Search for Disruptive Advertising pricing or Tinuiti pricing. You will find plenty about philosophy, partnership, and process. You will not find a number.
That is deliberate. A published management fee is easy to compare. Kept behind a discovery call and tied to ad spend, it lands differently: 12% of $40,000 a month sounds reasonable in a growth conversation. It looks different as $4,800 in a spreadsheet beside what it buys.
I spent close to a decade running Google Ads accounts for small ecommerce brands, home services companies, and one SaaS startup that reinvented its offer every quarter. I was on the delivery side of somebody else's retainer, so I know how the figure gets built: strategist hours, account manager hours, loaded cost, margin, then a round number the salesperson can say without flinching.
I am not going to invent precise retainers for agencies as though I had audited their contracts. Fees at this tier are negotiated per account and change over time. Any article claiming otherwise is guessing with your money. What I can give you is the arithmetic behind the quote, the costs outside it, and the questions that force a real total onto a first call.
Agencies price paid search three ways. The model matters more than the number because it determines what happens to your invoice when your budget moves, and what the agency prioritizes in a busy month.
In the accounts I worked on, percentage deals sat somewhere between roughly a tenth and a fifth of monthly media, with the percentage sliding down as budgets climbed. The appeal for the agency is obvious: revenue grows without a new sale.
When a client tripled its Q4 budget, the invoice tripled. The work did not. What actually got added was budget pacing and a few more conversations about inventory, maybe four extra hours a week. That is not 3x anything.
A flat monthly fee is usually banded by spend or scope, then renegotiated when you outgrow the band. It is the more honest version of the same trade because the fee tracks the work rather than a number you control.
It also forces the agency to explain what happens when your spend doubles. Have that conversation before you sign.
Performance pricing, usually a base fee plus a bonus on CPA or ROAS targets, sounds perfectly aligned until the account turns into an attribution debate. I have sat in a quarterly review that dissolved into whether one conversion counted. Nobody's CPA improved that afternoon.
If you sign a performance deal, agree on the measurement source and lookback window in writing before the first dollar spends. Then ask what drives the fee: hours, scope, spend, or a metric. Those four are not interchangeable. The answer predicts what gets deprioritized in a busy month.
The management fee is the number you remember from the call. It is rarely the number you pay.
Onboarding and account builds often get billed separately before anything goes live. They are positioned as an audit plus tracking implementation. Some of that work is genuinely necessary. Some of it is a commitment device: once you have prepaid a setup fee, walking away in month two means writing it off.
Our own comparison chart puts traditional agency onboarding at $5k or more and the typical commitment at six to twelve months, against $0 and cancel anytime on our side. That is our read on the market, so treat it as our read and check it against the quote in front of you.
Whatever numbers you get, do the multiplication across the whole term, not just the monthly line:
That is your real management cost before a cent reaches Google. Ask about the notice period in the same breath. A 12-month term with a 30-day out is a very different commitment from a 12-month term without one.
Landing pages are the line item that surprises people most. A paid-search agency can correctly diagnose conversion rate as your constraint, then route the page work to a separate creative retainer or your developer queue.
I have watched genuinely good media work underperform for months because five different search intents landed on the same page and nobody had budget to change it. Ask who builds pages, who pays for them, and how many days a new variant takes to ship.
None of these extras is scandalous on its own. This is simply how a total ends up well above the headline retainer while every individual line looks defensible.
Ask these on the first call, before you invest three more calls in a relationship you may not want. Send them by email if you would rather skip the call entirely.
A firm that wants your account will answer all four in one plain email. A firm that needs three calls to reach a number is teaching you something about how the number gets set.
The same questions apply to every agency. These two examples show where I would press first.
Disruptive's pricing lives behind a discovery conversation, so the retainer you are quoted is a function of spend and scope rather than a published tier.
The first thing I would pin down is not the monthly figure. It is the front end: what the audit and account build cost, and whether either gets credited against month one. A free audit and a paid onboarding can describe the same two weeks of work, depending on which page you happen to be reading.
Get the fee band and the setup cost in the same email, in writing, before you book a second call.
When a firm opens with channel breadth rather than a rate, that is a staffing model talking. Coordinated search, social, marketplace, and retail media mean a specialist per channel, an account lead above them, and analytics support beside them. That team has a floor under it no matter how small your media budget is.
So the first question is not the percentage. It is the minimum. Ask for the minimum monthly media spend before anything else. If you are under it, the rate never becomes relevant.
If you are well over it and negotiating at serious scale, use your leverage on where the sliding percentage breaks as budget grows rather than on the headline number. Two points of a large media budget is a headcount.
I am not going to pretend the answer is always software. There are three situations where I would pay agency rates without hesitating:
Nothing automated is going to tell you that your pricing page describes the wrong buyer.
If you spend under roughly $3,000 a month on media, manage it yourself. Any management fee, mine included, is a tax you are unlikely to earn back at that level. Turn on Smart Bidding, read the search terms report weekly, write three decent ads per ad group, and send every ad to a page that matches what was typed.
That is most of the available value in a small account. It takes a couple of hours a week.
Strip out the names and the decision comes down to spend. Spend determines whether a management fee can earn itself back at all.
That middle band is what we built our own pricing around: $1,499 a month flat for up to $25,000 in monthly ad spend, unlimited accounts and campaigns, no setup fee, and cancel anytime for any reason. A dedicated strategist and the engine are both included. Landing pages are handled end to end rather than referred to your developer queue.
Spending more than $25,000? Run a slice through it and upgrade once you have seen the numbers. I publish the figure because the whole argument of this article is that a firm that will not publish one is telling you something.
Two entries on our results page are worth reading in that light. A law firm in the $10,000 to $20,000 spend band cut CPA 34% and canceled a $3,000-a-month agency. An automotive aftermarket client in the same band scaled booking volume 42% in month one and also let its prior agency go.
Neither result proves agencies overcharge as a rule. Plenty do not. Both show what happens when a client can finally see the work and hold it next to the invoice.
A firm that will not name a fee until it knows your budget has told you the fee depends partly on your budget, not purely on the work. That is not fraud. It is not even unusual. It does mean the number you eventually receive is a negotiation, and negotiations reward whichever side did the arithmetic first.
Do the arithmetic before the call. Add setup, term, platform fees, and page work to the retainer. Divide that total by the number of real decisions you expect someone to make each month. Then ask yourself what you want to be arguing about in month nine.
If the answer is the invoice, you already know what to do.
