Four commitments, and what they cost us.
Most agency pages describe a philosophy. These are operating rules — each one gives something up, which is the only reason any of them are worth stating.
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One
Prices are published
Every package and every bracket is on this website. You can work out what we'd charge you before you speak to anyone, and the number won't move because of how the call goes, how big your company is, or what industry you're in.
What it costs us: we can't price to what a client will bear. A business that would happily have paid $2,000 a month pays $500, because that's the bracket their budget sits in.
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Two
You own the accounts
We work inside your Google Ads, Meta and TikTok accounts. If you don't have them, we create them in your name. The conversion history, the audience data, the creative and the campaign structure are yours.
What it costs us: leaving is easy. There's no account we hold hostage, no data you'd lose, and nothing to renegotiate on the way out.
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Three
Month to month
No twelve-month minimum. We'll ask for a fair run — paid campaigns need a few weeks of data before they can be optimised properly, and SEO takes considerably longer — but that's a request, not a contract term.
What it costs us: we have to earn the next month every month, and we can't count revenue that hasn't been delivered yet.
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Four
We'll tell you not to buy
If your budget is too small for paid search to gather usable data, we'll say so and point you at SEO or your Google Business Profile instead. If what you already have is working, we'll say that too.
What it costs us: the obvious thing. We turn away work that would have paid.
Why the fee tracks the budget
Almost every agency prices on one of three models. Each has a problem.
Percentage of ad spend is the most common. It's simple, but it rewards us for spending more of your money whether or not the extra spend returns anything.
Flat retainer regardless of spend is cleaner, but it means a business spending $500 a month subsidises one spending $15,000 — and the small account is the one that can least afford it.
Custom quote per client is what most agencies actually do behind a "contact us for pricing" button. It prices to what you'll bear, which is why the price is hidden.
Bracketed pricing is a fourth option. The fee is a fixed figure attached to a band of ad spend, published in advance.
It's honest about where the work actually comes from: a $500 budget needs one campaign checked weekly, while a $15,000 budget needs several, split by audience and geography, checked far more often, with creative refreshed before it fatigues. That's a real difference in hours, and the brackets track it.
It also means the fee doesn't creep upward as your spend grows within a band. Going from $2,000 to $9,000 a month in Google Ads changes nothing about what you pay us.
SEO is the exception — it isn't priced against a budget, because there isn't one. It's priced against ground covered: service areas, then a province.
What's in, what isn't
Included in the packages
- Audience and keyword research
- Ad creative and copywriting
- Campaign build and conversion tracking setup
- Ongoing bid, budget and creative management
- On-page SEO and minor website updates
- Google Business Profile management
- Blog articles, on the SEO packages
- Monthly reporting in plain language
Not included
- Your ad budget — paid directly to the platforms
- Website builds and redesigns
- Video production and photo shoots on location
- Public relations and media placement
- Email marketing and CRM setup
- Anything we'd have to subcontract and mark up
If you need something on this list we'll tell you who does it well rather than quietly adding a margin.
What we need from you
Campaigns stall on access and approvals more often than on strategy. These are the things that hold work up.
In the first week
- Admin access to your ad accounts, or permission to create them
- Access to your website, or an introduction to whoever has it
- Ownership of your Google Business Profile
- The list of towns or cities you actually serve
- Whatever brand assets exist — logo files, photography, anything already written
Every month after
- Creative and copy approvals inside a few working days
- A rough sense of which enquiries turned into paying work
- A heads-up before a promotion, a price change, or a busy season
That last one matters more than it sounds. Knowing you're booked solid for six weeks changes what we'd do with the budget.
The terms you'll see in reports
No report from us should need a glossary, but here's one anyway.
- Ad spend
- What you pay the platforms for the ads themselves. Separate from our management fee, and billed by them, to you.
- CPC
- Cost per click. What you pay each time somebody clicks an ad. Varies enormously by industry and location.
- CPA
- Cost per acquisition. What it costs in ad spend to get one enquiry or sale. The number that actually matters.
- CTR
- Click-through rate — clicks divided by how often the ad was shown. On search campaigns, roughly 3–8% is a healthy range.
- Conversion
- A tracked action worth money to you: a form submission, a phone call, a booking. Defined with you before launch.
- Quality Score
- Google's 1–10 rating of how relevant your keyword, ad and landing page are to each other. Higher scores lower your cost per click.
- Impression share
- The share of available auctions your ad actually appeared in. A low figure usually means budget or bids are the constraint.
- Negative keyword
- A term you refuse to show ads for. A plumber excludes "plumbing jobs" and "plumbing courses". This is where a lot of wasted spend gets recovered.
- Local pack
- The three map results at the top of a local search. Driven mostly by your Google Business Profile rather than your website.
- Service area
- One town, city or neighbourhood you want to rank in. Each needs its own page and its own local signals, which is why they're counted.
Still reading? Let's talk.
Twenty minutes, and we'll have looked at your ads and rankings before you join.