We charge £200 to £325 a month to manage Google Ads while your ad spend is up to £1,000 a month, with a fixed quote above that. That is the whole Google Ads management cost, with no VAT on top, because we’re not VAT registered. Your ad budget is separate: you pay it to Google yourself, on your own card, so you can see every penny.
The figure depends on how many campaigns you have and how much looking after they need, and you get it in writing before you sign. Whoever you choose, a fair fee is one where you can see what you got for it every month. If you can’t say what your agency did last month, the price is wrong, whatever it is.
How agencies charge for Google Ads management
Most charge either a flat monthly fee or a percentage of your ad spend, which rises and falls with your budget. Some mix the two, and many add a one off setup fee.
Search for the average cost of Google Ads management and nearly everything you find is written by agencies selling it. Pricing guides from UK agencies this year put percentage deals at around 10 to 20% of monthly spend. Treat that as a rough guide. Plenty of decent people charge that way, especially on big budgets.
Why we never take a percentage of your ad spend
A percentage pays the agency to make you spend more. Say I took 15% and you spent £1,000 a month. The easiest pay rise I could give myself would be talking you into doubling it, and I wouldn’t need to find you a single extra customer. That’s a bad setup even when the person running it is honest.
With a flat fee, my money stays the same whether you spend £500 a month or twice that. So when I tell you to switch off a campaign that isn’t working, or that you don’t need to spend more yet, you can believe me, because it costs me nothing to say it.
Why PPC management cost is so hard to compare
This month I looked up 39 web and digital firms around the West Midlands in the public advert libraries, where anyone can see who’s running adverts. Only 14 had ever run a Google advert in the UK, and 6 were running one that week.
So 25 of the 39 had never run a Google advert of their own in the UK. I’d always ask an agency whether it does. I do, through my own business, which is how I learned what goes wrong.
I read 30 of the adverts those firms had run. None showed a price, and nearly all offered a free audit, review or quote. When nobody shows a price, you can’t compare PPC (pay per click) management without a sales call with each firm. That’s why ours are on our pricing page, along with our 30 days notice.
What a Google Ads management fee should buy each month
Mostly, it buys someone reading the dull bits so you don’t have to. The main one is the search terms report, the list of what people actually typed before they clicked your advert, which is often nothing like the keywords you picked. I go through it every month and add negative keywords, which are words you tell Google never to show your advert for, such as “jobs”, “free” or “DIY”.
Then there’s testing new adverts against the old ones, setting how Google bids to suit how much data you have, and pacing the budget so it lasts the month. You get a report in plain English: what was spent, what came in, what each result cost and what I changed.
Nobody can honestly promise you a position on Google or a set cost per enquiry. If someone does, ask them to put it in writing.
How much Google Ads costs per month, all in
Picture a florist who sets her budget at £500 a month. She pays Google the £500, plus Google’s UK fee, plus whatever she pays someone to manage it.
Since 1 November 2020, Google has added 2% to the bill for adverts shown in the UK, because of the UK’s Digital Services Tax. It’s a separate line on your Google Ads invoice on top of the budget you set, so on her £500 of adverts it’s another £10.
A daily budget isn’t a hard limit either. On a busy day Google can spend up to twice your average daily budget, though across a month it won’t charge more than your daily budget times 30.4, the average number of days in a month.
How VAT shows on a Google invoice depends on your own VAT position, so ask your accountant, not me. For what to spend on the adverts in the first place, see whether Google Ads is worth it for a local business.
When the management fee stops making sense
One owner on a UK business forum was paying an agency nearly as much each month to manage two campaigns as he spent on the adverts, and he couldn’t see what they did for it. On a small budget the fee will look big next to the spend, ours included: £200 a month on around £300 of adverts. That’s only fair if you can see exactly what it pays for, so if you can’t, I’d be asking hard questions.
We usually suggest around £300 a month of ad spend as a starting point, though it depends on your line of work and your competition. Much below that, there often aren’t enough clicks for anyone to learn from, so you’d be paying a fee to watch small numbers wobble.
If your budget is tiny, I’d rather you spent £125 once on a Tracking Audit, got the counting right, and ran a simple campaign yourself for a while. That works if you can find an hour a week to read the search terms. Most owners I speak to are on their feet all day and can’t.
