WHAT THINGS COST
How much does ads management cost?
The management fee, the percentage, and which one is hiding from you.
Short answer
Meta and Google campaign management costs $600 a month plus 15% of the advertising spend. The spend itself is paid by you, directly to the platforms, and never passes through us. Both numbers are stated up front because surprise percentages are how this part of the industry earned its reputation.
Three pricing models, and what each one hides
A flat fee is predictable and stops matching the work as an account grows, so a studio on a flat fee quietly deprioritises the accounts that got bigger. A pure percentage is honest about scale but rewards spending more of your money rather than spending it better. A fee plus a percentage, which is what this is, tries to match both, and it is the model you should assume any agency is using even if they only quote you one half of it.
The question worth asking is not which model, it is whether both numbers were said out loud before you signed.
What gets managed
Campaign structure and conversion tracking that actually fires, checked rather than assumed, because a surprising share of accounts are optimising against a conversion event that has been broken for months. Then targeting, budgets and creative variations tested against each other, and weekly optimisation moving spend toward what works.
Reporting is cost per result, month over month, next to what changed. Impressions and reach are not results, and a report built on them is a report designed not to be checked.
Fix the destination first
Advertising to a page that does not convert is an expensive way to learn that the page does not convert. If the destination is weak, a landing page at $1,200 will do more for the cost per result than any amount of bid tuning, and we will say so before taking the management fee.
This is the most common reason we turn ads work down.
Minimum spend, and who pays whom
There is no contractual minimum, but below a few hundred dollars a month the platforms cannot gather enough data to learn and neither can we. We will tell you if your budget is too small rather than take it and produce noise.
Platform fees and ad spend go to Meta and Google on your own accounts and are not refundable by us. Where a platform refunds us something, we pass it on in full.
What moves the number
- Pushes it up
- More spend, more platforms, more creative variations, more markets
- Pushes it down
- Fewer campaigns doing more. Most small accounts are spread too thin
- Never ours to charge for
- The advertising spend itself. It is paid to the platforms by you
The packages behind these numbers
Each one lists its full scope, what it excludes and how the work runs.