A Google Ads agency that hands you the keys, not a hostage note.
Your Google Ads account, Merchant Center and conversion data stay in your name from day one. We charge a flat fee instead of a slice of your budget, publish what we charge on this page, and run PPC management where every dollar is traced to a lead you can count. Sydney office, accounts across Australia.
No spam. No sales pressure. Just your numbers.
Flat fee
never a percentage of your ad spend
Yourname
on the Ads, Analytics and Merchant Center accounts
Month‑to‑month
no lock-in contract, ever
Published
management fees, on this page
Google Partner
5.0 on Google
- Month-to-month, no lock-in
- You own every account
+$9,000
a month in extra revenue
BuyEcoGreen, eCommerce — paid and organic, $16K to $25K+ monthly
1-2 → 70+
leads a month
Solar National — paid and organic, one of the toughest ad markets in the country
Flat fee
on every account
Cut your budget and our fee stays the same. So can our advice.
Two Australian accounts, before and after.
Each of these has a specific cause and a specific fix. None of them are solved by “posting more blogs”.
Google Ads and SEO
revenue / month
revenue / month
An extra $9,000 in monthly revenue from a smarter search strategy, not a bigger team or a bigger ad budget.
Google Ads and SEO,
leads / month
revenue / month
From barely visible to consistent, qualified lead flow every month, in one of the most competitive markets in the country.
Google Ads + SEO
courses sold / month
courses sold / month
From zero online sales to 130+ course enrolments every month, in one of the most crowded RTO markets in Australia.
Meet Jimit Dagli
I have spent ten years in search and analytics, and the single most common thing I find in a new Google Ads account is not a bad bid strategy. It is conversion tracking that was never set up properly, so Google has been optimising towards the wrong thing for months.
That is why every account here starts with tracking, not with keywords. If the algorithm does not know what a real lead looks like, no amount of budget will teach it. Once the data is honest, most accounts get cheaper before they get bigger.
I hold the strategy on every account personally, and I would rather tell you to pause a campaign than sell you a bigger one. A flat fee makes that easy to say out loud.
✓ Google Partner certified
✓ 10 years in search and analytics
✓ Google Analytics and Tag Manager specialist
✓Clients across Queensland and NSW
Six things we find in almost every Google Ads audit.
None of these are exotic. They are just invisible unless somebody opens the search terms report and reads it line by line.
Conversion tracking is wrong, so Google optimises for nothing
Every page view counted as a conversion, or the thank-you page firing twice, or phone calls not tracked at all. The bidding algorithm faithfully chases whatever it was told to chase.
Rebuild tracking in Tag Manager first, with call tracking, before touching a single bid.
The agency owns your account
Built inside their manager account, under their email. Leave, and the conversion history, audience lists and quality score signals stay behind with them.
Everything created under your email. We are a user you can remove in two clicks.
The fee is a percentage of your spend
Which means the agency earns more when you spend more, and less when they make your account efficient. Nobody says it out loud, but the incentive is right there.
Flat monthly fee. Cut your budget in half and we get paid the same.
Broad match and Performance Max, unsupervised
Both will spend your budget happily. Without negative keywords, brand exclusions and search term mining, a good share of it goes to people who were never going to buy.
Weekly search term review, hard negatives, and brand traffic kept out of Performance Max.
Great ads, pointing at a weak page
Click costs rise when the landing page does not match the ad, because quality score falls. Then everyone blames the bids.
Match the page to the promise, fix the form, and measure what changes.
Reports full of clicks, impressions and CTR
All of which can improve while enquiries fall. Click-through rate is an input, not an outcome.
Report cost per lead and cost per sale first. Everything else is the explanation.
Seven campaign types. You will not be sold all of them.
Most accounts need two or three. We will tell you which, and more usefully, which ones to switch off.
PPC stands for pay-per-click, and PPC management is the ongoing work of running those campaigns so each click has a realistic chance of becoming a customer. Google Ads is the largest PPC platform, so in Australia the two terms are used almost interchangeably, though PPC also covers Microsoft Ads, Meta and LinkedIn. A PPC agency handles the keyword and audience targeting, the bidding strategy, the ad copy, the negative keyword list, the conversion tracking and the landing page the click lands on.
The distinction that matters is between setup and management. Setting up a campaign takes days. Managing it is a weekly discipline of reading what people actually searched, cutting what will never convert, and moving budget to what does. Agencies that only do the first part are why so many accounts look fine in month one and hollow by month four.
