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How much to pay an agency?
How much do you pay for PPC/Display management? Whats the ratio of budget to management? How much would you pay for a $10K media buy? Or 100k?
Best Answer
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- Brian Phelps
They will all quote you from 5-15% of spend. They are also all very willing to negotiate in this market. I don't know too many big paid search accounts paying more than 5% and the average is probably closer to 4%.
It's a really terrible way to structure a relationship, IMO. Don't know why so many accounts are willing to put up with it. It really just incentivizes more spending.
It depends on what they are doing. We do promotions, and campaigns, so we only charge for the specific job, no retainers or contracts.
If you like our work you will have us do more.
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It can also depend on the breakdown as some agencies charge more for each search engine that you run your campaign on, and even extra for using the Google Search + Display Network (Adsense).
Ive seen proposals where a management charge was added for Google, Bing & Yahoo even though it was run via the same bid management platform and was no extra ongoing work for the agency. But that agency also had very low fixed monthly costs which still made them a cheaper option.
There are fixed costs for running most campaigns so if they usually work on $10,000/month and you want to run a test campaign with $2,000/month they may charge you the same costs because they have fixed costs they need to cover.
A combination of fixed setup costs and a portion of percentage and performance based would be a good option. Tie their campaign to conversions/sales and you will get a better ROI, but they might hate me for suggesting that idea.
The rates can depend on the type of campaign such as performance based or pure traffic and rates can vary from 5%-35% depending on the budget and length of the campaign.