What you could expect to pay for Google Ads Management in the UK

By Lee Moran, Founder of Veritas Digital

Contact ten different agencies and consultancies in the UK and they’ll give a varying level of quotes for running your Google Ads account/s.

I can understand why – pricing is very competitive, and rarely does anyone want to be the most expensive or the absolute cheapest. But if you are spending £10K+ a month or more on Google Ads, you will want to know what is fair in terms of a quote and not be sucked into a potentially expensive or too cheap of an option.

So, in this article, I want to show what Google Ads management costs in the UK, the three ways that companies charge for it, what I personally think is a fair fee depending on the amount you spend each month.

What moves a fee up or down within a band?

Complexity is usually what can cause fees to go up or down. Below are factors that can justify a fee near the top of its range:

• Regulated sectors: Healthcare, finance, legal and anything else where every ad and landing page needs a compliance check before it goes live. Using AI is not enough here, a human needs to do all the reviewing manually.
• Lead generation: If the conversion is a phone call or an enquiry form, someone has to run call tracking, score lead quality and feed offline conversions back into the platform, which is more complexity that just tracking online sales with ecommerce.
• Multiple service lines or locations: Five services with different margins and different targets is five sets of decisions every month, no matter if the total ad spend is £15K or £150K.
• Multiple markets or languages: Every additional market or language adds structure, copy, and its own seasonality to track.
• Reporting depth: A short monthly report is very different to monthly margin analysis, competitor analysis and including multiple stakeholders who need different views from the reporting.
• Account condition: An account with broken tracking and years of accumulated structure needs far more attention in the first six months than an account that was recently restructured.

Stack two or three of above together and an account can be a lot more work, even when compared to another account that spends double but is simpler to run. A lead generation account in a regulated sector will usually cost more to run than a straightforward retail account with a bigger budget, and that is the correct approach based on the work it takes to run that account, rather than a company trying to get a boosted markup.

So, when you compare a quote against the table above, compare the level of work it takes to run thatn account as well as the quoted numbered – if a fee sits higher in its band, ask if any complexity is what causes the quoted fee to be higher than normal.

Why does the percentage fall as spend goes up?

It’s mainly because the work doesn’t scale as much as the budget.

A £10K a month account and a £50K a month account can need almost the same amount of hands-on time. The number of campaigns, the number of products or services, the number of markets and the quality of the tracking all increase the level of workload. The budget number itself barely moves the needle. Doubling a daily budget could take 30 seconds, if there’s already scale to grow spend further (campaigns are limited by budget for example).

That is why a fee that stays locked at 15% or 20% as an account grows stops being a price for work and starts a significant cost as your company grows. At £100K a month, 20% is £20K a month in fees and that usually is the fee for accounts spending £300K+ per month.

So, the percentage should compress as you scale and if yours hasn’t, that is a conversation worth having with your current provider.

Three ways UK companies charge for Google Ads

Percentage of ad spend

You pay a set share of whatever you spend with Google, usually 10% to 20%, sometimes 8% to 15% at higher budgets. This is the oldest model in paid media, and it is still common for some but is being slowly taken out of practice.

Flat monthly retainer

This is the most common form of charging nowadays. You pay a fixed amount every month regardless of what you spend, with the fee set by the scope and complexity of the work

Retainer plus performance incentive

A fixed base fee with an agreed bonus or commission attached to a specific business outcome, such as a revenue or profit target. Done properly, this is the fairest model of them, as it pays for resource but also incentivises the management company to push the account as far as it can to reach a revenue or profit target. In this case everyone wins.

I have also come across Google Ads management contracts which penalise a company if they don’t reach a certain revenue or profit target, and in some cases half the level of management fee if targets aren’t reached. Any clauses like this should be avoided at all costs and I would promote both management companies and client alike to avoid any contractual clauses like this, as to avoid creating a potentially negative outcome for both parties.

Is a percentage of ad spend a fair way to charge?