What my own Google Ads account taught me
The account I can show in full is my own. Over about a year, Detailing Sanctuary, my mobile car detailing business in Wolverhampton, spent £4,588 on Google Ads for 8,387 clicks. That’s an 8.59% click through rate at about £0.55 a click.
That looks healthy until you check what the account was counting. My audit on 24 September found this:
- The goal it was bidding towards relied on a tag in Tag Manager with no trigger, so it had never fired once. Google showed it as Misconfigured.
- Two tags fired on the same phone tap, so one tap counted twice.
- A conversion named for form fills was really fed by phone taps.
- The enquiry conversion fired whenever the thank you page loaded, so bookmarks and search engine robots counted as enquiries.
- Free weekend enquiries went through as full price purchases.
Every decision a manager makes rests on what the account says is a result, so with counting like that they’re steering blind, however hard they work. It’s also why Google Ads can bring clicks but no calls.
The tracking is fixed now. The campaigns haven’t been restarted, so there’s no result to show yet, and I won’t guess at one.
Google reps and their recommendations
Sooner or later someone rings saying they’re from Google, offers free credit and wants you to accept their recommendations. Be polite, and don’t press apply all. Some of those calls are from Google and some just use its name, so do what Google advises: ask the caller to email you, and check it comes from an @google.com address. Never give a password over the phone.
The optimisation score that rises when you accept recommendations is Google’s estimate of how well the account is set up. It doesn’t count your customers. On one UK business forum, someone described a client’s daily budget going up to four times what it was after a one click accept, and nobody noticed until the bill came.
You can turn off auto applied recommendations in your account, and it’s one of the first things I check.
Contracts, notice and who owns the account
Before you sign with anyone, us included, check these:
- The Google Ads account is in your business’s name, with you as an admin. Google recommends more than one admin anyway. If an agency links your account to their own manager account, you can remove that link yourself and keep your campaign history.
- The notice period is one you can live with. Ours is 30 days.
- You’ve read the contract. Between two businesses there’s usually no automatic cooling off period, so you’re held to what the paper says.
Our Google Ads work for a new café here in Wolverhampton runs inside the café’s own account, and the café pays Google directly. If we stopped working together, they’d keep the lot.
I’ve read forum threads from owners stuck in six month deals they couldn’t get out of. If that’s you, speak to a solicitor before you stop any payments.
Six questions to ask before you sign
Ask these whether you’re about to sign or already paying:
- Whose name is the Google Ads account in, and am I an admin?
- Is the fee flat, or a percentage of my spend?
- What will you do each month, and will the report show what you changed?
- What counts as a result in my account, and how do you know each one counts once?
- How much notice do I give if I want to stop?
- Do you spend your own money on Google Ads?
Then give it fair time. When a campaign starts or a bidding setting changes, Google’s bidding goes through a learning period, which Google says can take a few conversion cycles: the time it takes for a click to become an enquiry. We tell people to allow two to three weeks at the start, then judge it on the enquiries they can see coming in.
Questions people ask about Google Ads management cost
What is the 2% fee on my Google Ads invoice?
It’s Google’s UK fee, added since 1 November 2020 because of the UK’s Digital Services Tax, and it sits on top of your budget as its own line. VAT may be charged on top of it, so ask your accountant how that affects you.
Should a Google Ads agency charge a setup fee?
It can be fair if it pays for real, named work, such as building the campaigns or fixing the tracking, so get what it covers in writing. Our setup is £300, or £500 with conversions set up to your website or CRM. The Tracking Audit, for accounts already running, is £125, and its fee comes off the £500 setup.
Can I cancel Google Ads management whenever I like?
Only if your contract says so. Between businesses there’s usually no automatic cooling off period, so the notice terms you signed are what count, and a solicitor can tell you where you stand. Ours is 30 days notice.
Do I have to accept Google’s recommendations to keep my free ad credit?
Google’s standard terms for new advertiser offers are about spending a set amount within a set time, typically 60 days, and the credit can’t pay taxes or fees. If a caller says accepting recommendations is part of the deal, ask for that in an email and check it against your own offer’s terms.
If you want a second opinion
If you’re paying for Google Ads management now and can’t see what you get for it, start with the counting. Our Google Ads Tracking Audit is £125, fixed, and tells you plainly what your account is recording as a result.
If the honest answer is that you don’t need us, I’ll say so. Book a 20 minute call and tell me what you’re spending now.