Search campaigns
Text ads against what people type when they are ready to act. Still the highest-intent traffic Google sells, and where almost every lead-generation account should start.
Any business where customers search for a solution by name.
Performance Max
Google’s automated campaign, spending across Search, Shopping, Display, YouTube, Gmail and Maps from one budget. Excellent with a strong product feed. Expensive and vague without one.
eCommerce with real conversion volume. Used carefully, or not at all, for lead gen.
Shopping & Merchant Center
Product listings with image, price and rating. Most of the work is in the feed, not the campaign — titles, attributes, GTINs and stock accuracy decide what you can win.
Local & call campaigns
Ads built to produce a phone call or a visit rather than a click, tied to your Google Business Profile and a defined service radius.
Trades, clinics and anyone whose customers ring rather than fill in forms.
Demand Gen
Google’s replacement for Discovery campaigns, running visual ads across YouTube, Discover and Gmail. Demand creation rather than demand capture, so it needs patience and a clear creative idea.
Brands with something visual to show and budget beyond search.
Display & YouTube
Banner and video placements across Google’s network. Useful for reach and remarketing, easy to waste money on when it is left to run untended.
Remarketing & audiences
Following up the people who visited, added to cart or started a form and left. Usually the cheapest conversions in any account.
Tracking & measurement
Not a campaign type, but the one that decides whether the others work. Conversion tracking, call tracking, GA4, Tag Manager and offline conversion imports where the sale happens later.
Landing pages & CRO
The ad gets the click. The page decides whether you paid for a lead or a bounce. We fix the page as part of the campaign, not as a separate project.
Six things we find in almost every Google Ads audit.
None of these are exotic. They are just invisible unless somebody opens the search terms report and reads it line by line.
Landing page optimisation is the work of making the page a click lands on convert more of the people who arrive. In Google Ads it does two things at once: it lifts your conversion rate, which cuts cost per lead directly, and it lifts your Quality Score, which cuts cost per click as well. That compounding is why page work usually beats bid work.
Quality Score is Google’s one-to-ten rating of how relevant your keyword, ad and landing page are to the search. It is built from three inputs: expected click-through rate, ad relevance, and landing page experience. A higher score lowers what you pay for the same position, so two advertisers bidding identically can pay very different amounts for the same click. The landing page is the input most advertisers ignore, because it lives outside the Google Ads interface.
Eight things we fix on a Google Ads landing page
Message match
The headline on the page repeats the words in the ad, which repeat the words in the search. If someone searched “emergency plumber Parramatta” and lands on a page headed “Welcome to our website”, you have paid $16 to confuse them.
One page, one job
A landing page for an ad campaign should have one offer and one action. Sending paid traffic to a homepage with nine navigation items is the most common and most expensive mistake in paid search.
The offer above the fold
What you do, where you do it, what it costs or how to find out, and a way to act, all visible before anyone scrolls. On a phone that is about 600 pixels.
Form length
Every additional field costs conversions. Name, phone and one qualifying question will out-convert an eight-field form almost every time. Ask the rest on the phone.
Click-to-call on mobile
The headline on the page repeats the words in the ad, which repeat the words in the search. If someone searched “emergency plumber Parramatta” and lands on a page headed “Welcome to our website”, you have paid $16 to confuse them.
Proof near the action
Reviews, a real address, a named person and a guarantee sitting beside the form rather than buried at the bottom. Trust is needed at the moment of commitment, not before it.
Speed and Core Web Vitals
Landing page experience is a Quality Score input, and a slow page loses people before it loses points. Mobile load time is where most Australian sites fall down.
Tracking that proves it
Form submits, calls, chats and bookings all tracked as separate conversion actions, so you can see which change did what rather than guessing after the fact.
Where the money actually goes
Same $3,000 budget, same auction
Homepage as the landing page
600 clicks
12 leads at 2%
$250 per lead
Purpose-built landing page
600 clicks
36 leads at 6%
$83 per lead
Landing page work is included, not quoted separately. We build or rebuild the page the ad points at as part of managing the account, because sending paid traffic to a page we are not allowed to touch is how agencies end up blaming the client for their own cost per lead. If your site is on WordPress, Shopify or Webflow we work in it directly. See our web design work →
How much a Google Ads agency costs, and which fee model to avoid.
Every other agency on page one makes you book a call to hear a number. Here is the number, and the reasoning behind it.
