Most people shopping for a Google Ads agency start with the same question. What do you charge?
It’s a fair thing to ask. It’s also the wrong place to start.
I’ve watched business owners pick the cheapest agency in town and quietly bleed money for months. I’ve watched other business owners pay premium fees and bleed money just the same. I’ve also seen both the cheap option and the expensive one make people very good money. The fee, on its own, told them nothing about which way it would go.
I’ve been managing Google Ads accounts since 2008 and running an agency since 2012. So let me give you the actual numbers first, because that’s what you came here for. Then let me show you why the fee is the least useful thing to decide on, and how to work out whether an agency will actually make you money.
First, the number you came here for
Two separate costs get bundled into any Google Ads quote, and a lot of quotes blur the line on purpose.
Ad spend is the money that goes to Google every time someone clicks your ad. That goes to Google, not the agency. Most Aussie small businesses run this somewhere between $1,500 and $5,000 a month, depending on their industry and how competitive their keywords are. Working out the right number for your business is a separate question, and I’ve covered it in how much you should spend on Google Ads.
Management is what you pay a person or agency to run the campaigns. The strategy, the keyword research, the ad writing, the conversion tracking, the weekly tweaks, the reporting. That’s the number this guide is about.
Here’s roughly what management costs in Australia in 2026, separate from your ad budget:
- Freelancer or consultant: anywhere from about $30 an hour for an overseas consultant to $60 up to a couple of hundred for a local one. Fine for a one-off setup or an audit, harder to budget for ongoing work.
- Small agency or boutique: $500 to $2,500 a month, flat fee. This is where most small businesses land.
- Mid-sized agency: $1,500 to $3,000 a month. More account managers, more layers between you and the person touching your account.
- Large agency: $3,000 to $5,000+ a month, and often well beyond. Bigger teams, bigger overheads, and you’re often a small fish in a big pond. At the top end this climbs into the tens of thousands, depending on what you’re doing and how much you’re spending.
So the honest range for managing a small-to-medium account is roughly $500 to $3,000 a month, with most small businesses sitting between $800 and $2,000. Anything advertised as “free management” usually means the cost is buried in an inflated ad spend or a long lock-in contract.
Yes, there’s a top end where businesses spend $100,000 a month with Google and pay an agency to match. That world exists. It’s not what this guide is about. This one’s for small and medium businesses, so that’s where we’ll stay.
That’s your answer. Now here’s why that number shouldn’t be what decides it.
Why the range is so wide
Five hundred to three thousand is a big spread, and the reason is simple. The fee tracks the amount of work involved, and two accounts can be worlds apart.
Here’s some of what moves the number:
- How many campaigns and services. One search campaign for one service is a different job to a dozen campaigns across a dozen services.
- How many locations. Targeting one town is simple. Targeting every capital city, or a franchise with 40 sites that each need their own local setup, is a lot more to build and a lot more to keep an eye on.
- One country or several. A single-country account is straightforward. Multiple countries mean different currencies, languages, competitors, and rules to juggle.
- The size of the catalogue. Shopping ads for a store with 20 products is not the same beast as shopping ads for 100,000 SKUs. The bigger the feed, the more work to structure it and keep it clean.
- How competitive the space is. A cut-throat, high-value market takes more strategy and constant attention than a quiet one. A crowded low-value space brings its own headache, a flood of cheap clicks to sift through for the few that matter.
- The channel mix. Just search? Or search plus display, video, Performance Max, and remarketing? Every extra channel is another thing to build and manage.
- The creative. Who’s making the ads, the images, the video? If you’ve already got assets ready to go, great. If we’re producing them from scratch, that work sits inside the fee too.
A tonne goes into it. That’s why “what do you charge” rarely gets a straight answer on the spot. A good agency needs to understand your account before they can quote it properly. A fixed price with no questions asked usually means a fixed, one-size template running underneath.
Cheap and scattered is its own kind of expensive
That’s just the ad account, though. The moment you add split testing your landing pages, writing the copy, and running your email, it stops being one service at all. This is where a lot of businesses come unstuck, and it has nothing to do with any single fee.
They try to do everything at the lowest possible price. One person for SEO. Someone else for Google Ads. A freelancer for the landing page. Another for the website. Someone cheap for email. A mate’s cousin for the graphic design. Each piece looks affordable on its own.
Then you step back and none of it lines up. The ads point one way, the landing page says something different, and the emails are off doing their own thing. It’s cheap labour producing incoherent marketing, and when the results don’t come, nobody’s responsible. Everyone did their little bit. No one owned the outcome.
That’s the hidden cost of shopping on price. You save on every line item and lose on the whole, because marketing only works when it’s all pulling the same direction.
The fix is one team that handles the lot and keeps it pointing the same way. That’s the thinking behind our One Hour Marketing Method. We run the ads, the landing pages, the email, and the design, and we coordinate it so the whole thing works together. You spend about an hour a month reviewing it and we handle the rest. One of our clients, Dan, put it best: “I don’t even need the full hour each month.”
That costs more than $500. We’ve had clients pay us close to $10,000 a month, because we’re running the whole engine, not just flicking through an ad account. What they get back is marketing that actually holds together and one team on the hook for the result. Next to six disconnected freelancers who each blame the other when the phone stops ringing, that’s the cheaper deal, not the dearer one.
