Before you hire anyone
Someone will do it for $500 a month.
They’re not lying to you. That price is real, and for some businesses it’s the right one. This page explains what a monthly fee can and can’t include, why the good ones are hard to find, and what to ask whoever you end up with — including me.
I’d rather you read this and decide I’m not for you than pay me and work it out later.
The first thing nobody explains
A monthly fee is an hours budget.
That’s all it is. Whatever you’re quoted, the only useful question is how many hours of someone’s attention it buys, and what those hours have to cover.
So do the division. Call skilled attention $150 an hour — that’s an assumption, not a fact, and you can argue with the number. The shape doesn’t change.
| Monthly fee | Hours it buys | What honestly fits in that |
|---|---|---|
| $100 a week | Under 3 | A regular look at the account. Budget nudges. Pausing what’s obviously dead. |
| $500 a month | 3–4 | The above, plus new creative — which at that speed has to come off a template. |
| $1,200 a month | Around 8 | The above, plus reading your lead records, your website, and what happens after someone clicks. |
Nobody is being cheated in the top two rows. Three hours a month is genuinely enough to keep a simple campaign alive and stop the obvious waste. If your account is already wired up correctly and you just need someone to keep an eye on it, that is a fair trade and you should take it.
What three hours can’t do is go underneath. It can’t open your lead records and find that the ad name never reached them. It can’t sit on your enquiry form on a phone on 4G and watch where it breaks. It can’t work out what a completed job is worth to you and tell you the ads don’t clear it.
Not sure which row your account needs? Send it to me and I’ll tell you — free, and you keep the answer either way.
The second half of the same arithmetic
“All-inclusive” is a decision about speed.
When creative is included at no extra charge, creative has to be quick. That means a template with your logo dropped in, or a stock photo with a headline over it. Again — not a criticism. It’s the only way the numbers work, and a templated ad that runs beats a brilliant ad that never gets made.
But it does mean your ad will look like the other ads that agency is running this month, because it is the same ad. If you’re in a trade where four competitors are on the same system, you’ll be bidding against people whose ads are indistinguishable from yours. The auction sorts that out on price.
The part that decides whether you get told the truth
Ask what happens to the fee when the ads should stop.
Some months you shouldn’t be advertising. You’re at capacity, or it’s your busy season and the phone is ringing anyway, or the last thirty days of enquiries were all tyre-kickers and something upstream needs fixing first.
Whoever runs your ads has to be able to afford to say that.
If the fee only exists while the campaign runs, saying “switch it off for six weeks” costs them their client. Most people in that position won’t say it. Not because they’re crooked — because they’re human and it’s their income.
Mine isn’t perfectly clean either, and I’d rather you hear it from me. My fee has three bands based on what you spend: $1,200, $1,800, $2,500. So there is a step where spending more of your money pays me more. Two things about that. It’s in steps, not a percentage, so nudging you from $2,900 to $3,100 to earn another $600 would be transparent and you’d leave. And inside a band, telling you to spend less costs me nothing at all.
A percentage of ad spend is the arrangement to actually watch for. That one pays more every single dollar you spend, with no step and no ceiling.
Why the search is so frustrating
You’re not looking in a broken market. You’re looking at the visible part of it.
People who are genuinely good at this are mostly not advertising to you. They’re one of three things:
- Employed inside one business, doing it full time for that business
- Full, on referrals, and not taking anyone new
- Charging enough that six or eight clients is a living, so they never needed to advertise in the first place
Advertising to trades at scale — being in front of you constantly, on every platform, every week — costs money. To afford that, you need a lot of clients. To handle a lot of clients, you need the productised model. So the operators you can see are, structurally, the volume end of the market. That’s not a conspiracy. It’s just who can afford the ad slot.
Which is the obvious problem with this page, so let me deal with it: I’m advertising to you too. Here’s why I can. I run another business that pays my bills, so this one doesn’t have to feed me. I only need a handful of clients. And I’d rather spend the money reaching people than pay a salesperson to chase them.
Apply the reasoning to me the same as everyone else. That’s the whole point of writing it down.
Five questions
Ask these before you hand over an account.
Not to catch anyone out. Most people answer them fine. But the answers decide what you’re left holding if it ends badly, and almost nobody asks until it already has.
1. Whose Business Manager does the ad account sit in?
Yours or theirs. If it’s theirs, you are renting your own advertising history.
2. If we stop tomorrow, what do I keep?
The pixel, the audiences you’ve paid to build, the conversion history, the lead records. Get that answer before you start, not during the argument.
3. Who is my domain registered to, and can I log in to it right now?
Try it while they’re still on the phone. This is the one that catches people.
4. What email address gets the alerts from my website?
Security warnings, form notifications, hosting notices. If you don’t recognise the address, you don’t control the site.
5. Can I have the CMS login, in writing, today?
Not “we’ll sort that out later.” Today.
I ask because I got all five wrong myself.
About five years ago a bloke rang me and offered to build a website for my aircon business for $700. He built it, and it was good — I paid him $1,000 a month for three months of SEO after that and it has ranked well ever since. It still brings me customers today.
I have never had the login. He stopped answering the phone years ago. When I went to get Search Console back for one of my own domains, an agency I hadn’t dealt with in years still held it. Security alerts from my own website were going to an email address I’d never seen.
I don’t think any of it was malicious. Nobody planned the handover, nobody wrote down who owned what, and I didn’t know which questions to ask. That’s the mechanism, and it costs you the same either way.
Being straight about it
If cheap is what you need, take cheap.
I’m not trying to talk everyone out of a $500 arrangement. If your tracking is already sound, your website converts, you know what a job is worth to you, and you just want someone competent keeping the campaign alive — that is exactly the right amount to pay, and paying me instead would be waste.
What I do is for the other situation: the account where nothing underneath is wired up, the enquiries aren’t counted properly, and the budget keeps going up because nobody can see what’s actually happening. That takes a couple of weeks of somebody’s full attention before it takes anything else, and no monthly fee at the bottom of the market contains that.
The full list of who I’m not for — including the minimum spend below which none of this earns its keep — is on the pricing page, prices and all, no call required.
Start where it costs nothing
Or just find out which situation you’re in.
Send me read-only access to whatever you’ve got now. I’ll spend a couple of days going through the account and everything behind it and write you a plain-English breakdown: what’s being tracked, what isn’t, and what a customer is actually costing you.
No charge and no lock-in. If you’re already getting good value from whoever runs it, I’ll tell you that, and the findings are yours to hand them.