The invoice arrives and says Google Ads management. The ads are still running, the money is still going out, and nothing in the report tells you what the fee bought.
A Google Ads agency looks after two separate pots of money. Your ad spend goes to Google and buys the clicks. The management fee is what the agency charges to run the account, and it is billed on top of that spend. The fee pays for a month of decisions. It covers reading the search terms behind your clicks, blocking the ones that waste money, and moving budget towards what converts. It also covers ad copy testing, and checking that the conversions in the report are real. Part of that work lowers what you pay for each enquiry. The rest keeps the account clean.
This is for the business owner paying a monthly fee on top of ad spend. You can log into Google Ads. You have never opened the admin menu.
The names move around more than the work does. Pay per click, shortened to PPC, means you only pay when someone clicks your ad. So PPC services, a PPC agency and a Google Ads agency all describe the same job. So does AdWords management in Melbourne. AdWords was Google’s name for the product until 24 July 2018. An AdWords agency in Melbourne today is a Google Ads agency with an older sign.
A management fee is what an agency charges to run your account. Ad spend is what Google charges to show your ads. They are two different numbers, and they move for different reasons.
Most Australian agencies price the fee one of two ways. A percentage of your ad spend, or a flat monthly retainer.
The percentage model ties the fee to the size of the account. It scales with the work: more campaigns, more search terms to sift through, and more to lose when something goes wrong. It also carries an incentive problem worth naming. A fee that rises with spend rewards spending more, not performing better. That is real. Good intentions do not remove it from the arrangement.
What keeps it in check is the detail around the percentage, so ask for it. Ask what the minimum fee is, because below a certain spend the minimum takes over. Ask at what spend the percentage steps down, since a well-built account does not take twice the work at twice the budget. Ask whether the fee is reviewed when your spend rises, or whether it simply rises with it. An agency that has thought about its pricing will have those answers ready.
A flat retainer does the opposite. The fee is fixed, so the agency gains nothing by pushing your budget up. A fixed fee stops making sense at both ends. On a small account it can swallow a large share of the spend. On a large one it can stop covering the work, and the account drifts.
Neither model is the dishonest one. What matters is whether the number is explained, and whether anyone goes back and reviews it.
The monthly work on a Google Ads account is a short list of repeated jobs.
Those jobs are not equal, and a task list never tells you that. Four of them move your cost per lead: search term review, negative keywords, conversion tracking, and shifting budget between what converts and what does not. That is where the money is found. Landing page feedback belongs with them, though acting on it is usually your job.
Pacing, ad copy testing and reporting are the hygiene. They keep the account tidy and tell you what happened, but on their own they do not change what a lead costs you. An agency whose month is mostly hygiene is charging you to watch.
Campaign type is a decision rather than a monthly chore. If your account leans on automated campaigns and your cost per lead keeps climbing, that has its own diagnosis. We have set out separately why a cost per lead climbs on Performance Max.
For Google Ads to work in Australia, a small business usually needs between two and a half and five thousand dollars a month. That counts media spend and management together, and it is a floor rather than a typical bill. It is the range we publish in our own guide to splitting a budget between SEO and Google Ads.
At the bottom of that range, most of the money is media. The fee is small, so what it buys is small. A monthly look rather than a weekly one. A shared account manager rather than a named one. Landing page work and conversion tracking setup are often quoted separately at that level. None of that makes the bottom of the range a bad deal. It makes it a different deal, and worth knowing before you compare two quotes.
Fees from an Australian agency attract GST on top, so check whether a figure you have been given is before or after it.
There is no single Melbourne number, and an agency that refuses to give you one is not dodging the question. A plumber and a cosmetic clinic are not bidding in the same auction. Different competitors, different click prices, and a very different value per job. Anyone who quotes a cost per click for your industry without looking at your account is guessing.
Plenty of businesses are better off without one. A single-location business spending a few hundred dollars a month is usually one of them.
The arithmetic is blunt. If the fee takes a third of what you put in, one dollar in three buys attention rather than clicks. On a small budget there are not enough clicks to be worth that much attention. A monthly review ends up looking at noise and calling it a trend.
Take a suburban workshop spending a few hundred dollars a month on brake and logbook service searches. It has a set service area, a short list of jobs worth advertising, and a handful of enquiries a month from Ads. That account needs building properly once. Tight location targeting, a short keyword list, a solid negative keyword list, call tracking that works, and a landing page that matches the ad. Then a proper look every three months.
It does not need a monthly fee to watch a number that barely moves.
An agency starts paying for itself when a small improvement in cost per lead is worth more than the fee. That is a sum you can do on the back of an envelope. If it lands on the agency side, that is the moment to start comparing what Google Ads management includes.
Four questions, and the first is the one people forget until it matters.
Ownership has a mechanism behind it. Google Ads has five access levels: Email-only, Billing, Read-only, Standard and Admin. Admin is the level that can manage users and account links, so whoever holds Admin decides who else gets in.
There is a second layer most business owners never see. An agency usually runs your account through a manager account. That is one Google Ads login sitting above a number of separate advertiser accounts. Linking a manager account does not by itself hand administrative ownership of your account to the agency. Where the manager account does hold ownership, its admins can edit user access, managers and product links inside your account. That is the mechanism behind “the agency set it up, so the agency has it”. Both of those facts come from Google Ads Help, and they are settings rather than tricks.
Account access is one piece of a larger question, and the rest is better read before a relationship ends than after. Ownership of your domain, your hosting and your website when the agency relationship ends follows the same pattern.
Before you change anything, find out what you already hold.
Log into your Google Ads account. Open the Admin menu, then Access and security. You will see everyone who has access to the account, with each person’s level shown in the Access level column. Find your own name and read what sits beside it.
If it says Admin, the account is yours to grant and remove access on. If it says anything else, somebody else holds that control. Neither answer is a crisis on its own. Not knowing is the problem, because that is what turns a straightforward parting of ways into a month of emails.
It takes about two minutes, and it is the check that most often turns up something unexpected. Once you know who holds what, the next job is making that access harder to lose. That is where setting up a passkey on a Google Ads account comes in.
If what you find surprises you, raise it with whoever runs the account before anything else changes. If nobody is running it, that is the conversation to have with CJ Digital.
There is no single figure, because the answer depends on the fee model and how big the account is. Add the money going to Google and the agency’s charge together, and two and a half to five thousand dollars a month is a workable Australian range. GST sits on top of the fee.
Yes. Your ad spend is passed through to Google to buy clicks. The fee is what the agency charges for the hours spent deciding where that spend goes. Some agencies put both on one invoice, which is where the confusion usually starts.
Not always. A business at one address with a few hundred dollars a month to spend rarely does. That account is better built carefully once, then reviewed each quarter. An agency earns its fee once the budget is big enough. Better decisions then become worth more than the charge for making them.
Whoever holds Admin access controls it. That comes down to a setting, not to who paid for the clicks. Where an agency built the account, Admin often sits with the agency until somebody thinks to ask. You can see the answer yourself on the Access and security page.
Enough that you can see what changed and why. A useful report names the spend, the leads or sales it produced, the changes made during the month, and the plan for the next one. A report nobody will take questions on is a document rather than reporting.
