The short version
The fee is not the whole budget
Total marketing is the fee plus your ad spend. The agency fee is the smaller slice; the spend is usually bigger.
Budget 7 to 10 percent of revenue
That is fee plus ad spend combined (U.S. SBA), toward 12 percent when you are pushing to grow.
Pay a flat fee for the work
Not a percentage of your ad spend. A cut of spend pays the agency to spend more of your money, not to book more jobs.
No markup on the spend
You pay Google and Meta directly, from your own accounts, and see the real cost. Any marked-up number is a cut you cannot see.
A fair fee scales with the work
More channels and more spend to manage is more work. A flat fee can step up, but it should not float with your ad bill.
When a contractor asks what an agency should cost, the honest answer starts by splitting the question in two: the fee for the work, and the money that goes to the ad platforms. They are not the same line, and conflating them is how quotes get padded.
The number behind this. We learned the fee-versus-spend split the hard way on our own shop. An agency ran our ads for six months with the conversion tracking broken, so most calls and forms were never counted, and we were paying for activity we could not measure. We took it in-house, fixed the tracking, and qualified leads (real calls and form fills) went from about 10 a month to 58. That 10-to-58 is the only first-party number on this site; the budget figures below are sourced public benchmark data, not results we are claiming.
The fee is a slice, not the whole pie
Almost every agency quote bundles two costs that have nothing to do with each other:
- The work (the fee). What you pay the people and tools that run your marketing: building the site, running the ads, managing your profile, watching the numbers, and bringing you the booked-job math.
- The ad spend. Money that goes straight to Google, Bing, and Meta to buy clicks and leads. This is your money, not the agency’s, and it should never be marked up.
Keep them on separate lines and the bill gets easy to judge. Mash them into one number and you cannot tell whether you are overpaying for the work, overspending on ads, or both. The cost pillar walks through all three contractor marketing costs (the work, the spend, and the website build); this post is about the first one, the fee.
Start with the total, then find the fee
You cannot price the fee in a vacuum, because it lives inside a total budget. The U.S. Small Business Administration puts total marketing at 7 to 8 percent of revenue for shops under $5 million, rising toward 12 percent when you are pushing to grow. The 2025 Gartner CMO survey landed in the same place, around 7.7 percent. That figure is fee plus ad spend combined. Established shops often run leaner, around 3 to 5 percent, just to hold steady.
Here is what the total looks like by revenue band, with a sane fee range carved out of it:
| Annual revenue | Total marketing (7 to 10%) | Per month, all in | Fair fee for the work (monthly) |
|---|---|---|---|
| $750k | $52k to $75k | $4,400 to $6,300 | ~$1,500 to $2,500 |
| $1.5M | $105k to $150k | $8,800 to $12,500 | ~$2,500 to $4,000 |
| $3M | $210k to $300k | $17,500 to $25,000 | ~$3,500 to $6,000 |
Read the table this way. The middle column is the whole budget, fee and spend together. The last column is a reasonable fee for the work itself, which leaves the rest for ad spend (the bigger slice, the money you were going to put in front of Google anyway). The fee steps up with revenue because a bigger shop usually means more channels, more spend to manage, and more to track. The exact split depends on how many channels you run and how much hand-holding the work takes, but the shape holds: the fee is the smaller number, the spend is the bigger one.
Why the fee should not be a percentage of ad spend
This is the one that quietly costs contractors the most. A lot of agencies charge the fee as a percentage of your ad spend, often 15 or 20 percent. It sounds tidy. It is also a perverse incentive.
If the fee is a cut of what you spend on ads, the agency makes more money by spending more of yours, whether or not it books a single extra job. Their raise comes from your budget going up, not from your calendar filling. That is backward. You want a partner whose interest is more booked jobs, not more spend.
A flat fee for the work fixes it. The agency gets paid the same to run your account well, so the only way to earn more is to do more work or get you to a place where you want to invest more, because it is paying off. The fee can step up as your account grows (more channels, more spend to steward is genuinely more work), but it should be a number you agree to, not a meter that runs faster every time your ad bill climbs.
No markup on the spend, accounts in your name
Two more rules separate a fair fee from a padded one:
- No markup on the spend. You should pay Google, Bing, and Meta directly, from your own accounts, and see the real cost on the platform invoice. An agency that runs your spend through its own account and bills you a marked-up number is taking a cut you cannot see, on top of the fee you can.
- You own the accounts. Your Google Ads account, your domain, your Business Profile, your analytics, all in your name from day one. If the agency owns them, leaving means starting over and losing the history. A fee you pay does not buy them the right to hold your accounts hostage.
We show all of this in the open on our pricing page: the work separated from the ad spend, a flat fee for the work, no markup on the spend. Not because it is generous, but because it is the only structure that keeps everyone honest.
Who this is and is not for
This is not for a shop hunting the lowest possible monthly fee with no regard for what it produces. If the fee is the only number you are comparing, you will pick the cheapest one and learn the hard way what got left out. If you want a fair fee for real work, with the spend on its own line and your name on every account, that is how we price it.
Get a fair read on your numbers
A fair fee is the one that fits inside a budget sized to your revenue, with the work and the spend on separate lines. If you want to see where your own number lands, the free game plan is the place to start. We read your site, your ads, and your top local competitors, then send back a plain report: where your leads are leaking and what each fix is worth in booked jobs. A few days, no call unless you want one, yours to keep. Bring us on and you walk your finished site before a dollar moves, the scope is in writing, satisfaction is guaranteed on the build, and everything is yours from day one: month to month, walk anytime and keep it all. Get my free game plan.
Sources: U.S. Small Business Administration marketing-budget guidance; Gartner 2025 CMO Spend Survey. Fee and budget ranges are indicative and vary by market, trade, channel mix, and year.