Google Ads Management Pricing Comparison

Looking for Google Ads Management Pricing that Makes Sense?

At Third Marble, we believe in being transparent with all of our PPC Management prices. If you have been to other websites, it’s hard to find their pricing. That’s why we put all our prices on our website to make it easy to find:

CLICK HERE TO SEE OUR GOOGLE ADS MANAGEMENT PRICES

Not only do we have some of the best prices, but the best service too. (Read our Google Ads Management reviews.) We are 100% transparent with your account, never require a contract, respond to your requests quickly and all of the work is completed in the USA in our office in Richmond, VA.

Researching PPC Management Prices Can Be Confusing

So we put together the chart below to help you understand the different PPC management pricing methods used by agencies. Hopefully, this will help you understand the basic plans and costs that are out there for small to mid-sized business. Don’t take our word for it. Call around and ask about pricing. There are also a few other questions you should ask that we outlined for you (see below).

Many website don’t put their prices online. We never understood that, so we’ve researched and asked around too. We hope the chart below helps.

PPC MANAGEMENT PRICES – COMPARISON CHART

Agencies use a variety of structures in their Google Ads and PPC management prices. To make sure we’re comparing apples-to-apples, this chart compares Monthly Management Prices based on a $1000 / month click budget.

• Agencies with minimums greater than $1000 are calculated as if they allowed a $1000 / month click budget.
• Monthly Fees are in addition to the $1000 in Google charges.
• For Agencies that charge a flat rate, like $1500/mo and take 33% of that as a fee, we subtracted $1000 for clicks, and used $500 for the Management Fee.

Questions About Our Google Ads Management Prices & Services?

Why are Third Marble’s Google Ads Management Fees so low?

The question really is why do other agencies charge so much? It boils down to efficiency. Well-performing, well-designed campaigns do not require as much work as poorly managed ones.

Third Marble is designed to be Google Ads Management company from the ground up. We aren’t a website design agency that one day decided to start running Google Ads. We focus on it. Our processes are built for the purpose of keeping our costs to you as low as possible. In other words, we work smart, not hard.

Just like Henry Ford’s assembly line. Henry Ford didn’t invent the car – he made it affordable to the masses by creating a better process for making the cars. That’s what Third Marble is doing. We are making the process of managing a Google Ads account as efficient and as affordable as we can. 

Yes, you can pay an agency 5 times as much. We’ve seen these accounts and these clients were not getting their money’s worth from a management company. From what we can tell, one person makes the changes to the account when they feel like it. They are probably working on building new websites or writing Facebook posts instead of paying attention to your account. When you don’t focus on one thing, like Google Ads, it’s difficult to juggle your account. 

And the large agencies that have hundreds of employees and smooth talking salesmen? If you look at their stock reports, you can see that 50% of their revenues go to pay for commissions – not to the people that need to work on your account.

Why do those other agencies charge more? 

• They might not know how to be efficient – so you pay more than you need to.
• They have far too much overhead – so you pay more than you need to.
• They don’t keep their clients for very long. On-boarding and advertising costs more than keeping a client – so you pay more than you need to.
• They don’t know how to make a Google Ads account deliver results and meet goals – so you DEFINITELY pay more than you need to.

Our goal is to deliver good results at a fair price. We do this by efficiently engineering Google Ads campaigns that work. 

What Should You Look Out For When Shopping PPC Management Prices?

When evaluating different company’s PPC management prices, make sure you find out how much of the click costs actually go to Google Ads. Many of the larger agencies charge a flat rate each month. This raises a few questions:

1. How much of your bill is actually going to the PPC ads and how much is going to the agency?
2. If they can’t tell you the amount spent on clicks, then how can they possibly report the results to you? What’s your cost per click? How much did you spend on each keyword? What happens if they underspend the clicks by $100 – do you get a refund?
3. What happens if you increase or decrease your budget? How much do they get then? Is it a flat rate, or a percent of spend? (Can you even change your monthly budget with them?)
4. If they don’t give you the breakout of their management fees and the cost of the PPC clicks, can they show you the data from your Google Ads account? It’s your data. You paid for it. If they will not give you access to your Google Ads account, what are they hiding from you? You’ll never know.
5. What happens if you want to change PPC Management companies? If they can’t show you the actual Google Ads account, how can they transfer your data to your new agency? Your new agency will have to start from scratch, which means you’ll have to pay for their learning curve on your data. Going with an agency that won’t give you access to your Google Ads account is a big red flag.
   

What About Google Ads Management for Small & Local Businesses?

We love to work with small businesses that have budgets in the $300 to $3000 per month range. We have resources dedicated to budgets under $3000 per month and have engineered our processes to be super efficient so we can keep out costs low – even if you only want to spend $300 each month for clicks. Because we can keep our focus on businesses that want to advertise locally, we don’t need the overhead associated with giant e-commerce or national advertisers that have thousands of locations.

Agencies that manage large PPC accounts and offer dozens of services have layers of supervisors and managers that only increase the cost of managing your Google Ads campaigns. Their employees might only work on Google Ads one or two hours per week since they have to worry about website design meetings, hosting issues, website updates, social media plans, getting the next Facebook post put together, writing email blasts, creating new images, etc… Then they have to coordinate all that activity with the rest of their team in lengthy meetings – that ALL get billed to you.

