How Much To Charge For Google Ads Management: A UK Pricing Guide For 2026

Okay, I believe we are live...Just give me a moment. Make sure everything is working fine and we shall get the session started. We had a bit of an issue yesterday with the audio and looks like it's seems to be ok today. Yeah, seems to be fine. If you have any issues with the audio, just put in the comment box and I'll keep an eye on it.

Okay. So everything seems to be working fine. Friday afternoon 17 of July, 2020. Hello and warm welcome to you. My name is Uzair and if you are new to these live streams then a special welcome to you, and those of you who have been here before you know the drill, we cover a topic, usually Google Ads or anything about digital online marketing and I go to the comment box to answer any questions you may have.

So please put them in there in the comment box on the right hand side, and I'll try my best to answer them for you. Hello Vinod, good to see you here. Brilliant. So we'll get the session started because we had that audio problem yesterday, but the audio wasn't 100% and a lot of you could not listen in properly.

I'm going to do a repeat of yesterday's session and I'm going to open up my presentation. Okay, that's working fine so today I'm going to be talking about how much you should charge for pay-per-click advertising either as a freelancer or as an agency, be it a Google Ads, Facebook, Twitter, or any kind of paid ads. The principles and the process are the same.

You need to charge a certain amount to maintain your lifestyle and obviously pay all your bills and make a profit. So before I get started, I just wanted to give you a bit of a background as to how I started, because what I am asked the most is I'm starting afresh, I haven't got any clients, how do I get new clients?

And how much should I charge? So I'll give you my story as to what we did and how we started and where we are right now. The business was started in 2002, and it was started as a traditional photography business by my wife and I joined her full-time within three months of starting it. Photography has always been my hobby and my passion since I was 16 years old and we had this opportunity and we thought, okay, why not, let's get started and we started off as a social photographers and corporate photography.

So we did family portraits, weddings, business, and headshots and so on. In 2009 when the recession started, our traditional marketing was getting more and more expensive and by that, I mean we used to advertise in newspapers, magazine and trade shows and fairs, etc. and I came across Google Ads at that time and I thought, Hmm, this looks interesting and I started giving it a go and I was getting a lot of traffic through my website in those days at very low cost because they weren't that many people using Google Ads, but that was for our photography business.

Now, as you can see on those photos on the screen, I... I'm still proud and privileged to have been an evangelist for Nikon UK, where I used to teach photography to other photographers and I've also given presentations and seminars and spoken at some of the biggest events in the UK for many big companies, including at the Apple store in London.

In fact, this photograph at the Apple store, which is on the top right hand corner is actually one of my presentations in about I think 2011 or thereabouts, where the iPhone, the second version was released and then they started to have video on it. Now being a photographer and being involved with Nikon, I was one of the first person to know about any new technology coming along the line and I was able to try, test it and see what's happening.

Now, all of a sudden we had these traditional cameras, which has got video on it and our phones, which has got a video on it. So that said something, that where the industry is heading. So you need to keep evolving. And this is what we did. If we had stayed as photographers, we would have been dead and buried because now with the smart phones, they are so good, most people take photographs with their smartphones and the demand for traditional photography has gone right down.

So what happened was, I didn't realize at that time as to how big this change is going to be, but all of a sudden YouTube came along and then things started to go really quickly! So from photography, we started to do a fair bit of videos. Now, one of our customers, which at that time, at that point in time, we had, he said, well, you're doing our photos and our videos.

Why can't you do our website? And the idea popped in. That's a good idea, why not do this? So we'd never done any websites before. We started doing a web design and on the website, the two most important things are photos and videos. If you can get some really good quality images and videos, the website is going to look really good.

Then when you have a website, you need traffic. And that's where we started to look into it and we got certified as Google partner and as they say, the rest is history,! But our business evolved quite a bit. And now we are a full-fledged marketing agency where we can take anyone from concept to campaign, and this is what you need to do and this is how you want to set yourself up and your business so that you are constantly evolving and learning and changing with the times.