In Australia, Google Ads management fees take one of three shapes: a flat monthly fee, usually $800 to $2,500 depending on account size; a percentage of ad spend, usually 10 to 20 percent; or a hybrid of a small base fee plus a percentage. The management fee is always separate from your ad budget, which is paid directly to Google from your own account.
The model matters more than the number, because it decides whose interests the agency is serving when your account gets efficient.
Percentage of spend
Typically 10–20% of whatever you spend each month.
- Scales down automatically if you pause.
- The agency earns more by spending more of your money, not by spending it better.
- Making your account efficient costs them income. Nobody says it, but the incentive is real.
Base fee plus percentage
A small retainer, then a percentage on top above a spend threshold.
- Predictable floor for small accounts.
- Same conflict as above, just delayed until you scale.
- Hard to compare between agencies, which is often the point.
Percentage of spend
One number, set by the work the account needs, not by the budget.
- We can recommend cutting your spend without cutting our own income.
- You can forecast the cost, and compare us to anyone else honestly.
- If we halve your spend and hold your leads steady, you keep the difference.
- Search and call campaigns
- Conversion and call tracking built properly
- Weekly search term and negative keyword work
- Monthly report and 30-minute call
- Everything in Starter, plus:
- Shopping, Performance Max or Demand Gen where they earn it
- Landing page and conversion rate work
- Remarketing and audience strategy
- Full-funnel campaign architecture
- Feed management and Merchant Center optimisation
- Offline conversion imports from your CRM
- Dedicated senior strategist
Australian cost-per-click, by industry, with the maths on what your budget buys.
Every agency tells you “it depends”. It depends on this. These are real Australian click costs, so you can work out your own numbers before anyone quotes you.
A Google Ads budget is not a strategy, it is a click count. Divide your monthly budget by the cost of a click in your category and you get the number of chances you have to win a customer that month. Below roughly 300 clicks, automated bidding does not have enough conversion data to optimise properly, which is the real reason small budgets underperform.
Search | Cost per click | $500/mo buys | $3,000/mo buys | Verdict at $500 |
Car insurance | $16.69 | 30 clicks | 180 clicks | Not viable |
Emergency plumber, Sydney | $16.41 | 30 clicks | 183 clicks | Emergency only, very tight |
Home loan broker | $10.80 | 46 clicks | 278 clicks | Not viable |
Personal injury lawyer | $9.79 | 51 clicks | 306 clicks | Not viable |
Family lawyer, Sydney | $7.48 | 67 clicks | 401 clicks | Not viable |
Roof repairs, Sydney | $7.24 | 69 clicks | 414 clicks | Too thin to learn |
Removalists, Sydney | $6.90 | 72 clicks | 435 clicks | Too thin to learn |
Pest control, Sydney | $6.02 | 83 clicks | 498 clicks | Too thin to learn |
Conveyancer, Sydney | $5.56 | 90 clicks | 540 clicks | Too thin to learn |
Air-con installation, Sydney | $5.38 | 93 clicks | 558 clicks | Too thin to learn |
Solar panels, Sydney | $5.16 | 97 clicks | 581 clicks | Too thin to learn |
Electrician, Sydney | $4.54 | 110 clicks | 661 clicks | Borderline |
Accountant, Sydney | $3.96 | 126 clicks | 758 clicks | Borderline |
Landscaping, Sydney | $3.61 | 138 clicks | 831 clicks | Borderline |
NDIS provider, Sydney | $2.64 | 189 clicks | 1,136 clicks | Workable, tightly targeted |
Dentist near me | $3.32 | 151 clicks | 904 clicks | Borderline |
So is $500 a month enough? In almost every row above, no. At a $16 click it buys thirty chances. The one category where it works is a low-cost, tightly geo-fenced local service with a small keyword set. That is why our honest answer to a $500 advertiser is usually "not yet", and why we would rather set it up once properly than charge you a monthly fee that eats most of the budget.
The number that actually matters: cost per lead
Cost per click is only half the equation. What you really pay for is a lead, and that depends on how many clicks convert. Cost per lead = cost per click divided by your conversion rate. A $5 click at a 2% conversion rate costs $250 a lead. The same $5 click at a 6% conversion rate costs $83 a lead. Nothing changed in the auction. The landing page changed.
That is the single most important thing on this page, and it is why the next section exists. Most agencies will optimise the bids and leave the page alone, because the page is somebody else’s job. Tripling your conversion rate is almost always cheaper and faster than tripling your budget.
