Paid search management services, vetted the buyer's way

Agencies with a verified published price

How to compare paid search managers on evidence

1. Confirm who does the work and who owns the account. Ask whether the person on the sales call will run your account or hand it to a junior team, and insist the ad account lives under your ownership with the agency added as a manager. An agency that owns the account can hold your history and conversion data hostage when you leave.
2. Get the fee model in writing. Managers charge a flat monthly fee, a share of ad spend, or a blend. A spend share pays the agency more when you spend more, whether or not results improve, so ask what happens to the fee if you cut budget. Whatever the model, the fee and the media spend should be invoiced separately so you can see each.
3. Ask for the last account they improved, with numbers. A credible manager can show a before-and-after from a real account: cost per lead falling, search impression share held, wasted spend cut through negative keywords. Names can be redacted. What matters is that they measure their own work and will show you the measurement.
4. Agree the reporting cadence before signing. Monthly reporting should tie spend to leads or sales, not to clicks and impressions alone. Ask to see a sample report from a current client. If the sample leads with vanity metrics and never mentions cost per conversion, that is how your account will be reported too.

What paid search management costs and what moves the price

Fees track two things: the size of your media budget and the complexity of the account. A single-location business running a modest budget on a handful of campaigns is a very different job from a multi-location advertiser with feeds, call tracking and dozens of ad groups, and the monthly fee reflects that. Percentage-of-spend pricing commonly sits in the low-to-mid teens as a share of media budget, while flat retainers for small accounts often start in the high hundreds of dollars per month. Treat any quote far below that with suspicion: someone has to spend real hours in the account, and a fee that cannot cover those hours usually buys you automated rules and silence.

Setup is often billed separately, and legitimately so. Building conversion tracking, importing offline conversions, structuring campaigns and writing ads from scratch is front-loaded work. What you should not accept is a long lock-in contract on top of a setup fee. Month-to-month or quarterly terms keep the agency accountable, and a manager confident in their work rarely needs a twelve-month commitment to keep you.

The vetting questions that separate operators from resellers

Ask how they decide what a click is worth to you. A real answer works backward from your close rate and average job or case value; a weak answer is a target cost per click pulled from the air. Ask what they did in the last account they inherited: good managers talk about search term reports, negative keyword lists, and turning off spend that was not converting, because inherited accounts almost always leak money in those places.

Then ask about access and transparency. You should be able to log into your own ad account at any time and see every search term your money bought. A manager who resists read access, reports only from their own dashboard, or bundles ad spend invisibly into one invoice is asking you to take performance on faith. Google's own Quality Score documentation is a useful shared reference here: it describes how ad relevance and landing page experience are assessed, which is exactly the work you are paying a manager to do well.

When paid search management is the wrong purchase

If your website cannot convert the traffic, management fees amplify the waste. A slow site, a form that fails on phones, or a phone line that rings out during business hours will defeat the best-run campaign. Fix the destination before paying to send traffic to it. Similarly, if your total monthly budget is very small, a fixed management fee can eat a large share of it; at that scale a one-time account build with a quarterly review, or a hard look at whether organic and local search would serve you better, is often the more honest recommendation, and a good agency will say so.

Questions people actually ask

Should the agency or the business own the Google Ads account?

The business, always. Your account history, conversion data and Quality Score signals accrue to the account itself. If the agency owns it, leaving them means starting over. Any reputable manager will work inside an account you own and control.

Is percentage-of-spend pricing a bad sign?

Not by itself; it is the most common model in the trade. It becomes a problem when the agency also controls budget recommendations, because raising your spend raises their fee. Ask how budget increases are justified and insist they be tied to measured cost per conversion, not to traffic alone.

How long before paid search management shows results?

Unlike SEO, paid search produces data immediately: you will see clicks, search terms and conversions within days of launch. Judging the manager takes longer, since testing ads and refining targeting plays out over one to three months. What you can judge in week one is transparency and the quality of the build.

Can I run Google Ads myself instead?

Yes, and for a very small budget it may be the right call. The risk is not the interface, which is approachable, but the defaults: broad targeting, auto-applied recommendations and display expansion quietly spend money on low-intent clicks. If you self-manage, review your search terms report weekly and disable automatic recommendations.

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