What should PPC management actually cost?

Most UK SMEs pay between £500 and £2,500 a month to have their Google Ads managed. But the number on the invoice tells you almost nothing on its own. A low fee that buys you a junior and a set-and-forget Performance Max campaign is dear at any price. A higher fee that finds and cuts the waste pays for itself. Here is how PPC pricing actually works, what each model quietly rewards, and what your money should buy.

Pricing in this industry is deliberately murky. Hardly any agency publishes a number, ours included, and there are reasons for that I will come to. But you can still walk into the conversation knowing what good looks like. It comes down to three things: how they charge, what the fee includes, and what the whole arrangement quietly rewards.

The three ways agencies charge

Almost every PPC fee is one of three models, or a blend of them. Each one points the agency in a different direction, and that matters more than the headline rate.

Percentage of ad spend. You pay a percentage of whatever you spend with Google, usually 10 to 20%. It flexes with your budget, so a quiet month costs you less and a busy one funds more work on the account. It also ties the agency to your growth, they earn more as you scale, so they have every reason to help you get there. Agree a cap and a shared view of what good spend looks like, and it keeps everyone pulling the same way.
Flat monthly retainer. A fixed fee for an agreed scope of work. Cleaner, because the agency earns the same whether your spend goes up or down, so the advice is about results rather than their margin. The risk is a retainer that quietly buys less and less attention over time.
Hourly or project. You pay for time, often £75 to £150 an hour, or a one-off fee for a build or an audit. Fine for a specific job. Harder to rely on for the week-in, week-out management that keeps an account healthy.

What is a normal number for an SME?

For a business spending between £1,000 and £50,000 a month, management fees usually land between £500 and £2,500 a month, depending on the spend, the number of accounts, and how much is going on. Below about £500 you are rarely getting senior time. You are getting a junior and a template.

Spend matters here. Paying a £1,500 fee to manage a £1,000 budget makes no sense, the maths never works. Paying £1,500 to manage £20,000 of spend can be the best money you spend all year, if the person doing it knows what they are doing.

What the fee should actually buy

This is where most of the value hides, and where most of the disappointment comes from. A management fee should pay for ongoing work, not a setup followed by silence. At a minimum, you should be getting:

Conversion tracking that is checked and trusted, because every other decision rests on it.
A search term report reviewed regularly, with negatives added and waste cut. Weekly, not quarterly.
A campaign structure built for your business, not whatever Google’s default wizard suggested.
Reporting that talks about revenue, leads and return, not a wall of impressions and clicks designed to look busy.

If you are paying a monthly fee and none of that is happening, you are not paying for management. You are paying for access to a dashboard.

The red flags

A few things should make you pause, whatever the number:

A fee that looks too cheap. Someone has to do the work. If it is suspiciously low, it is either a junior practising on your budget or software running unattended.
Percentage of spend with no cap. Capped, this model works fine. Left uncapped, your fee just climbs with your spend whether or not the return follows.
Markups you cannot see. On tools, on Comparison Shopping Service fees, on landing pages. Hidden margin is common and it is a choice they made. Ask what is included.
Long lock-in contracts. If the work is good, you stay because it works, not because a clause says you have to.

The real cost is the waste, not the fee

Here is the thing most owners miss when they fixate on the fee. The fee is the small number. The spend is the big one, and that is where the money is won or lost. We typically find enough wasted spend within the first 30 days to cover our fee, because in most accounts the waste is sitting there in plain sight, in the search terms and the structure. Death by a thousand cuts.

So judge the fee against what it protects and grows, not in isolation. A cheap fee that lets £3,000 a month leak out of a £15,000 budget is the most expensive option on the table. Before you sign anyone, it is worth knowing the questions that separate a good agency from the rest, and being honest about whether you should be hiring one at all.

If you want a straight read on whether your current fee is buying you anything, that is what the Free Audit is for.