How Much Does an Agency Charge for PPC? UK Pricing Guide

Most UK agencies charge somewhere between £145 and £1,000 a month to manage a pay per click account, and the price is set one of three ways: a fixed monthly fee, a percentage of your ad spend (usually 10% to 20%), or a hybrid of a base fee plus a percentage. Small businesses spending under £2,000 a month on ads typically sit at the lower end. Accounts spending £10,000 or more usually pay £750 to £2,000+ a month in management.

The number matters less than the model. A percentage fee means the agency earns more when you spend more, which is a quiet conflict of interest. A fixed monthly fee means the agency earns the same whether your budget goes up or down, so the only thing left to compete on is results. At DPOM we charge a fixed fee, starting from £145 a month for Google Ads management, because we think that is the only model where our incentives and your profit point in the same direction.

The three PPC pricing models, explained properly

Almost every agency in the UK uses one of these three. They are not equally good for a small business, but each has a logic behind it, so it is worth understanding what an agency is actually trying to cover.

Why percentage-of-spend became the default

Percentage pricing came from the old media buying world, where agencies bought press and TV space and took a commission. It carried over into digital because it is easy to explain and it scales without renegotiation. If a client doubles their budget, the agency's income doubles automatically, no awkward conversation required.

There is a defensible argument for it. Bigger budgets genuinely do need more work. A £20,000 a month account has more campaigns, more search terms to review, more creative testing and more reporting than a £500 account. Spend is a rough proxy for complexity.

But it is a rough proxy, not a good one. A single-location plumber spending £3,000 a month on four campaigns is far simpler to manage than an ecommerce shop spending £1,200 across a Shopping feed of 2,000 products. Percentage pricing charges the plumber more and the shop less, which is backwards.

Typical UK monthly PPC fees by ad spend tier

Here is what the market roughly looks like. These are observed market ranges rather than a survey, and they vary by agency size, sector and how much extra work (landing pages, feed management, creative) is bundled in.

Monthly ad spend	Typical flat fee	Typical % model (15%)	Who it suits
Under £500	£145 to £250	Usually below agency minimums	Local trades, single-service businesses testing PPC
£500 to £1,500	£195 to £400	£75 to £225 (often a minimum fee applies instead)	Established local businesses, small service firms
£1,500 to £5,000	£350 to £750	£225 to £750	Multi-location or multi-service businesses, small ecommerce
£5,000 to £10,000	£600 to £1,200	£750 to £1,500	Growing ecommerce, competitive B2B lead gen
£10,000+	£900 to £2,500	£1,500+ and rising with spend	National retailers, larger lead generation operations

Notice where the two models cross. Below roughly £2,500 a month in ad spend, a percentage fee often looks cheaper on paper but gets replaced by a minimum monthly fee anyway, so you end up paying a flat fee with extra steps. Above £5,000, percentage pricing starts to get expensive fast, and the extra money is not buying you proportionally more work.

The incentive problem with percentage pricing

This is the part that rarely gets said out loud. Under a percentage model, the agency's revenue is a function of your budget, not your profit. Those two things can move in opposite directions.

Say your account is producing leads at £40 each and you are happy at that price. Your agency suggests expanding into broader keywords and a wider location radius. Spend goes from £3,000 to £6,000. Lead volume goes up, but cost per lead drifts to £65 because the new traffic is less qualified. Your total lead cost has gone from £120,000 a year to £234,000 a year for a smaller improvement in sales than you expected.

The agency's fee, meanwhile, has gone from £450 to £900 a month. They are objectively better off. You might be, marginally, or you might not be. Nobody lied to you. The incentive just leaned in one direction and nobody in the room was paid to lean the other way.

What good looks like under a fixed fee

Under a fixed fee, the agency has no financial reason to push budget up. If cutting a wasteful campaign improves your cost per acquisition, they will just cut it, because their income is unaffected. If your best month is a month you spend less and sell more, that is a clean win for both sides.

It also makes the conversation about scale honest. When a fixed-fee agency says "we think you should increase budget on this campaign", it is because the data supports it, not because it is payday. That is a much more useful recommendation to receive.

The counter-argument, fairly stated

Defenders of percentage pricing say it aligns the agency with growth. If you grow, they grow. There is something to that, but only if the percentage is tied to revenue or conversions rather than spend. A fee based on 5% of tracked sales would genuinely align incentives. A fee based on 15% of what you hand to Google does not, because spend and profit are not the same thing.

Fee structures tied to lead volume or promised outcomes sound like the fix but bring their own problems. They push agencies to chase cheap, low-quality conversions, argue about attribution and cherry-pick easy accounts. We do not work that way, and we would be cautious about anyone whose pricing depends on committing to a result they cannot control. Auction competition and your own conversion rate are not the agency's to promise.

What should actually be included in the fee

Two agencies quoting £400 a month can be doing wildly different amounts of work. Before you compare prices, compare scope. Here is what a proper monthly management fee should cover for a small business account.

• Search term review. Reading the actual queries that triggered your ads and adding negative keywords. This is the single highest-value routine task in PPC and it is the first thing lazy agencies drop.
• Bid and budget management. Adjusting targets, reallocating budget between campaigns, managing bid strategy changes as Google shifts the goalposts.
• Ad copy testing. Writing and rotating new responsive search ad assets, reviewing asset performance, updating messaging when your offer changes.
• Conversion tracking maintenance. Checking tags still fire, values are still passing through, and that Google is optimising towards the right action. Broken tracking is startlingly common.
• Structural work. Adding or splitting campaigns, updating location and schedule targeting, adding new services or products as the business changes.
• Reporting and a monthly conversation. A plain-English report and a video call where you can ask why something happened.