Spend is a reasonable starting point for working out what an account should cost, because it is a rough proxy for complexity and workload, however, what I don’t do is bill on it month to month, and I have three reasons for that personally.

The first is that it makes your costs unpredictable and if you scale spend in Q4 for a peak season, your management bill rises with it significantly, in the month when your cashflow is already potentially stretched thin. Finance teams usually detest this, and I can completely understand why as an ex-accountant myself – a fixed retainer lets you budget for twelve months in advance, without any unexpected bill to come in last month, due to spending more during a peak season than expected.

The second is that it creates a resourcing problem on the agency end. If client cuts spend by 40-60% for a quarter, the fee drops by 40-60% while the workload around the same or only slightly less, then that’s how accounts end up being monitored less or being passed to a more junior person, which can lead to more errors or errors not being found and addressed.

The third is a more obvious one – if account management fee rises every time spend increases, there is a financial reason to recommend spending more and this is not a model I personally like to lead on.

A flat retainer removes all three problems in one go: you get a predictable cost, the account can be resourced properly all year round, and focus can be on scaling revenue and profit, not focusing on spending more for the sake of it.

What should a £50K a month account cost?

A realistic management fee on £50K a month in Google Ads spend is £4,000 to £5,000, which works out at 8% to 10% (some providers may charge a lot less than this, but be wary of going too cheap).

Here is what that looks like as a full cost of ownership over a year:

• Media to Google: £600,000
• Management fee: £48,000 to £60,000
• Tools and tracking: £3,000 to £12,000, depending on whether you need call tracking, feed software or server-side tagging
• Total cost: roughly £651,000 to £672,000

Using the above numbers management is somewhere between 7% and 9% of your total paid search investment. The question is never whether £5,000 a month is a lot of money in isolation – it’s whether that 8% is buying you a lot more than an 8% of improvement in the performance of your accounts. If account performance improves by 30-40% when the new management company comes aboard, then 8% is a small price to pay.

What should be included in the fee?

This is where most disputes start, so get it in writing before you sign anything. Here is the split I would expect to see.

Normally inside the fee	Normally charged separately
Day to day campaign management and optimisation	Initial account builds from scratch on a complex setup
Keyword, negative and search term work	Landing page design and build
Ad copy and asset creation	Creative production for video and display
Bid strategy and budget management	Third party tool licences
Monthly reporting and a review call	Feed management software for large catalogues
Conversion tracking maintenance	Full analytics or server-side tracking rebuild
Shopping feed housekeeping	Out of scope channels such as paid social or programmatic

Setup fees are usually the most contested item when charging for Google Ads management – I personally only charge a setup fee where a build is genuinely complex, and when I do, it’s usually agreed upfront and at a reasonable amount to cover the account and tracking setup costs.

Should you bring Google Ads in house instead?

At £100K a month or more in spend, there is a genuine argument for it. Below that and the numbers rarely work.

UK salary data puts an inhouse PPC manager at around £50,000 a year on average, with the upper quartile being £60,000 to £70,000 and experienced London specialists even higher again. Add employer national insurance, pension, tools, recruitment costs, and the fully loaded cost of one in-house paid search hire can reach over £100,000 a year in practice. Some vendors will mention that the in-house tipping point at roughly £500,000 a year in ad spend, which is a little over £40,000 a month.

My own personal view is that the sensible threshold sits higher at around £100K a month and not because of the salary maths, but because of what you get for the money. One in house hire is one person with one set of experiences and no one to check their thinking. An external team sees dozens of accounts, spots platform changes early, and has cover when someone is ill or leaves. You need enough scale to justify hiring two or three people before in-house genuinely beats that, with a two-person team significantly outperforming one person doing it all.

The best setup I see at larger spend is usually a hybrid. A senior staff member who heads up everything in-house, together with a team of in-house specialists doing the hands-on platform work, plus an external agency or consultancy who supports that team with additional knowledge or deep experience with tactical execution to help the in-house team scale even further.

What about hiring a freelancer instead?

A good freelancer is often excellent value. A cheap one, however, is a genuine risk.

