Agency pricing depends on leverage: someone experienced sells the account and someone junior runs it. That model works for the agency. Here you get one person, fewer clients by design, and no layer between you and whoever is changing your bids.
Not usually incompetence. Structural incentives.
When the fee is a share of budget, advising you to spend less costs your vendor money. You may never hear the words 'pause that campaign' from someone paid this way.
The account gets tuned, the landing page and tracking stay broken, and the ceiling never moves because the real constraint was never in the ad platform.
Impressions up, clicks up, CTR up, and no line connecting any of it to revenue. Activity reporting is what you get when nobody wants to be measured on outcome.
The strategist you met during the pitch has forty accounts. Yours is being run by whoever joined most recently.
The phrase covers everything from a monthly screenshot to someone rebuilding your account. Here is what a month of real work looks like, so you can hold any quote against it.
The search terms report is where money leaks first, and it leaks continuously. Reviewing it weekly and adding negatives is the least glamorous part of PPC ad management and the part that most accounts skip once onboarding excitement fades.
Budgets that run out by the twentieth, or that never spend, are both failures. Pacing gets checked against the month and against the season, not against a spreadsheet set in January.
One deliberate test at a time, with enough traffic behind it to mean something. Testing five things at once in a small account produces noise and a confident story about nothing.
Closed deals, booked jobs or signed clients imported as conversions with values attached. This is the difference between an account that optimises toward cheap leads and one that optimises toward revenue.
Campaigns that made sense at one budget stop making sense at three times that. Structure is not set once, and an account nobody has restructured in two years is usually paying for that.
The Google Ads account, the analytics, the tag manager and the conversion setup stay in your name. Adwords management services that keep the account in the provider's own MCC and hand you a login are renting you your own data.
Most PPC management companies quote in a way that makes comparison hard. Three questions make the quotes comparable again.
Percentage of spend means your provider earns more when you spend more, including when spending more is the wrong call. It is the most common model in PPC advertising services and the one with the clearest conflict built in. A flat fee removes the argument entirely.
Long lock-ins usually exist because the first months are setup and the provider needs the tail to make the account profitable for them. That is honest enough, but it should be said out loud rather than buried.
Ask for the name and the weekly cadence. In agency work the gap between the person who sold and the person who executes is the single most common complaint, and it is answerable in one sentence.
If the account, the tracking or the landing pages do not come with you, the price was never the real cost. Ownership is the clause worth reading before the fee.
Management is a commitment on both sides. Being clear about the fit saves a bad quarter.
Spend meaningful enough that a percentage point of waste is real money, one or two platforms rather than six, and someone internally who can answer questions about the business. Location is irrelevant: accounts are run in a browser, and Google Ads management near me stopped being a useful filter years ago.
Budgets too small to generate the conversions an account needs to learn, or a business where the constraint is intake rather than traffic. In both cases management fees buy you a faster route to the same problem.
Some of this work runs behind other people's brands. That arrangement has its own economics and its own risks, covered in white label PPC.
Management is ongoing by definition. When the question is simply whether the account is being run well, a fixed scope PPC audit answers it without a retainer.
The campaign is one part. The measurement and the conversion path are what decide the ceiling.
Before anything gets scaled, the data has to be right. GA4 and Google Tag Manager audited and rebuilt where needed, conversion actions deduplicated, Meta CAPI or server-side tagging where it applies, and offline conversion import so the platform optimises toward revenue instead of form fills.
Structure, keywords, negatives, bidding, ad copy, audiences and budget pacing. Built and maintained by me, weekly, not handed off after setup.
Paid traffic dies on a bad page. I build and iterate the landing pages the campaigns point to, so the conversion path is one system instead of two vendors blaming each other. Fixed scope, tied to the campaigns, not open-ended web design.
Not a percentage of spend, so recommending a budget cut costs me nothing. No twelve month lock-in, because a lock-in mostly protects the vendor.
Your Google Ads account, your GA4, your tag manager, your landing pages. If we stop working together you keep all of it, history included. This should be the standard and often is not.
I take a limited number of accounts. If your situation is better served by an agency with a large creative team, I will say that on the first call.
Managed roughly $20K per month in Google Ads spend as a freelance PPC specialist for this Houston HVAC and plumbing company.
I go through the account, the tracking and the conversion path and tell you what is actually broken. You get the findings whether or not we work together.
Tracking, conversion actions and structure get corrected first. Optimising on top of bad data just makes you confidently wrong.
Campaigns, ad copy, audiences and landing pages built around how your buyers actually search.
Weekly optimisation against the metric that matters to your business, with a monthly written read on what moved and what is next.
Long-form writing on this topic from the blog.
Companies already spending on Google Ads that want it run by someone senior.
Not a fit: Businesses that have never advertised and need a marketing plan before any campaign.
Flat monthly fee based on scope and complexity, never a percentage of ad spend. You get a fixed quote on the first call before sending anything over.
Almost always take over and fix in place. Rebuilding throws away conversion history that Smart Bidding depends on, so it needs a genuinely good reason.
There is no hard floor, but below roughly $5K per month the data is usually too thin for ongoing management to earn its fee. At that level a one-off audit is often the better purchase.
Yes, where the audience justifies it. I would rather run two channels properly than five badly, so that gets decided from your data, not a package.
A short form beats a long discovery call. Give me the basics and I will come back with a straight read on whether I can help, usually within one business day.
Rather book a time directly? Schedule a call.