Things that are commonly extra, and reasonably so: landing page design and build, Shopping feed creation and optimisation, video or display creative production, and CRM or offline conversion integration work. Ask which side of the line these sit on before you sign.

Watch for the "management" that is just a report

The cheapest quotes in the market, roughly £75 to £120 a month, usually mean an automated report and a login check every few weeks. Nobody is reading your search terms at that price because it does not cover the hours. If you are paying that, run a quick audit of your own account and see how much has actually changed in the last three months. Check the change history in the account. It tells you everything.

Setup fees, contracts and the other numbers

Management fee is not the whole picture. Here is what else shows up on PPC proposals in the UK.

Charge	Typical UK range	Worth paying?
Account setup / build	£200 to £1,500 one-off	Sometimes. A proper new build takes real hours. Ask what it includes and who owns the account afterwards.
Minimum contract term	3 to 12 months	Three months is fair (PPC needs data). Twelve months with no exit is a red flag.
Landing page build	£300 to £2,000+	Often the highest-return spend on the whole list if your current pages convert badly.
Shopping feed management	£100 to £500 a month on top	Yes, for ecommerce. Feed quality drives Shopping performance more than bids do.
Ad spend	Paid directly to Google	This should always go on your card, in your account, not through the agency.

That last row is important. Your Google Ads account should be in your business name, with your billing details, and you should have admin access. An agency should have manager-level access granted by you and revocable by you. If an agency insists on owning the account or reselling you spend at a markup, walk away. You lose your entire history when you leave, which is exactly the point of the arrangement.

Worked example: three quotes for the same business

Imagine a commercial cleaning company in the Midlands. They spend £2,500 a month on Google Ads, run four campaigns, and want to grow lead volume without raising cost per lead. Three agencies quote.

Agency A: 15% of spend, minimum £450

Today they pay £450 (the minimum, since 15% of £2,500 is £375). If the account works and they scale to £6,000 spend, the fee becomes £900. At £10,000 spend, £1,500. The fee grows by £1,050 a month with no change in the actual work required, because the campaign structure stays the same, it just gets more budget.

Agency B: £395 flat, banded by campaign count

They pay £395 today. If they scale to £10,000 spend with the same four campaigns, they still pay £395. If they add a Shopping element or a second service line, they move up a band and pay more, which is fair, because that genuinely is more work.

Agency C: £250 base plus 8% of spend

They pay £450 today. At £10,000 spend they pay £1,050. Better than pure percentage, worse than flat, and it still carries the same directional bias towards bigger budgets.

All three are legitimate businesses. But over a year at scaled spend, Agency A costs roughly £13,000 more than Agency B for materially the same work. That difference comes straight out of profit, or out of budget that could have gone to Google.

Does spend size change what you should pay for?

Yes, and not in the way percentage pricing assumes. The real driver of workload is account complexity, not budget size.

If an agency prices on complexity rather than spend, you can grow your budget without your costs rising in lockstep. That is the whole point.

Questions to ask before you sign anything

1. Is the fee fixed, and what triggers it going up? Get the bands in writing.
2. Who owns the Google Ads account? The answer must be "you do".
3. What happens in a typical month? Ask for the actual task list, not the sales deck.
4. Who does the work? The person on the call, or an offshore team you will never speak to?
5. Are you a Google Partner? It is not a guarantee of quality, but it does mean they meet Google's spend and performance thresholds. DPOM is a Google Partner.
6. What is the notice period? Thirty days is normal. Anything longer needs justifying.
7. Can I see how you report? Ask for a sample. If it is a raw Google Ads export with no commentary, you will be interpreting your own data every month.
8. What happens if it does not work? A good answer involves timescales, diagnostics and honesty about whether PPC suits your market. A bad answer involves a guarantee.

On that last point: nobody can promise you a position, a cost per lead or a return. Auction dynamics, competitor budgets and your own conversion rate all move. Anyone who guarantees a result is either misunderstanding the platform or hoping you do.

How to work out what PPC is worth to you

Before you compare agency fees, work out your own numbers. It makes the whole decision easier.

1. Average sale value. What is a customer worth on the first transaction?
2. Lifetime value. How many times do they typically buy? A cleaning contract worth £600 a month for two years is a very different proposition to a one-off £120 job.
3. Lead to sale rate. If you close one in four enquiries, four leads equals one customer.
4. Maximum viable cost per lead. Divide your acceptable customer acquisition cost by your close rate.

Now add the agency fee into that calculation. If you spend £2,000 with Google and £400 with an agency, your true cost per lead is £2,400 divided by leads, not £2,000. Agencies quietly leave their own fee out of cost-per-lead reporting all the time. Ask for it to be included.

If the maths only works with the fee excluded, PPC is not currently viable for you at that fee level, and a decent agency will tell you so. If you are still working out whether paid search fits your business at all, our guide to how Google Ads work for small businesses covers the fundamentals first.

Where DPOM sits

We charge a fixed monthly fee. Google Ads management starts at £145 a month, banded by how complex the account genuinely is, not by how much you hand to Google. Your spend can double and your fee does not move unless the work does. You own your account. Meetings are video calls. There are no results guarantees, because there cannot honestly be any.

We have been doing this for fifteen years, almost entirely with small UK businesses, and the fixed-fee model is the one that has caused the fewest awkward conversations. If you want the full breakdown of what sits in each band, our Google Ads pricing page lists it plainly. For a deeper look at how management costs are constructed, see our UK PPC pricing guide.