First: there are two numbers, not one
The media budget is what you pay Google, Meta or Microsoft for the clicks. The management fee is what you pay somebody to run it. They are entirely separate, and confusing them is the single most common reason a PPC quote is misread.
A proposal that gives you one combined number is hiding which is which. Ask for them split, always — and ask whether the media budget is billed through the agency or straight to your own card, because that decides who owns the account and the history in it.
The three fee models
| Model | Shape | Who it actually suits |
|---|---|---|
| Percentage of spend | Commonly 10–20% of the media budget, up to around 40% on small accounts | Predictable for the agency; expensive per hour of attention at low budgets |
| Flat monthly fee | A fixed retainer per account or per platform | Stable accounts where the monthly work is genuinely similar each month |
| Block of hours | One number a month, spent on whatever the account needs | Businesses who want ads, site and tracking handled together, and no fee that rises with budget |
Source: Cybrial’s own description of the models we are quoted against. No competitor’s published pricing is reproduced here, and none has been used as a source.
The arithmetic against percentage-of-spend is not complicated and it does not depend on anybody being dishonest. Managing a £2,000 monthly budget well takes roughly the same hours as managing a £1,000 one: the keyword research is the same, the negative keywords are the same, the bid strategy is the same. Charging twice as much for it is a convention rather than a cost.
Where it genuinely bites is at the bottom of the market. A £600 budget at 20% is £120 a month, which does not buy competent attention — so those accounts get a template and a quarterly glance. Meanwhile a £20,000 account on the same percentage funds £4,000 of attention for work perhaps twice as complex. Small advertisers systematically subsidise large ones under that model, and nobody sets out to make that happen.
Working out your own media budget
Do not start from a figure somebody suggested. Start from your own cost per click, which you can find in the platform’s keyword planner in ten minutes, and work forwards.
- Find the typical cost per click for the searches you would actually want.
- Assume, to begin with, that roughly one in twenty clicks becomes an enquiry. That is a starting assumption to be replaced by your own data, not a law.
- Multiply: twenty clicks at your cost per click is what one enquiry costs you in media.
- Divide your average job value by that. If the answer is comfortably above one, the channel can work. If it is not, no amount of optimisation rescues it.
At £3 a click, an enquiry costs about £60 in media and £600 a month buys ten of them — enough to judge whether the leads are any good. At £15 a click the same reasoning gives about £300 an enquiry, and if your average job is £400 that is not a channel, it is a hobby. Doing this before the first meeting changes the conversation entirely.
One floor worth knowing: below about £300 a month most accounts cannot gather enough data to be optimised, so you would be paying somebody to watch noise. That is an argument for spending less on management and more on media, not for spending nothing.
The part that is worth more than the management fee
Conversion tracking, set up before any money is spent. Without it the platform optimises toward clicks rather than customers, and every later performance conversation becomes an argument about attribution.
It is also where most inherited accounts are quietly broken: conversions counted twice, page views counted as conversions, and phone calls not counted at all. For a trade or service business where most enquiries arrive by phone, an account optimised on form fills is spending your money chasing the wrong half of your customers. Firing an event when somebody taps the number on a mobile is a few lines of code and it is the most commonly missed enquiry route there is.
A related point that costs UK advertisers real money: consent banners mean anything relying on a cookie only sees visitors who accepted one. The true picture is always better than the dashboard says, and how much better depends on your banner. Knowing the size of that gap is the difference between pausing a campaign that works and scaling it.
How to choose a PPC company
Five questions, and the answers tell you more than any case study.
- Who owns the ad account? It should be you. An account owned by the agency means the campaign history — most of the accumulated value — does not leave with you.
- Is the media budget billed to me directly? It should be. Agency-billed media is where margin hides.
- What is the fee if my budget doubles? A percentage model doubles it for the same work. Ask them to justify that.
- Who does the work, and how many accounts do they have? At £120 a month of fee, the honest answer is “not many hours”.
- What will you do in the first month before spending? If the answer does not include conversion tracking, keep looking.
And one to ask yourself: is this account big enough to need an agency at all? A well-set-up small campaign with the tracking right and a monthly hour of attention beats a badly-set-up one with a fee attached, every time.
Is PPC worth it — and PPC or SEO?
PPC is worth it when the arithmetic above clears and you need enquiries this month. It stops the moment you stop paying, which is both its weakness and, when cash flow is tight, exactly the point.
Search is the opposite: slower, and it keeps paying after you stop. Most businesses that can afford both should do both. If you can only do one, the answer depends on how quickly you need leads rather than on which is philosophically better.
Either way, fix the tracking and the landing page first. Paid traffic sent to a page converting at 1% is an expensive way to discover that the page is the problem — and it is a discovery a great many advertisers pay several thousand pounds to make.
