What Google Ads management costs — and what a Birmingham audit covers

Google Ads management cost is one of the hardest things to research honestly, because most firms won't publish a number. Here's how the pricing models actually work, what we charge, and what you get from an audit before you commit to anything ongoing.

The three pricing models

• Flat monthly fee. You pay a set amount for a defined scope. Easy to budget, and the fee doesn't change just because you increased spend.
• Percentage of ad spend. Usually somewhere in the mid-to-high teens as a percentage. Simple math, poor incentives — the only lever that raises the fee is telling you to spend more.
• Hybrid: a base fee plus a percentage above a spend threshold. Common at larger budgets, and reasonable when the base covers the real work and the percentage covers genuine added scale.

There's also performance-based pricing, where the fee moves with leads or revenue. It sounds aligned and often isn't: it pushes toward whatever is easy to count rather than what's actually worth money, unless the measurement is airtight on both sides.

Why we charge a flat fee

We charge flat monthly fees so our advice about your budget stays advice. If cutting spend in a weak market is the right call, we should be able to say so without cutting our own pay. Ad spend is billed directly to your card and never marked up.

Our published fees

• Spark — $1,750/month plus ad spend. One primary acquisition channel, managed correctly, with measurement you can trust.
• Signal — $3,500/month plus ad spend. The full path from ad to landing experience to qualified lead.
• Beacon — $6,000/month plus ad spend. Acquisition, search visibility, website experience, CRM data, and revenue connected end to end.
• Regional and multi-market programs start at $9,500/month.
• One-time projects: Google Ads audit $750, tracking audit with GA4 and Google Tag Manager build $2,500, visibility audit with roadmap $2,500.

Free review versus the $750 audit

These are two different things and it's worth being clear about which one you want.

• The free Google Ads review is a high-level scan: the biggest likely leak, up to three next steps, and a short conversation. No fee, no obligation, and no 40-page deck.
• The $750 audit is the deep version: detailed account and search-term analysis, conversion tracking verification, lead-quality analysis, a landing page review, a recorded walkthrough, and a prioritized written fix list you can hand to anyone — including your current agency.

If you engage us for ongoing management afterward, the audit fee comes off your first month.

What an audit usually surfaces

• Conversion actions counting the same lead more than once, or counting page views as conversions.
• Search terms that have been quietly eating budget for months because nobody added negatives.
• Geography set far wider than the area the business actually serves.
• Calls that are never tracked, so phone-heavy accounts look like they're failing.
• Ads pointed at a homepage instead of a page about the thing that was searched for.
• Smart bidding optimizing toward the wrong signal, because the wrong signal is the only one it was given.

An illustrative cost picture

Illustrative arithmetic only — not a benchmark, not a promise, and not results from a specific account. A single-location business on Spark at $1,750/month with $4,000/month of ad spend has a $5,750 monthly total. Add the $750 audit in month one and that first month is $6,500. Whether that's a good number depends entirely on your close rate and what a customer is worth.

A fee is only expensive relative to what it produces. The point of an audit is to find out before you commit to twelve months of anything.

Full program inclusions are on the pricing page, the deep audit is described on the Google Ads audit page, and the free review has its own page.