Is $500 a month enough for Google Ads? Usually not, and here is when it is.
Google will spend whatever you give it. The real question is whether the budget can buy enough clicks to learn anything.
A monthly ad budget only works if it buys enough clicks for the campaign to produce data. Below roughly 300 clicks a month, automated bidding has too few conversions to optimise against, and you are effectively paying for a very slow experiment. What that means in dollars depends entirely on what a click costs in your category, which in Australia runs from about $2 for a suburban trade to more than $30 for legal, finance and cosmetic services.
$300–$500
Very tight
One campaign, exact and phrase match only, on your highest-intent terms. No Display, no broad match, no Performance Max.
Workable for a narrow local trade. Not viable in a competitive category.
$1,000–$3,000
Enough to learn
Two or three campaigns, room for a real negative keyword list, and enough conversions for smart bidding to work within a month or two.
$5,000–$20,000
Room to compete
Search plus Shopping or Performance Max, proper remarketing, and enough data to test landing pages rather than guess at them.
Where most growing eCommerce and multi-service accounts sit.
$20,000+
Full funnel
Multiple campaign types, audience segmentation, offline conversion imports, and incrementality questions worth actually asking.
Needs a senior strategist, not a dashboard.
A word on the $500 account. If that is your budget, our honest advice is usually not to pay anyone a monthly management fee at all, because the fee would eat most of the money. Pay once for a proper setup, run it yourself, and come back when the budget can carry both. We would rather say that now than take the retainer.
Tracking first. Keywords second. Budget last.
Most agencies run this in reverse, which is why so many accounts spend for months before anyone can say what a lead actually cost.
01
Week 1–2
Account audit
Search terms, wasted spend, tracking accuracy, bidding strategy, structure and negatives. On your existing account if you have one.
You get: a written audit and a prioritised fix list in plain English.
02
Week 2–3
Tracking rebuilt
Conversion actions, call tracking, GA4 and Tag Manager, so Google is finally optimising towards a real enquiry.
03
Month 1–2
Keyword & campaign plan
Intent-scored keywords, match types, campaign structure and the negative list, mapped to what you sell and where.
You get: the plan and forecast before anything goes live.
04
Month 2 onward
Build & launch
Ads written, extensions set, landing pages checked against the promise in the ad, budgets capped sensibly for the learning period.
You get: every ad for approval before it runs.
05
Ongoing
Search term mining
Reading what people actually typed, cutting what will never convert, and moving budget to what does. This is the work.
You get: a running negative keyword log you can read.
06
Every month
Report & strategy call
Cost per lead and cost per sale first. Then the spend, the wins and what changes next month.
You get: 30 minutes with the person in the account.
What business owners are actually asking about Google Ads agencies.
Taken from Google’s People-also-ask box and from public threads on Reddit and Quora. Every source is linked so you can read the whole argument yourself.
Twenty dollars a day is about $600 a month. Whether that is good depends entirely on your cost per click, which is why the table above matters more than any rule of thumb. At a $3 click it buys 200 clicks a month, which is enough for a tightly focused local campaign to start learning. At a $16 click it buys 37, which is not enough to conclude anything.
Run the division before you run the campaign. If the answer is under about 100 clicks a month, expect a long, noisy learning period and do not judge performance for at least 90 days.
There are two costs and they are constantly confused. The ad spend goes straight to Google every time someone clicks, and in Australia that runs from about $2.60 for an NDIS search to more than $16 for insurance or emergency trades. The management fee is what you pay a person or agency to run it, and that is separate.
Most Australian small businesses land somewhere between $1,000 and $5,000 a month in ad spend, plus $800 to $2,500 a month in management. Our own fees start at $890 and are published above.
A real thread where the poster notes that automotive agencies commonly charge around 25% of ad spend, which on a $20,000 account works out to $5,000 a month. The question is whether that still makes sense, and the answer is almost always no.
A $20,000 account does not take five times the work of a $4,000 account. It takes more work, but not proportionally more, which is the whole flaw in percentage pricing. At that spend we would charge a flat fee and you would keep the difference. Read it: r/PPC, “Would you pay $5k/month to manage a $20k Google Ads account?”
From a furniture eCommerce owner spending about $10,000 a month and paying $3,000 to have it managed. That is 30% of spend, and it drew more than a hundred replies, most of them saying it is high.
