Paid Search Marketing Services

Agencies with a verified published price

How to buy paid search management

1. Fix conversion tracking before anything else. Every decision the platform makes is downstream of what you tell it a conversion is. Tracking must be configured, tested and owned by you before a campaign runs, with offline conversions imported where deals close on the phone. An agency that starts spending before tracking is verified is optimising towards a number nobody has checked.
2. Get the fee structure and the account ownership in writing. Ask whether the fee is flat, a percentage of spend or performance-based, what it includes, and crucially whose Google Ads account the campaigns live in. If the agency owns the account, your keyword history, conversion data and quality signals stay with them when you leave, and you restart from zero somewhere else.
3. Review the search terms report yourself. Ask a candidate to walk you through a real search terms report from an account they manage. It shows what people actually typed, which is where waste hides. Someone who reviews it regularly will talk fluently about negatives and match type decisions. Someone who does not will talk about impressions and click-through rate.
4. Agree what the landing page work covers. Ad quality and landing page experience feed into Ad Rank, so the page is part of the campaign, not a separate project. Establish who builds and tests landing pages, how quickly changes ship, and whether testing is included. Campaigns sending expensive clicks to a generic homepage are the most common reason paid search underperforms.

What you are actually paying a manager for

Three things, in descending order of value. Judgement about which queries deserve budget, which means aggressive negative keyword work, honest match type decisions and the discipline to stop spending on traffic that looks relevant and never converts. Measurement, which means conversion tracking that reflects real business outcomes rather than form loads, including offline import where deals close later. And the message: the ads and the pages they lead to, tested against each other rather than written once.

What you are not paying for any more is manual bid management on a schedule. The platforms do that better than a person can. An agency whose value story is bid optimisation is describing a job that has largely been automated, and it is worth asking what they do with the hours instead.

How fees are structured and which structure to prefer

Percentage of spend is the most common model and the least aligned, because the agency's income rises when your budget does rather than when your cost per acquisition falls. It is still workable at scale, where the percentage typically declines as spend grows. A flat monthly fee tied to a defined scope is the cleanest structure for most businesses, since it separates the manager's income from your budget decisions entirely.

Performance pricing on cost per lead sounds attractive and needs careful definition. Agree in writing what counts as a lead, who counts it, and what happens to disputed or junk submissions, because otherwise the incentive is volume rather than quality. Whichever model you choose, ask for the total cost as a share of spend at your expected budget, which is the only comparable number across structures.

The evidence that separates operators from resellers

Ask to see an anonymised account: campaign structure, negative keyword lists, ad variants, conversion actions and their attribution settings. An operator will show you this comfortably. Ask what they turned off recently and why, because the willingness to cut spend is the clearest sign of someone managing rather than administering.

Ask about the platform's automated recommendations, which arrive constantly and frequently suggest broadening targeting or raising budgets. A competent manager can name recommendations they routinely decline and explain why. Anyone who accepts them wholesale is letting the platform manage the account and charging you for the privilege.

Questions people actually ask

What is a reasonable management fee?

Percentage models commonly sit in the low to mid teens of spend for small accounts and fall as budgets grow, while flat fees are quoted against a defined campaign scope. The number that matters is total cost as a share of spend, including any tool fees. Below a certain budget, a flat fee is almost always cheaper than a percentage minimum.

How long before paid search performance is meaningful?

Automated bidding needs conversion volume to learn, so expect a few weeks of instability, longer if conversions are rare. Judge the first month on structure, tracking accuracy and search term hygiene rather than on cost per acquisition, and hold the performance conversation once the account has enough conversion events to be statistically meaningful.

Should paid search and SEO be bought from the same firm?

It helps, because search term data from ads is the best available evidence of what converts and should direct the organic page plan. The risk is that one team's weaker discipline is subsidised by the other's results. Buy them together only when both disciplines can be evidenced separately.

What do I own if I leave?

You should own the ads account, the conversion history, the keyword and negative lists, the creative and the landing pages. Get this in writing before launch. Rebuilding an account from scratch loses the performance history that the platform's automation relies on, which is a real and often unmentioned cost of the wrong contract.

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