already and need somebody to direct it rather than to run channels, the honest product is the fractional CMO engagement, not management, and it costs more for a reason.

What should be included for the money?

At minimum: campaign build and ongoing management, conversion tracking that you can verify, and a monthly conversation with the person doing the work rather than an account manager relaying it. Anything less is a report subscription.

Reporting is not a favour. Google’s own Google Ads Terms & Conditions require a third party running ads on your behalf to give you reporting at least monthly, disclosing the absolute dollars spent on Google along with cost, clicks and impressions. If you are not receiving that, you are not being done a disservice by a busy agency; you are missing something they agreed to provide as a condition of touching the platform.

Ask also what is explicitly excluded. On my own tiers, SEO is not included at the Channel Management level and is included at Growth Partner, which is written on the page rather than discovered in month three. Whatever the answer is elsewhere, get it in the same document as the price.

How do I know if it is working?

You compare the gross profit the channel produced against everything it cost, including the fee, and you look at the trend over a quarter rather than a month. A single month of ecommerce data at these budgets is mostly noise, and anybody presenting one month as evidence is selling.

Two practical notes. Google Ads budgets are set as an average daily amount, and Google’s guidance on setting an average daily budget is to divide a monthly figure by 30.4, so the number in your contract and the number that leaves your card in a given calendar month will not match exactly. And the account should be yours: open it in your own name, then use Google’s account access controls to grant the agency access to it. An agency‑owned account is the single most expensive thing in this article, because the cost only appears when you leave.

What to check before you sign anything

1. The fee and the ad spend on separate lines, with the payment terms attached to whichever one they apply to.
2. What happens to the fee if the budget halves, in writing. This single question sorts the three models faster than reading any of them.
3. Who owns the ad account and the tracking. Yours, with access granted to them. Never the reverse.
4. The named person doing the work, and how much of their month you are buying. “A team” is not an answer.
5. What is excluded. Creative production, SEO, email, landing pages and feed work are the five that get assumed in and billed later.
6. The exit. Notice period, what you keep, and whether the campaigns stay in your account when the relationship ends.

Run the gross profit sum with your own margin before any of that, though. It is the only step that tells you whether the answer is which agency, or none yet.

Questions people ask