For context: at $10,000 a month in spend, our Growth tier is $1,450 and our Scale tier is $2,500. The work on an eCommerce account at that level is real, but 30% is a fee built from a percentage rather than from the job. Read it: r/adwords, “Agency managing our Google Ads account for…”
The most-upvoted answers on Quora put the range at 10% to 30%, with the percentage falling as spend rises. Google’s own AI Overview on “google ads management cost” puts the typical band at 10% to 20%, and adds a caveat worth reading twice: the model “can financially reward the manager for increasing your spend rather than your efficiency”.
That is Google describing the conflict of interest, not us. It is the reason we do not use the model. Read it: Quora, “How much ad spend does Google manage?” and “What is a fair price for PPC management?”
Often, yes, and we will say so. The r/PPC threads on fee structures put experienced Google Ads freelancers at a flat retainer of roughly $3,000 to $8,000 a month at the top end, though local Australian freelancers commonly sit at $500 to $1,500.
A freelancer is usually the right call when your account is simple, your spend is modest and you can manage the relationship yourself. An agency earns its fee when the account spans several campaign types, the tracking is complicated, there is a feed to maintain, or you need the work to continue when one person is on holiday.
A recurring thread, and a fair question. Our position: the fee should track the work, not the calendar and not your growth. If your account genuinely gets more complex, the fee changes and we explain what changed. If it does not, it does not.
What should never happen is a fee that rises automatically because your spend rose. That is a percentage model wearing a flat-fee costume. Read it: r/adwords, “How much do you raise your Google Ads management fees annually?”
Ask for the change log. Every competent account has one: what was paused, what negatives were added, which ad variants were tested, what the search term report showed this month. If nobody can produce it, the account is probably on autopilot with a monthly dashboard email.
You should also have your own login. Not a PDF, not a Looker dashboard, the actual Google Ads account, where you can open the Change History tab yourself and see every edit with a date and a username against it.
Why we are quoting Reddit on our own sales page.
Because the honest answers to these questions are already public, and a page that pretends otherwise is easy to see through. Google's results for "google ads management cost" currently rank a Reddit thread first, above every agency in the country. That is Google telling you where the trustworthy answers are. We would rather meet that standard than argue with it.
What other Australian agencies charge, from their own published pages.
We publish ours, so it seems only fair to show you the context. Every figure below is taken from a public page or from Google’s own summary of the market.
Source | Entry | Mid | Top |
SOUP Agency (published packages) | $2,500 / mo | $4,000 / mo | $6,000+ / mo |
Grove Foundry (published tiers) | 800–1,500 | 1,500–2,500 | 3,000–5,000+ |
Media Plus Digital (agency range) | $1,500 / mo | – | $5,000 / mo |
Bobo Digital (agency range) | $1,000 / mo | – | $3,000 / mo |
Percentage-of-spend model (market norm) | 10% of spend | 15–20% | Up to 30% |
Digitalzoop, flat fee | $890 / mo | $1,450 / mo | $2,500 / mo |
Five questions to ask any Google Ads or PPC agency.
Ask us the same five. The answers below are what you should be hearing from anyone you are considering.
01
"Whose name is the Google Ads account in?"
"We'll set it up in our manager account" — you lose the history the day you leave.
Created under your email, with the agency added as a user you can remove.
02
"Is your fee a percentage of my ad spend?"
"15% of spend" - they earn more when you spend more, not when you spend better.
A flat fee, so cutting wasted budget costs them nothing and saves you money.
03
"How is conversion tracking set up, and can you prove it fires?"
A blank look, or "Google handles that" — the most common fault in every audit.
Named conversion actions, call tracking included, tested in front of you.
04
"What does the monthly report open with?"
Impressions, clicks and click-through rate — all of which can rise while leads fall.
Cost per lead and cost per sale, with the spend that produced them.
05
"When would you tell me to spend less?"
"More budget means more leads" — true only if the account is already efficient.
A straight answer with an example, and a fee model that makes it painless to say.
One more, worth asking every time: “Can you guarantee the top spot on Google?” The honest answer is that your ad will appear if you bid enough, but nobody can promise the top position at a price that makes commercial sense. Ad rank is your bid, your quality score and whoever else is bidding on that exact search at that exact second. Buying the top spot is easy. Buying it profitably is the job.
Digitalzoop versus a typical Google Ads agency.
