What PPC Management Fees Actually Cover

There are two ways PPC management gets priced, and the difference is not cosmetic.

The common model is a percentage of ad spend — typically 10% to 20%. The other is a flat monthly fee. Ours is flat: paid search is included in the $1,600/month tier, and the ad budget is paid directly to Google or Microsoft out of an account you own.

The problem with percentage pricing

If your agency earns 15% of what you spend, then every recommendation they make about budget is a recommendation about their own revenue. That does not make them dishonest. It makes "we should increase spend" a sentence you can never fully evaluate.

It also inverts the incentive on efficiency. An agency that halves your cost per click has just halved the spend required to get the same result, and cut its own fee. The work that most benefits you is the work that costs them most.

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

Flat fees have their own failure mode — an agency on a flat fee can quietly stop doing the work, since the invoice arrives regardless. The defence against that is a report that shows what changed, which is the same defence against everything else in this industry.

What the work actually is, week to week

Paid search is not set-and-forget, and the reason is that the input changes constantly. Competitors change bids, Google changes match behaviour, seasons move, and your own search terms drift.

Search term mining

Every week, read what people actually typed to trigger your ads — which is not the same as your keyword list, and the gap has widened as match types have loosened. This is where you find that a third of your budget went to searches for free advice, DIY instructions, or jobs in a city you do not serve.

Negative keyword maintenance

Acting on the above. The negative list is the most valuable asset in a mature account, and it is built one wasted click at a time.

Bid and budget allocation

Moving money toward the campaigns and hours that produce calls. Most local accounts have a handful of hours a week where cost per call is half the average and the budget is not weighted toward them.

Ad copy testing

Running variants long enough to mean something. This is where patience matters — most "winners" called in a week are noise, and a lot of agencies report them anyway because there is nothing else to show.

Landing page and conversion tracking

An ad that lands on a homepage converts worse than an ad that lands on a page about the exact thing the ad promised. And if call tracking is not configured, every other decision in the account is being made on clicks, which is a proxy for a proxy.

The audit questions that expose a neglected account

Ask your current manager these. The answers take a minute each and tell you a lot.

1. When did you last add negative keywords, and how many?
2. What is our cost per phone call — not per click, not per conversion?
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 last one is the one people get wrong. If the agency owns the account, leaving means losing the entire history — every conversion signal, every learned optimisation, every negative keyword. Accounts should be owned by the business and access granted to the agency, never the reverse.

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 did not.
• What we changed this month and why.
• What we are testing next month.

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

Paid search runs alongside organic in the $1,600 tier for a specific reason: the search terms the ads buy tell you exactly which pages are worth writing. Running them separately throws that away.