One of the biggest confusions for new clients who have never run Google Ads before is what it costs, and where their money goes.

It’s different to organic social media or SEO where there’s just one singular cost, and one invoice because with Google Ads, you’re effectively spending twice.

In this blog, we’ll break down the difference between ad spend and Google Ads management fees.

What is ad spend?

Ad spend is really the easiest part to define and justify as it’s the money that’s paid directly to Google Ads. When you add your billing information into the Google Ads platform, quite simply, Google automatically charges you for what you’ve spent.

How Google Ads charges you

Effectively, you decide how much you want to spend every month and then Google charges you for every user who clicks on your ads. We can then break down the average cost-per-click over the month and the cost per conversion, which you’ll see in your report at the start of each month.

What your Google ad spend buys you

To put it in the most basic terms, it buys your bids in an auction and the higher your ad spend is, along with using the right keywords and campaign structure, the more likely your ads are to be seen.

To break it down, what you get for your Google ad spend is:

Impressions

It allows your ads to be shown in the “sponsored results” section of the Google search engine.

Clicks

Once your ads start getting impressions, you’re basically bidding for users to click on your ads and depending on your industry, the cost-per-click can vary wildly.

Data

Another key part of what you’re paying for is valuable data and insights, including visibility over search terms that will allow us to further optimise your campaigns.

What you’re not paying for

The important thing to note is that you’re not paying for guaranteed conversions. You can spend £20,000 a month on Google Ads, but if your campaigns aren’t structured well, your landing pages don’t work and your targeting is wrong, you could be wasting money on clicks.

What is the management fee?

For many small businesses, the management fee that you pay to an agency can be a sticking point as unlike us, some agencies don’t offer much in the way of transparency.

In fact you may often wonder why you should pay someone £185+ a month, just to watch your ads spend money.

What our management fee buys you

We talk to many businesses who think that a management fee is simply pressing the on button, but what you’re really paying for is expertise.

So what does our management fee actually get you?

Full campaign setup

We’ll build your account and campaigns from the ground up. This includes keyword research, campaign structure, ad groups and asset group creation.

Conversion tracking

Conversion tracking is the cornerstone of reporting. Without it, we have no real way of telling how your ads are performing. We utilise Google Tag Manager in order to ensure conversion tracking and reporting are as accurate as possible.

Ongoing optimisation

Depending on the package you choose, we will carry out ongoing optimisation tasks either fortnightly or weekly. This will include reviewing search terms to ensure the right users are finding us, adding negative keywords and reviewing ad copy.

Monthly reporting

At the start of each month we’ll provide you with a full report that breaks down impressions, clicks, cost-per-click, conversions-by-type and cost-per-conversion, with a full analysis of what we’ve done and what we plan on doing in the coming month.

Can I just manage Google Ads myself?

Whilst you could manage Google Ads yourself, partnering with an expert PPC agency ensures that your ads are reaching their full potential.

There are so many intricacies within Google Ads and errors that you can make when you’re not a PPC expert that the value of partnering with one, like the PPC People, much outweighs the cost.

If you want to have a chat about what you could potentially get out of Google Ads, get in touch with us today.