Okay. So unfortunately during the last four or five months due to this lockdown and the COVID situation, a lot of you may have lost your jobs, made redundant or lost your income and now you're probably thinking about, okay might as well get started on my own, but you don't know how to start and where to start...So here are some really good...

I would like to think some do's and don'ts as to what you should be doing and what you should avoid at all costs. So, first of all, you need to decide whether you just want to work as a freelancer or as an agency, if you are offering your services as a freelancer...I'm a freelancer. One of the most important things is you should keep every client information in confidence.

You should never share it, or publicly say that, you know, I work for such and such company, or I'm running AdWords for such and such account or a corporate account if you have been given that account through another third party. So that confidence is a must because once you lose that trust, nobody's going to give you any work.

The other one is obviously as an agency, but if you're starting afresh, you start small, and there's no... It's not a bad thing to start small and then grow your business slowly but surely and make it into a full-fledged agency, but for you to become an agency, you need to have systems and processes in place so that you can scale and scale very quickly without that you will fail and if you want to just run by yourself, then you should just get enough work to keep you busy and you're not working 20 hours a day, which you've all done in the past, but if you're young and you want to do that, it's your choice, but you are going to burn out very quickly!

Avoid billable hours and what I mean by that is don't charge per hour because there are only certain number of hours in a day and that is your maximum limit. You cannot build more unless you increase your hourly rate or you employ more people. I would highly recommend that you give value to your customers and I'm going to talk about it a bit in detail in a bit later on...

What you want to do is make sure that first of all, you're giving great value and you are charging a management fee per month. So you avoid that hourly billing model, because if you are not well, you want to go away on holiday, then you won't be able to build your hours or earn anything. So that is something which I would highly recommend you do that.

This is extremely important. You keep the billing for Google Ads and your fees as separate, so your client knows how much they're paying for the ads and how much they're paying you. I've seen a lot of companies to include all of these together and present one amount to the client as one lump sum. But now the client doesn't know how much you've spent on Google Ads and how much you are taking it as your fees; keep very transparent at all times.

So the Google Ads account is always the client account so they can see what's happening and you just charge them your fees. However you want to do - weekly, monthly, or whatever your billing schedule is. Don't run your client campaigns to your account and always get access through your MCC, which is my client center. If you don't know, just Google it, set up a MCC account and then link all your client accounts through your MCC and then run them through them.

So the client always owns the campaigns and the data. So should they stop working with you, they have paid for your services and the work which you've done which always stays in the client account. I've seen many freelancers as well as agencies, where they don't give access to the client, to their campaigns, which it's up to them, how they wish to run, but personally, I'm not a big fan of that business model.

Never charge or use your credit or debit cards for running clients Google Ads, because if they don't pay you, you will be liable to pay Google and Google is going to get the money off you, whether your clients have paid or not. So never, ever... This is the biggest takeaway from today's session is never run up your card, no matter how good the client is, how trustworthy they are, it's a no-no complete no-no!

I would never run any account using my banking or my credit card details, because I don't want to get billed directly by my customer and then go to the client paying me afterwards. The way we bill our clients is what we call on a performance based billing model and I'm not saying that this is the best way to model your billing, but I think this is a win-win situation where the client wins as well as we, as an agency win.

And here's how a lot of agencies, they take the monthly fee or the fixed fee, irrespective of whether the client gets a positive return on investment or return on ad spend, so there's no incentive for the agency to work really hard. I know they all do their best, but if there was an incentive for the agency to earn more money, I'm sure they will double up their work and do more hard work to get the results a lot quicker.

So on the performance based billing model, what we do is we charge a percentage of the total ad spend per month. So whatever that percentage is, we charge... At the present moment, 20%, I know some companies are charging 25 and some are also charging 30% of ad spend, but I personally feel that it's a very fair amount for the work we do, and we are giving great value to our clients and for the work we do, a client is only going to increase the ad spend if they are making a profit, they're not going to increase or scale the account if they are making a loss, but it's in my interest to make sure that we reach the breakeven point as quickly as possible, and then go into profit as fast as we can because it's in my interest.