The risk is not always skill (although this can be the case also). Plenty of freelancers are stronger operators than the agency teams they left. The risk is if they are ill, on holiday, overloaded with another client, or they simply stop monitoring your account properly and there are no second pair of eyes on the work, no cover, and no one to catch a mistake before it costs you a month worth of budget.

I am currently a solo founder, so I will be straight about how I handle that rather than pretend it does not apply to me. Veritas runs with a bank of vetted contractors behind it, contracted and insured, so there is capacity and cover behind the account rather than just me. That is the difference between a one-person operation and a small company, and it is a fair question to ask anyone you are considering. Ask who runs the account when your contact is away and ask what happens if they leave.

Red flags to watch for when you get a quote

These are the ones I see most often, and any one of them is worth challenging.

• A fee of £3,000 to £4,000 a month on £10K of monthly spend: That is 30% to 40% which is very high. Unless there is a very unusual scope attached, it is far too high for the work involved.
• Graduates running the account: There is nothing wrong with junior people learning on live accounts, if someone senior is genuinely reviewing the work on a consistent basis. Ask how many accounts your day-to-day contact handles, who signs off on changes and how many hours per month your senior also spends on the account.
• Seniors in the pitch, juniors on delivery: The oldest trick in the media industry. Ask directly which of the people in the room will be in your account next month and get the answer in writing.
• The agency holding admin access to your account: You should own your Google Ads account and grant access to them, not the other way round. If the account sits inside their manager account and you have no admin rights, you cannot easily take your history with you when you leave. That is not a technical detail, it can potentially become leverage and should be avoided from the beginning.
• A fee quoted with no scope attached: A number without a list of deliverables is not a price, it is a placeholder and scope should be clearly defined to avoid future issues of what services include and don’t include.
• A markup on your media: You should be billed by Google for your spend, at cost. If someone is buying media and reselling it to you, ask what the margin is.
• Long lock-ins at the start. A three-month initial term is reasonable, because paid search takes time to show results. Twelve months before anyone has proved anything is not.

How Veritas Digital charges

Flat monthly retainers, sized by the scope of the account rather than billed on your spend.

I generally start at £10K a month in ad spend, because below that the fee stops being proportionate to the value I can add. A smaller account still needs most of the same work, so a fair fee on it lands at around 20% of spend, and at that point you are paying a fifth of your budget for management which is really the maximum anyone should charge.

Where it makes sense, I will build a performance incentive into the retainer so that part of what I earn is tied to a revenue or profit target rather than to activity. Setup fees only apply where a build is genuinely complex, including complex tracking setups, and they are agreed up front. You own your Google Ads account throughout, and you keep it if we stop working together. You can read more about how I work on our Paid Search service page.

If you are not sure whether your current fee is fair, the fastest way to find out is to look at what is going on in the account. I have written separately about what a PPC audit usually finds, and the answer is often that the fee was never the real problem, it’s the way the account is being run.

The bottom line

Google Ads management in the UK costs between 6% and 20% of your media spend and depends on monthly ad spend and complexity.

At £10K to £15K a month, expect to pay £2,000 to £3,000 per month. At £50K a month, expect £4,000 to £5,000. At £100K a month, expect £6,000+ per month and start asking whether a hybrid in-house model would serve you better. Where you land inside each band should come down to how complex the account is, and whoever quotes you should be able to detail what makes up that fee.

In my personal opinion, always push for a flat retainer over a percentage of spend, get the scope written down, check who is really going to be on the account, and make sure you own your own data and accounts. Do those four things and you will avoid almost every bad PPC/paid search relationship I have seen in last 12-13 years.

References

• Google, Google Ads third-party policy
• Google Ads Help, About access levels in your Google Ads account
• Google, Advertiser guide: Working with third parties
• GOV.UK, Rates and thresholds for employers 2026 to 2027
• Glassdoor, PPC Manager Salary, United Kingdom
• Indeed, Paid Search Manager Salary in United Kingdom