Your paid ads management fee pays for the ongoing work of running your campaigns on platforms such as Google Ads and Meta, so your budget turns into enquiries and sales. For your monthly fee you should get regular work on keywords and search terms, conversion tracking you can trust, testing of ads and landing pages, and a report that shows what each enquiry cost. If all you see is a login and a monthly PDF of clicks, you’re paying for the wrong thing.
What does good paid ads management include?
Setting up a campaign is the easy part. The value is in what happens every week after launch. This is what a competent manager should be doing on your account.
Account structure
Campaigns and ad groups should follow how you make money. A plumber might split emergency call-outs from boiler installs, because the searches and the value of each job are different. Lumping everything into one campaign makes it impossible to see what’s working.
Keywords, search terms and negative keywords
Keywords are what you bid on. Search terms are what people actually typed. The search terms report in Google Ads shows the gap between the two. A good manager reads it every week or two and adds negative keywords to block searches that will never buy, such as “jobs”, “free” or “course”.
Conversion tracking
Without tracking, Google’s automated bidding is guessing. Your account should record form enquiries, calls from the ads, calls from the website and purchases if you sell online. Check it counts real enquiries, not just visits to the contact page. Broken tracking is a common reason an account looks busy but doesn’t bring in work.
Ad testing and Quality Score
Google’s responsive search ads take up to 15 headlines and four descriptions, which Google mixes to find the best combinations. Your manager should keep writing new options and pausing weak ones. That feeds into Quality Score, a 1 to 10 rating based on expected clickthrough rate, ad relevance and landing page experience. Google says it isn’t used directly in the auction, but that higher quality ads can lead to lower prices and better ad positions.
Landing pages
Sending every click to your homepage wastes money. Each campaign should land on a page that matches the search, loads fast on a phone and makes it easy to call or enquire. A good manager will tell you when the page is the problem, not the ads.
Moving the budget
Money should move towards the campaigns and keywords producing enquiries at a cost you’re happy with, and away from the rest. Daily costs need watching too. Google says a campaign might spend up to twice its average daily budget on a given day, but over a month it won’t spend more than 30.4 times that daily amount. Your manager should explain that before the first bill arrives.
Reporting on cost per enquiry
The report should lead with enquiries and sales, and what each one cost, broken down by campaign. Clicks, impressions and clickthrough rate help diagnose problems, but they don’t pay your bills.
Ad spend and the management fee are two separate costs
Every paid ads budget has two parts. Ad spend is what you pay Google, Microsoft, Meta or TikTok for clicks and views. The management fee is what you pay the person or agency running the account.
Keep them apart. Ad spend should be billed to your own card by the platform, so you can see every penny in the account itself. That’s how our paid ads management works. We never touch your ad spend or add a margin to it, and our management fee is quoted to your business separately.
How do agencies charge for PPC management?
Fees for PPC (pay-per-click) management usually follow one of four models. None is right for everyone, and the model matters less than what’s included.
| Fee model | How it works | Suits | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Percentage of ad spend | The fee rises and falls with your budget | Larger accounts where budgets change month to month | The manager earns more when you spend more, whether or not it’s working |
| Flat monthly fee | A fixed amount each month for an agreed scope | Small and medium accounts with steady budgets | Check how many campaigns and platforms are covered |
| Hybrid | A base fee plus a percentage once the budget passes a set level | Accounts expected to grow | Get the thresholds in writing |
| Pay per lead | You pay for each enquiry delivered | Simple, high-volume enquiries | Disputes over what counts as a lead, and the agency may keep the account |
Whichever model you’re offered, ask for the fee and the scope in writing, and make sure you can see the platform’s charges yourself.
Red flags when hiring a Google Ads management agency
- The ad account is in the agency’s name, so you’d lose the history if you left.
- Ad spend goes through their invoice with a markup you can’t see.
- Reports lead with clicks and impressions and never mention cost per enquiry.
- Nobody can show you conversion tracking working, or it counts page views as enquiries.
- They guarantee top position or a set number of leads.
- Every recommendation is to raise the budget.
- You can’t get a clear answer about what changed in the account last month.
What to ask before you sign up
- Will the ad account be in my name, with admin access for me?
- Is ad spend billed to my card by the platform, or through you?
- How will you track enquiries, including phone calls?
- What will you change each week, and what each month?
- What does your monthly report show? Can I see an example?
- Who’ll actually work on my account, and how often can I speak to them?
- What happens to the account and its data if I leave?
Are paid ads right for your business yet?
Ads send more people to what you already have. They suit businesses with a clear offer, a website that converts and a budget that can last a few months of testing. If one of those is missing, fix it first. You’re probably not ready in these cases.
- you can’t say in one sentence why someone should pick you over a competitor
- your site is slow on a phone, or it’s hard to call or enquire from it
- your budget only covers a few weeks, so the test ends before there’s enough data
- nobody can answer the phone or reply to enquiries quickly
- you can’t tell where your current enquiries come from
If you’re not sure where you stand, a digital marketing audit checks your website, tracking and search position first. It doesn’t include a line-by-line review of an existing ad account, so ask for that separately if you already run ads.
If you’re not sure your website is ready for paid traffic, what a digital marketing audit should cover explains how to find out first.
Common questions about paid ads fees
How much should a small business spend on Google Ads?
Work backwards from what an enquiry is worth to you. For example, if a click in your area costs £3 and one in ten visitors gets in touch, each enquiry costs about £30 in ad spend. Decide how many enquiries you need each month and multiply. Then make sure you can keep that going for a few months, because the early weeks are mostly about learning which searches work.
What’s a good cost per enquiry from Google Ads?
It depends on your market. LocaliQ’s 2026 search advertising benchmarks, published in May 2026, put the average Google Ads conversion rate across industries at 8.18% and the average cost per lead at $66.69. Those are dollar figures pooled from thousands of accounts, so use them as a rough sense check. Your own numbers, tracked properly, matter far more.
Can I manage Google Ads myself?
Yes, and plenty of owners do with a small account. The risk is leaving it to run on its own. If you can’t give it an hour or two every week to read search terms, check tracking and adjust bids, it’s probably time to hand it over.
Which platforms do you manage?
We run Google Ads, Microsoft Ads (Bing), YouTube, Facebook and Instagram, and TikTok. Reporting covers enquiries and sales and what each one cost, not clicks and impressions. You can see how it works on our paid ads management page.
See the digital marketing audit More from the Learning Centre
