Management fees typically run ten to twenty percent of ad spend or a flat few hundred to a couple thousand a month, on top of what you pay Google. Heights quotes ad management separately from the $750 build and $399 a month plan.
There are two numbers in paid search and conflating them is the most common mistake contractors make. There is ad spend, which goes to Google, and there is management, which goes to whoever runs the account. Management across the market is usually priced as ten to twenty percent of spend, or as a flat fee from a few hundred to a couple thousand a month, often with a minimum. Some agencies require a minimum spend before they will take the account. Always ask for both numbers plainly, and ask which one the proposal is quoting.
Legitimate management cost is attention. Negative keyword work every week, because contractor accounts bleed money on job seekers, DIY searches and wrong trades. Call tracking and actually listening to calls to see what the clicks turned into. Bid and budget adjustments around weather, season and capacity. Landing pages built for the specific service instead of your homepage. Location targeting tightened to where your trucks go. Conversion tracking set up so you can tell a booked job from a form fill. That is real weekly labor, not a set and forget.
What is margin: percentage of spend fees with no cap, which reward the agency for spending more rather than converting better. Reporting that leads with impressions, clicks and cost per click instead of cost per booked job. Automated bidding left on defaults and billed as management. Setup fees on top of a monthly on top of a percentage. And the big one, where the agency owns the ad account and the call tracking numbers, so leaving means losing all your conversion history and starting from zero learning.
At any price, you should own the Google Ads account and the data in it, with the agency as a user. You should get conversion tracking that counts calls and forms, service specific landing pages, a negative keyword list that grows every month, geographic targeting you have reviewed, and reporting in leads and cost per lead. A real program adds call recording review, budget pacing by season, competitor monitoring and testing. If nobody can tell you your cost per booked job, nobody is managing anything.
To judge a quote, ask what percentage or flat fee applies, whether there is a spend minimum, who owns the account, how often negatives get added, and what the report shows. Then ask what cost per lead they would consider acceptable for your trade and market, and whether they would tell you to pause if the math stopped working. Heights builds for $750 and runs sites for $399 a month covering content, SEO and profile work, and quotes paid ads management separately on top of your spend.
| What you are buying | What it usually runs per month |
|---|---|
| Running it yourself | Your time, plus spend |
| Percentage of spend management | Usually ten to twenty percent of spend |
| Flat fee management | Several hundred to a couple thousand |
| Typical contractor ad spend | One to ten thousand, by market and trade |
| Heights Digital | Site at $750 and $399 a month, ads quoted separately |
If yours is not here, ask it on the call. You will get a straight answer.
(210) 729-4008Flat fees align better at small budgets, because a percentage of two thousand does not pay for real weekly work and a percentage of fifty thousand often overpays for it. Percentage fees also create an incentive to raise spend. If you do agree to a percentage, ask for a cap and a defined scope of work.
Enough to generate a meaningful number of clicks in your service area, which varies widely by trade and city, since an emergency plumbing click costs far more than a landscaping click. Start by asking what a click costs for your main service locally, then budget for enough clicks per week to learn something in a month.
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