And this is what we always tell our clients that look, as soon as we go into profit, then it's up to you, whether you wish to scale or not, some clients are happy at what they are spending and the amount of work they are getting in the account, they cannot cope up with more work, or they may be out of stock for some particular products.

So they don't want to scale, but a lot of the companies, yes, they want to scale because they want the capacity or they create the capacity to grow and this is how they grow and this is how we as an agency grow as well, and the other good thing about this model is then you don't need to worry about charging a set amount for Google and then a different one for Facebook and Twitter, wherever they want to go, whether they want to go just on Google or they want to go on Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, wherever ads can be run, we can run those ads,...Amazon...The more channels they want to go.

Obviously the more budget they will have and the higher our fees, because we will be working more on multiple accounts, but this is what we find and feel is the best of both worlds. It's a win-win situations for us and the client. Some companies charge a minimum fixed fee or a percentage of ad spend - it's up to you, how you wish to go about it.

So this is how we charge, and this is how we run our agency. I'm going to go to the comment box now and see if there's any questions... Vinod, 'which bidding strategy is good for you and why it is a more good among all bidding strategies?' Well, it really depends on what your goals are for your campaigns.

They are about seven or eight different bidding strategies from the manual to the most automated biddings and the smart biddings. It's too broad a question to pinpoint and give you a one specific bidding strategy. One it doesn't fit... Different bidding strategies are used at different points of the ad / the campaigns being run when we're trying to scale.

So for example, when we start a campaign, we usually run manually, but some companies, they go straight with TCPA or TROAS - I personally feel that we want to get the data manually, get the conversions and have a bit of a control and then once we have got a fair amount of data in the campaign, then we can try, other bidding strategies.

So I cannot answer, which is the best bidding strategy for you, because it could be a shopping one. It could be lead generation, or it could be a brand campaign where different metrics and KPIs come into place and we need to work as to what is best for the client and which bidding strategy will suit. The best thing and I always say that is something which works for me, may not work for you, but something which works for you may not work for me.

So why not try this yourself? There are no shortcuts in Google Ads. You've got to test it out and try it, see if it doesn't work, do something different and keep testing until you start to get the results and that's what I'm going to say to you, run different campaigns with different bidding strategies and see which, what other results and what you're achieving in for each of these campaigns and then the ones which are not working, just switch them off and put all the budget towards the most profitable one.

Okay. So Mac, no problem, you can watch the replay again...So I think there aren't any questions. If you have any, then now's your time. Okay. Adam, just ping them, hi Adam, 'Will you consider a session that highlights your hundred points, Google Ads, account checklist.' Oh God, okay. Yeah, sure! In fact, I have that in my schedule and I'll go through that as to how we have a list of things to do, when we take on an account, it might be a fairly long one.

What I am thinking of doing is perhaps having a little workshop where we have maybe six or 10 people, and then get you guys to work on your checklist as well, so it will be a practical workshop rather than just all of, you know just watching me present and I don't know how much of the stuff you guys put into practice as to what you learn over here.

So yeah, but I've been thinking about that. So perhaps we could have just small groups and just focus on one particular campaign or strategy, or it could be building up the checklist so that you guys have a complete system to scale because there are certain things which are just a one-off you only do this once at the time of creating the campaign or the account.

So for example, analytics, Google tag manager, setting up all the extension site links. And then there are some things which you need to be doing on a daily basis, weekly fortnightly and monthly, depending on how small or big the account is. For example, you know, we will check the conversion tracking tags are working or not once a week, or if there has been a drop in conversions, we get notifications that, you know, there hasn't been any conversions and please check the conversion tracking code or something.

If the impressions have stopped, that mean a good keyword is being blocked by a negative keyword which has been put in by accident. But these sort of checks and balances you need to have, and once you have that system, then you can certainly scale. So, yeah, I think I'll set something up fairly soon and then we can hop online and get you guys sorted out with the systems and processes!

So you can scale your business. So that's it for today. There aren't any more questions. So thank you for being with me. I hope you had a productive week and have a great weekend, and I shall see you on Monday at five o’clock, till then stay safe and goodbye.