At Third Marble, we are specialists. We spend all day working on Google Ads Management. Nothing else. We do one thing and do it well.

If you’re a business that only wants to spend a few hundred or even a few thousand dollars each month in PPC ads, and you choose to go with an agency that also manages much larger accounts, prepare to be the “small fish in the big pond.” Expect minimal customer service because you will not be that important to them. At Third Marble, 80% of our accounts only spend between $300 and $3000 each month in clicks. That’s our specialty.

Choosing a PPC Management Partner can be a challenge. Many business owners have very little experience with pay-per-click ads and are constantly bombarded with scam telemarketing phone calls and emails telling them they aren’t on page one. (These are total scams – they call us all the time too.) Here are a few things you should do before signing any contract:

1. Check the website for a Google Partner Badge. Click on it and make sure it’s linked to the official Google Partner database. That page says if they are in good standing with Google.
2. Do a little research. Simply Google the agency’s name, city and state. Check out their online reviews by Googling the agency’s name and the word “reviews”, for example “Third Marble Marketing reviews.”
3. If you can’t find an address for the agency you’re considering on their website, that’s a huge red flag. If they don’t have any reviews – red flag. If they have multiple bad reviews – red flag.
4. If they don’t publish their PPC management prices on their website, you’ll have to contact them for a quote. 
5. Narrow the list down to a few and make some calls. Ask the important questions (see below).
6. Take notes and make the choice that’s right for your company.

Questions to ask a PPC Management Company:

• What are your PPC management fees? If they don’t break-out their fees from the click costs, how will you know how much goes to the agency and how much goes to the clicks?
• What are your set-up fees?
• What types of ads are included in your PPC management fees? Search engine ads? Remarketing ads? Display ads? Video?
• What platforms does that include? Google Ads? Bing AdCenter? Facebook Ads? LinkedIn Ads?
• After the set-up, are there any fees for changing my PPC ads, creating news ads or making any other changes?
• If I need to pause the ads for a few months or a few weeks, can I pause at anytime and are there any charges for doing so?
• If I want to change my budget at anytime, can I? What happens if I want to go from $3000 / month down to $300 / month?
• How often do you provide reports and what data will be on your reports? (Google Partners are required a minimum reporting of once per month with at least impressions, clicks and costs actually paid to Google without commissions or mark-ups. You’d be surprised how many agencies do not report this basic information.)
• For the people doing the work on my Google Ads account, what city are they in? Are they your employees, or do you outsource any or all of the PPC management work to another company or freelancers?
• How many Google Ads accounts does your agency currently manage? (Most local web design agencies only manage a handful of PPC accounts and usually outsource the work to an overseas company.)
• If I choose to switch to another PPC management agency, will you transfer my Google Ads (and / or Bing) account to my new agency? Will I have access to my account? (It’s your data and your account. If they won’t give you access, that means they’re hiding something, or they don’t want another agency to audit their work.)
• If you offer call tracking, do I get to keep my business’s phone numbers? If not, what happens to those tracking phone numbers after we part ways?
• Will you create any web pages or websites as part of your service? (Be very careful of the agencies that create a copy of your website. This creates “duplicate content” on the web and may hurt your organic rankings.) If you create a new website, who owns the domain – your agency, or my company?
• Will you alter any of my web pages, or any of my online properties like my Facebook page, my Yelp page, my Google My Business account, or any other of my web properties? (If so – red flag. Agencies that alter your online properties can take their tracking phone number and put it all over the web. When someone searches for the name of your business, they may call the agency’s tracking phone number instead of your real phone number and the agency will take credit for that call. These calls are not incremental business for you. We call this tactic “brand theft”.)
• If I’m not happy with the leads I’m getting, can I terminate your PPC management service at anytime? If not, what are your termination terms?

Here are a few links to other PPC Management Pricing websites:

How does efficiency keep my PPC Management Fees affordable?

Simple – we focus on the 80/20 Rule.

Google Ads has some incredibly powerful Learning Algorithms built into their systems. We simply help those “Artificial Intelligence” models learn better. With this approach, we can get 80% of your results with 20% of the effort that the other agencies try. Since we are focused on small to medium sized businesses, we maintain a process that is tailored to being as efficient and cost effective as we can possibly be. Large Google Ads accounts require a more complicated process which a small business cannot afford. For example, to manually adjust the bids on 500 keywords every day would take hours each day (done correctly). You can pay another agency $1000’s each month for that work. Or you can let Google make adjustments thousands of times a day based on more variables than a human can ever look at – and it only takes us a few hours a month to “guide” the models.

Also, since we only focus on Page One of Google, Third Marble doesn’t have all the overhead associated with building websites, managing social media content, doing email blasts, hosting and fixing broken websites. These other services are very labor intensive and drive prices up across a typical agency, which drive up fees for other services like Google Ads Management.

Our president is a former industrial engineer with a focus on efficiency and process improvement. We’ve been managing Google Ads for over 10 years and are still constantly improving how we do things. We like to think we are improving the digital marketing industry in much the same way Henry Ford improved the automobile industry – be smarter with your processes to provide a solution that everyone can afford.

We maintain a laser-focus on Google Ads. By not being distracted with other projects, we can remain efficient and effective, then pass those savings on to you.