What a Google Ads management fee should cover in Australia

A Google Ads management fee should pay for a set of checks and decisions done on a schedule, not for pressing buttons now and then. Before you compare prices, compare that list. We charge a flat $549 a month AUD, month to month, and you pay Google directly for your clicks. This post sets out what we believe the fee should cover, with one example of a check earning its place. We do not quote a market price range, because the ranges we have seen are agency guides and not something we have verified.

What the fee should cover

These are the tasks we run on the accounts we manage. Use them as a checklist for any provider, including us.

1. A daily look at spend against what was agreed. Spend, clicks, cost per click and conversions for the account, with each campaign's live budget compared with the budget you approved. Any mismatch is flagged first.
2. Impression share and what is limiting it. Whether you are missing out because of budget or because of how your ads rank. These need different fixes, and mixing them up wastes money. See lost to budget or lost to rank.
3. Conversion tracking that counts real enquiries. What each conversion action counts, whether it fires on a real phone and a real form, and whether the totals agree with your inbox and phone log. This is covered in Google Ads says 284 conversions, we counted about 30 real leads.
4. Search terms. The words people actually typed before clicking, reviewed for waste and for terms worth adding. See search terms and negative keywords for a local service.
5. Website results next to Ads results. How many enquiries came from paid search and how many from elsewhere, so the cost per lead is calculated from real leads and not from the Ads conversion column alone.
6. A written list of proposed changes, each needing your approval. Not a surprise edit to your budget at midnight.
7. A plain monthly summary. What happened, what changed, what we propose next.

Ask a provider what is on that list and how often. A fee that covers only the monthly summary is a report, not management.

Flat fee or share of spend

Some providers charge a percentage of your ad spend. That model pays more when you spend more, whether or not the extra spend is a good idea. We use a flat fee so the advice on budget does not affect our pay. This is an incentive point, not a promise of outcomes. No provider can promise rankings, leads or revenue from Google Ads, and we do not.

What the fee does not include

Be clear about these before you sign anything.

• Ad spend. Billed by Google to your card or account.
• Your account ownership. You keep your own Google Ads account and add us as a manager. If you leave, the account, its history and its conversion data stay with you.
• Website changes. The base website plan is separate, at $298 a month. Ads management works on the account, and a landing page change goes through the site plan.

A real example: the budget that stayed up

On one account we manage, the owner approved raising a campaign budget from A$60 to A$90 a day for a single day. The change back was written in a notes file as a to do, due the next day. On that afternoon the budget was still A$90 and spend was already A$133, against about A$68 a day on average in September. The owner noticed the spend before we did.

Nothing here was dramatic, and the money was within what the owner had been willing to spend. But it was the exact thing a daily check exists to catch, and it was not caught. Two changes came out of it:

1. Any temporary change now gets a scheduled reminder to reverse it at the moment it is approved, not a line in a checklist.
2. The daily check records what each campaign's budget is supposed to be, and the next run flags a mismatch as a high priority item until it is fixed.

That is what a fee for management pays for: a process that notices, and a record of what it missed and how it was fixed.

Questions to ask any provider

1. What do you check every day, and what do you check every month?
2. Whose account is it, and who can see the conversion data?
3. Do you change anything without my approval?
4. How do you decide what counts as a conversion?
5. Is the fee flat or tied to my spend?
6. What is the notice period if I stop?

Ours: daily checks as above, changes proposed for your approval, your own account, a flat fee, and month to month with no lock in for the Ads add-on. The Ads management service page lays out what we do, and pricing shows how it sits next to the $298 a month website plan. When you are ready, get started.