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 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.
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.