Paid advertising management is quoted as a monthly figure and delivered as anything from a fortnightly glance at the account to a team producing creative, building landing pages and reconciling conversions against your sales system. Since the platforms now automate much of the bidding, the difference between a cheap and an expensive service is almost entirely in which of those surrounding tasks are included. Writing the list yourself is what makes the quotes comparable.
The task list to price against
Account structure and ongoing restructuring; conversion tracking including offline outcomes; search term review and negatives; creative production and testing; landing page build and testing; budget allocation between campaigns; reporting and reconciliation. Ask every supplier which of those are included, which are extra, and roughly how many hours each receives. The answers separate the quotes immediately.
Automation has moved where the work is
Bidding, much matching and increasingly asset selection are handled by the platforms. What remains is deciding what to buy at all, feeding accurate conversion signals, excluding waste, and producing creative and offers. A proposal built around manual bid management is describing work that has largely been automated away.
Landing pages are the most common gap
Many management services stop at the click, which leaves the most consequential variable owned by nobody. Establish who builds and tests pages, whether it is inside the fee, and how quickly a change can be shipped. If the answer is your web developer with a two-week queue, the account will be optimised around a constraint it cannot move.
Reporting should reconcile, not just display
A useful report ties platform-reported conversions to what your own systems recorded, explains the difference, and says what changed in the account and why. Ask to see an anonymised example before signing. A dashboard link with a traffic chart is a display, and it will not tell you whether the money is working.
Questions people ask about ads management services
What is a fair management fee?
Compare fees as hours of named people at your expected budget. A percentage looks cheap on a large budget and may still buy little attention if one person carries many accounts; a flat fee on a small account may be the only structure that funds real work.
Should one supplier manage all platforms?
It is simpler and depends on whether they genuinely operate each one. Ask roughly how much spend they manage on each platform you care about; the answer distinguishes the platforms they live in from the ones on the capability list.
Who owns the accounts?
You should, with access granted to the supplier. Conversion history and audience lists are hard to rebuild, and an account held inside the agency's own manager makes leaving expensive in a way that only becomes apparent at the end.
How long should we commit for?
A short initial period covering setup, then rolling with a fair notice period. Where a supplier needs longer to fund the initial work, agree a fixed-fee setup project rather than a twelve-month lock-in that removes your only leverage.