Every row here is something we have had to undo on an account inherited from someone else.
| Typical web designer | DIGITALZOOP | |
| Account ownership | Built in the agency’s manager account | In your name, we are a removable user |
| Fee model | 10–20% of your ad spend | Flat monthly fee, published above |
| Contract | 6–12 month lock-in | Month-to-month |
| First month’s work | Campaigns live in week one, tracking “later” | Tracking rebuilt before a dollar is spent |
| Reporting | Impressions, clicks, CTR, impression share | Cost per lead and cost per sale, first |
| Performance Max | Switched on everywhere, brand traffic included | Used where it earns it, brand excluded |
| Who does the work | Junior account manager, offshore execution | Senior specialist in Sydney, founder on strategy |
| Honesty test | Always recommends more budget | Will tell you to pause, or to spend on SEO instead |
Do not take our word for it. Take theirs.
Where we already know what a click is worth.
Industry experience in PPC management mostly means one thing: knowing the realistic cost per lead before you spend a dollar finding out.
Solar & renewables
Expensive clicks, long consideration, and lead quality that has to be filtered hard.
eCommerce & retail
Shopping feeds, Performance Max and return on ad spend measured against real margin.
Legal & professional
Some of the costliest clicks in Australia. Negative keywords matter more than bids.
Healthcare & NDIS
Call-driven, locally targeted, and tightly bound by advertising policy.
Trades & home services
Emergency intent, call extensions, and a service radius that has to be exact.
Education & training
Enrolment cycles, long forms, and competition from aggregators with deep pockets.
Property & real estate
Seasonal, hyper-local, and heavily dependent on remarketing.
B2B & industrial
Tiny search volumes, enormous deal value, and offline conversions to import.
A real office, a real ABN, and your money never touches our account.
In paid search this matters twice over, because you are trusting someone with a live budget every single day.
The account is yours.
Ads, Merchant Center, Analytics and Tag Manager, all under your email.
We never touch your budget.
Your card, your account, paid straight to Google. No media markup.
Month-to-month, no lock-in.
Leave whenever. The account and its whole history stay with you.
Senior-led, no junior handoffs.
The person on your monthly call is the person in the account.
Reports open with cost per lead.
Not impressions. Not click-through rate. The number that decides if this works.
We will tell you to spend less.
Or to put the money into SEO, or a better landing page, when that is the truth.
Google Ads FAQs
How much does it cost to use a Google Ads agency?
In Australia, Google Ads management fees usually take one of three shapes. A flat monthly fee, typically $800 to $2,500 depending on account size. A percentage of ad spend, usually 10 to 20 percent. Or a hybrid of a small base fee plus a percentage.
We charge a flat monthly fee from $890, published above, because a percentage model quietly rewards an agency for spending more of your money rather than spending it better. The management fee is separate from your ad budget, which you pay directly to Google from your own account.
How much should I pay someone to manage my Google Ads?
A reasonable benchmark is that management should cost less than the waste it removes. Under $5,000 a month in ad spend, expect $800 to $1,200. Between $5,000 and $20,000, expect $1,200 to $2,000. Above $20,000, expect $2,000 and up.
If the fee is a percentage, ask what happens when you want to reduce budget. Their income falls with yours, which is exactly the moment you need honest advice.
Is $500 a month enough for Google Ads?
It can be, for a narrow local business with a small service area and cheap clicks, such as a suburban trade or clinic. At $500 a month, about $16 a day, expect one campaign, tightly targeted, on your highest-intent terms only. No Display, no broad match, no Performance Max.
It is not enough in a competitive category like legal, finance or cosmetic services, where one click can cost $20 or more and $500 buys roughly 25 clicks a month. If $500 is your budget, our honest advice is usually to pay once for a proper setup and run it yourself, rather than pay a monthly fee that consumes most of the money.
Is $10 a day enough for Google Ads?
Ten dollars a day is about $300 a month. That is viable only for a very specific, low-competition local search where clicks cost a few dollars, and only with exact and phrase match on terms with clear buying intent.
Google will spend it whatever the settings, so the risk is not whether the money goes out. It is whether it goes to searches that could ever become a customer. Expect a long learning period, because conversion volume is too low for automated bidding to work well.
Who owns the Google Ads account, me or the agency?
With us, you do. Your Google Ads account, Merchant Center, Analytics and Tag Manager are created under your own email and stay in your name. We are added as a managed user you can remove at any time.
This matters more in paid search than in SEO. An account built inside an agency’s manager account keeps the conversion history, audience lists and quality score signals when you leave, and rebuilding that from zero can cost months of performance.
