What a Google Ads agency costs

Google Ads is the channel with the most honest intent and the least honest pricing. The person typing “emergency plumber near me” wants a plumber now, which is the best signal advertising has ever had. The agency selling you the management of that signal will usually not tell you what it costs until you have had the call. We would rather write it down.

How do agencies charge for Google Ads?

Three models, and most agencies use one of them or a blend. A share of spend, where the fee is a slice of what you pay Google each month and shrinks as a proportion only once the budget is large. An hourly rate, where you pay for the time of a named specialist and the invoice follows the work. A flat retainer, where the number is agreed up front and does not move with the budget.

Read the third column twice. The model is not an accounting choice. It is the instruction you give the agency about what to want.

What does a share of spend pay the agency to do?

It pays them to spend. That is not a cynical reading; it is the arithmetic. If the fee is a slice of the budget, the only way the agency earns more is for you to pay Google more, and every piece of advice points gently that way. Add the Display network. Turn on Performance Max. Raise the daily cap. Each of those may be right, and each is also a raise.

The advice you will not get on this model is the advice that saves you money. Nobody on a share of spend tells you that your brand-name campaign is buying clicks you would have had for free, or that the account has found its ceiling and the next thousand dollars buys worse leads than the last. Those sentences are pay cuts for the person saying them.

At the small end it fails the other way. A slice of a modest budget does not pay for a senior person, so the account is opened by whoever is cheapest, or by nobody, and the agency's margin depends on you never noticing.

What does an hourly rate pay the agency to do?

It pays them to log hours, which is a better incentive than it sounds and a worse one than it should be. Hourly is honest about the one thing a share of spend hides: there is a person, and the person has a rate. A senior specialist's rate is high, and that is the real cost of the attention you are buying, whoever is invoicing you for it.

The trouble is what counts as an hour. Checking the search terms report is maintenance. Rebuilding the campaign structure is strategy. Both are billed at the same rate, and only the second is what you hired the person for. Hourly also charges you for your own questions, because the reply to your email is on the clock. It suits a short, defined job (an audit, a rebuild, a handover) far better than it suits a relationship.

What does a flat retainer pay the agency to do?

It pays them to get the result for the least effort, which is exactly the incentive you want as long as the result is written down. A flat fee is the only model under which the agency can say “stop spending on this” without it costing them anything, and that is the only condition under which the sentence can be trusted.

What it hides is scope. Because the number does not move, every protection the agency wants lives in the words around it. Two retainers at the same price can differ by whether anyone writes new ads, whether landing pages are in scope, whether tracking is set up or merely blamed. The fee is only comparable once the scope sits beside it.

Where does the money hide inside a Google account?

The fee is the visible cost. The account has quieter ones, and a buyer who knows the list reads an agency's report in a different light.

• Your own name. A campaign on your brand's name returns beautifully, because those people were coming anyway. It is the easiest way to make a report look good and the hardest to notice. Ask for brand traffic reported on its own line.
• Default settings. A new campaign opts you into the search partner network, the Display network and broad match on your keywords. Each one spends; none of them was your decision.
• The search terms you never see. What people actually typed before they clicked is the most useful report in the account. If it is not in front of you every month, nobody is reading it.
• Conversions that are not sales. A tap on the phone number is not a call. A visit to the thank-you page is not an order. Ask what the account counts, and whether the number it counts is the one you pay rent with.
• The black box. Performance Max often works and tells you almost nothing about why. An agency that runs everything through it has handed its judgement to Google and is charging you for the handover.
• The landing page. If the page after the click is weak, the account is blamed, the budget is raised, and the page stays weak. Ask whose job the page is before you sign.
• Ownership. Some agencies open the account under their own manager login. Leave, and the history, the data and the learning leave with it. The account must be yours, with the agency as a user on it.

What do we charge for Google Ads?

One flat fee, and it is on the pricing page. Starter is $2,000 a month for one channel; on the published list that channel is Meta ads on one account, with four new creatives a month and weekly optimisation. Google Ads management, on its own or beside Meta, sits in Tailored: priced to the number we agree on the first call, and flat once agreed. If you want Google alone on a modest budget, say so on the call and we will tell you whether a one-channel fee makes sense or whether you should run the account yourself for a while.

Ad spend is separate. It stays in your own Google account, on your own card, paid to Google directly. No share of it, no media commission, no rebate from the platform that we keep without telling you. The fee does not move because you had a good month, and it does not move because you had a bad one.

The reason is self-interested as much as moral. A flat fee is what lets us tell you to pause a campaign, cut the Display network or move budget into email without it costing us anything. On a share of spend that advice costs the agency money every time it is given, and advice that costs money is given less often.

Nobody who guarantees a result is telling you the truth.

When is Google the wrong channel?

More often than an agency selling Google will say. Search advertising only works when people are already searching, and that is a smaller set of businesses than it looks.

• Nobody types it. A new category, a product people do not know they want, a gift bought on impulse. Personalised newborn wear sells on discovery, in a feed, and closes in a conversation; a search campaign for it buys only the handful of people who had already decided.
• The order is too small for the click. If a sale earns you a few dollars and a click in your category costs about that, the arithmetic is settled before the campaign starts.
• The listing already does it. A local service with a well-kept Google Business Profile, real reviews and photographs often gets the map result for free. Pay for ads only once you can see what the free listing already brings in.
• The page cannot close. Search traffic is the warmest a site will ever get. If a warm visitor does not convert, the campaign is measuring the page, and the page is the job.
• The budget would be mostly fee. If our fee would be larger than your media, do not pay it. Learn the account yourself, or hire a freelancer by the hour for a rebuild, and come back when the spend justifies a retainer.

We have no cleared Google case to show you, and we would rather say so than borrow one. What we can show is the method: an account that is yours, search terms read every week, brand traffic reported on its own line, conversions that are orders, and a fee that does not grow when the budget does. The service page is at /services/google-ads, and the Meta version of this question is at /blog/what-a-meta-ads-agency-costs.