The fee is a cost. The result is the point.
Say you find someone to run your ads for $500 a month. Feels like a win. But if the campaign is built badly, sends clicks to the wrong page, and has no proper tracking, you might spend $3,000 with Google and get nothing back. You’ve paid $3,500 all up to lose money. The cheap fee didn’t save you a cent.
Now say another agency charges $2,000 a month. Sounds steep next to the first one. But they build it properly, the phone actually rings, and those enquiries turn into $20,000 of work. You paid more and came out miles ahead.
Same business. Same ad budget. The only real difference was the quality of the person running it, and the cheaper option was the expensive one.
I’d rather pay a serious management fee and walk away with profitable leads than pay the bare minimum and slowly lose money. Most business owners, once you put it like that, feel the same. It’s easy to forget in the moment though, because the fee is the number sitting right in front of you and the result is still hypothetical.
There’s a line I use in my book that applies here. If you pay five bucks a month for hosting, you get five bucks a month worth of hosting. The same logic runs through most of marketing. Cheap rarely means good value. It usually just means cheap, and you find out the difference once the money’s gone.
A big fee doesn’t guarantee a big result either
Here’s the part that keeps the whole thing honest. Paying more is not proof of anything.
Plenty of agencies charge premium fees and still do average work. Big retainers, polished decks, an account manager who’s lovely on the phone, and campaigns quietly running on autopilot underneath. A high price is not evidence of skill any more than a low price is evidence of a bargain.
So you can’t shortcut the decision with the fee at all. Cheap doesn’t mean bad. Expensive doesn’t mean good. The price tag simply isn’t the signal.
What matters is whether the agency knows how to turn your budget into more money than it costs you. And you can actually check for that before you sign anything.
How to tell if an agency will actually make you money
You don’t need to understand Google Ads to sort the real operators from the rest. You need to ask a few questions and pay attention to how they answer.
Ask them to explain what they’ll do in plain English. If someone can’t tell you, in normal words, how they’ll get you results, walk away. The ones who hide behind jargon are usually hiding the fact that there isn’t much of a plan. The good ones will happily talk you through it.
Ask how they’ll track results. If an agency can’t tell you how they’ll measure leads, sales, and cost per enquiry, they’re flying blind, and so are you. Proper conversion tracking is the whole game. Without it, nobody can honestly tell you whether the ads are working.
Ask what they’ll show you each month. A good report tells you what came in, what it cost, and what they’re changing next. If the monthly update is just “impressions are up,” that’s activity, not results.
Ask what happens when it isn’t working. Every account has a slow patch. The answer you want is a calm one about testing, adjusting, and being straight with you. The answer you don’t want is silence, or spin.
Ask them to split the quote. When an agency says “Google Ads will cost you $3,500 a month,” ask how much is ad spend going to Google and how much is their fee. A good agency breaks that down without flinching. If they won’t, that tells you something.
None of that needs technical knowledge. It just needs you to treat the fee as one small part of a bigger question. Not “what does this cost,” but “will this make me more than it costs.”
The clients who prove the point
I could keep telling you this. It lands better coming from business owners who’ve lived it.
Boardstore left us twice. We’ve worked with them since 2012. Twice over the years, another provider came in with the same pitch: better results, cheaper price, fancier promises. Twice they left to try it. Both times they came back. The worst case was an SEO provider who migrated their site and wiped out years of ranking equity, and we were brought in to rebuild from the rubble. Boardstore isn’t a client we held with lock-in contracts. They tested the market, more than once, and chose to come back. Today some of their campaigns run at up to 20x return. That’s the real testimonial, cheaper offers and all.
Corey at Complete Removals had been burned before. His previous agency, based overseas, charged $4,000 a month and underdelivered. We took his cost per lead from $110 down to $39. His words: “That absolutely blew me away.” He also said something that stuck with me. “I see digital marketing like a mechanic. You don’t really know whether what they’re telling you is true. I really do trust Johannes.” The trust came from results he could see, not from the size of the invoice.
Kirsten at PKM had six months of nothing. Before us, another Google Ads company ran her account for six months and produced a single phone call. Within two months with us, she was getting calls every day. Same service, same industry, completely different outcome. The difference was never the fee. It was who was running it.
The thread through all three is simple. Not one of them stayed because we were the cheapest. They stayed because the ads made them money.
So what should you actually pay?
Pay what it takes to get someone competent who can prove they’ll make you more than they cost. For managing a Google Ads account, most small businesses land between $800 and $2,000 a month, on top of a real ad budget. If you want the whole engine handled and coordinated, the ads, the landing pages, the email, the design, it’s more than that, because it’s a bigger job and it’s replacing a scramble of separate freelancers.
Just don’t shop on that number. Shop on whether the person you’re talking to can explain their plan, show you the results, and be straight with you when things get bumpy. Get that part right and the fee pays for itself. Get it wrong and the cheapest agency in town is still the most expensive decision you’ll make this year.
If you want to work out whether you’d get the right results with us, get in touch and have a chat. No pitch, no pressure. We’ll look at your situation honestly and tell you whether we think we can make you money. If we can’t, we’ll tell you that too.