How long before Google Ads starts working?
Clicks and impressions start on day one. Useful data takes two to four weeks, because automated bidding needs conversion volume before it can optimise. A fair judgement comes at about 90 days, once the learning period, search term mining and landing page fixes have each had a full cycle.
Anyone promising profitable results in the first week is describing luck, not a method.
What is Performance Max, and should I use it?
Performance Max is Google’s automated campaign type, spending across Search, Shopping, Display, YouTube, Gmail and Maps from a single budget. It works well for eCommerce with a healthy product feed and strong conversion data. It works poorly for lead generation accounts with little conversion history, where it tends to absorb budget into cheap, low-intent placements.
We use it where it earns its place and exclude it where it does not, and we always run it alongside a branded search campaign so it cannot take credit for traffic you already owned.
Do you charge a percentage of my ad spend?
No. We charge a flat monthly management fee. A percentage creates a conflict of interest, because the agency earns more by increasing your budget rather than improving your cost per lead. With a flat fee, if we halve your spend and hold your leads steady, we are paid the same and you keep the difference.
Can you take over and fix my existing Google Ads account?
Yes, and it is usually where the fastest gains are. A takeover starts with a free audit of the live account: wasted search terms, tracking accuracy, bidding strategy, campaign structure, negative keyword coverage and landing page match.
Fixing a badly tracked account often lifts results before a single extra dollar of budget is added, because the bidding algorithm has finally been told what a real lead looks like.
Can you guarantee my ads appear at the top of Google?
We can guarantee your ads appear, because that is what the auction does when you bid enough. We cannot guarantee the top position at a price that makes commercial sense, and no honest agency can.
Ad rank is decided by your bid, your quality score and the competition on that exact search at that exact moment. Buying the top spot is easy. Buying it profitably is the actual job.
What is the difference between Google Ads and SEO?
SEO earns visibility that keeps working after the invoice but takes months to build. Google Ads buys visibility immediately and stops the moment you stop paying.
Most businesses are best served running both: ads for immediate leads and cash flow, while SEO compounds underneath and gradually reduces how much traffic you need to rent. We will say plainly which deserves your budget first.
Do you work with businesses outside Sydney?
Yes. Our office is in Parramatta in Sydney and we run accounts for businesses across Australia. Paid search has no geographic limit on the agency’s side, only on your targeting, so the campaign is built around the catchment you actually sell to.
Is $20 a day good for Google Ads?
Twenty dollars a day is about $600 a month, and whether that is good depends entirely on your cost per click. At a $3 click it buys 200 clicks a month, enough for a tight local campaign to start learning. At a $16 click it buys 37, which is not enough to conclude anything.
Do the division before you commit. Real Australian click costs by industry are in the table above.
How much do Google Ads cost in Australia?
There are two separate costs. The ad spend goes straight to Google on each click, and in Australia that ranges from about $2.60 for an NDIS search to more than $16 for insurance or emergency trades. The management fee is what you pay someone to run the account, and it is charged separately.
Most Australian small businesses run $1,000 to $5,000 a month in ad spend plus $800 to $2,500 a month in management. Ours starts at $890 and is published above.
What is a good Quality Score in Google Ads?
Quality Score runs from 1 to 10. Seven or above is healthy, 5 to 6 is average and worth improving, and anything below 5 usually means the keyword, the ad and the landing page are not telling the same story.
It is built from three inputs: expected click-through rate, ad relevance and landing page experience. A higher score lowers what you pay for the same ad position, so two advertisers with identical bids can pay very different amounts for the same click.
What percentage of ad spend do Google Ads agencies charge?
The common range in Australia is 10 to 20 percent of ad spend, and public discussion on Quora puts the wider band at 10 to 30 percent, with the percentage falling as spend rises.
Google’s own AI Overview on “google ads management cost” notes that the model “can financially reward the manager for increasing your spend rather than your efficiency”. That is Google describing the conflict of interest, not us, and it is why we charge a flat fee instead. There is more on this, with the source threads, further up this page.
Find out what your ad budget is really buying.
Send me your website and I will look at the live account. You will get back the wasted search terms in dollars, whether your conversion tracking is telling the truth, and the three changes worth making first. If your budget is too small to justify an agency, I will say that instead.
- Wasted spend, named and costed
- Whether your conversion tracking is accurate
- The three fixes with the fastest payback