Two numbers, and people confuse them constantly
Before anything else: your ad spend and your management fee are different things going to different places.
- Ad spend goes to Google. It buys the clicks. You set it, you can change it any day, and it is yours.
- The management fee goes to whoever runs the account. It buys the campaign structure, the keyword work, the negatives, the bidding decisions and someone watching what is happening.
A quote of "£1,500 a month" is meaningless until you know how it splits. Ask for the two numbers separately, in writing, every time. It is the single most common place a Google Ads arrangement goes wrong, and it goes wrong at the beginning.
The four fee models, and what each one rewards
| Model | Typical | What it quietly rewards |
|---|---|---|
| Percentage of spend | 10–20%, up to 40% on small accounts | Spending more. The fee rises with the budget whether or not results follow. |
| Flat monthly fee | £300 – £2,000 | Efficiency. Once the account is stable, the agency's margin improves by touching it less — which is fine if it is genuinely working, and a problem if nobody notices it stopped. |
| Hourly | £60 – £150 an hour | Honesty about scope, and a nervous client who does not want to ring. |
| Performance-based | Cost per lead, or a share of revenue | Alignment on paper. In practice it rewards claiming credit for leads that would have arrived anyway, and requires attribution both sides trust. |
| Cybrial growth block | from £250 a month, 0% of spend | Doing whichever work moves the business that month — which some months is not the ads. |
Source: Cybrial pricing correct 4 September 2026. Ranges from UK proposals seen and quoted against.
None of these is dishonest. Percentage-of-spend is the industry standard and plenty of good agencies use it. But it is worth being clear-eyed about the arithmetic: managing a £2,000 monthly budget well takes roughly the same time as managing a £1,000 one. The keyword research is the same, the negatives are the same, the bid strategy is the same. Charging twice as much for it is a convention, not a cost.
What management actually involves
Useful to know, because it is the basis on which you decide whether any fee is reasonable.
- Setup, once: account structure, conversion tracking, campaign and ad group architecture, ad copy, extensions, and the negative keyword list you start with rather than the one you build painfully later.
- Weekly: search terms review (what people actually typed, as opposed to what you bid on), adding negatives, pausing what is not converting, moving budget toward what is.
- Monthly: bid strategy, budget allocation across campaigns, ad copy testing, landing page problems, and reconciling what the platform claims against what actually arrived in the inbox.
- Occasionally: Shopping feed work if you are a retailer, which is a separate discipline and the place most retail accounts are silently losing money.
- Always: telling you when it is not working. This is the part that fee structures make expensive to do.
For a straightforward local service business, that is realistically two to four hours a month after setup. Price any quote against that. If a fee implies twenty hours a month on a five-keyword local account, ask what the other sixteen are.
The thing that decides whether any of it works
Conversion tracking, set up before a pound is spent. Not after the first month, not "we will add it once we see some data".
Without it, the platform optimises toward clicks rather than customers, and every reporting conversation becomes an argument about attribution. With it, the account has an actual objective. This is also where most inherited accounts are broken: conversions counted twice, page views counted as conversions, phone calls not counted at all.
It is worth understanding why this is so often skipped: tracking is unbillable-feeling setup work that produces nothing visible in week one. A percentage-of-spend agency has no incentive to spend the first fortnight on it, because the fee is the same either way and the campaign going live is what the client is watching for.
What is the minimum sensible ad budget?
Enough to learn something within a month, which means enough clicks for the numbers to mean anything rather than a fixed pound figure.
Work backwards instead of picking a number. If your cost per click is around £3 and roughly one in twenty clicks becomes an enquiry, each enquiry costs about £60 in media, and £600 a month buys you ten — enough to judge whether the leads are any good. If your cost per click is £15, the same reasoning gives you a very different answer, and possibly the answer that Google Ads is not your channel.
For most local UK service businesses that arithmetic lands somewhere between £300 and £1,000 a month to start. Below about £300, the account cannot gather enough data to be optimised, and you are paying a management fee to watch noise.
What this site cannot show you
Every other service page on this website carries a measured client result. This one does not, and I would rather say so on the page than let you notice the gap.
Cybrial has no published Google Ads case study, because there is not yet a campaign result that a client has agreed to make public. Until there is, this page is about method and pricing only, and you should weigh it accordingly. The Shopping side of the discipline is evidenced — the Merchant Centre work behind Beds.ie is real, measurable and documented at 94.5% of 17,233 items approved — but a feed is not a campaign, and I am not going to let one stand in for the other.
If you are choosing an agency on evidence, that is a genuine point against me and in favour of a specialist PPC shop with published results. What you get here instead is that the ads sit alongside the site, the tracking and the conversion work, run by the person who built all four — and no percentage of your spend.
Seven questions before you sign anything
- What is the management fee and what is the ad spend, as two separate numbers?
- Who owns the Google Ads account — my business or yours? If it is theirs, you cannot take your history with you, and the history is most of the value.
- What conversions will be tracked, and will phone calls be among them?
- How many hours a month, realistically, after setup?
- Is there a minimum term or a setup fee?
- What happens to the account if I leave — do I keep the campaigns and the data?
- What will you tell me if it is not working, and when?
Question two is the one people forget and regret. Insist the account is created under your own business, with the agency given access. It costs nothing at the start and it is the difference between changing supplier and starting again.
