Just wondering what other people/companies charge out there. A lot of agencies and individuals charge around 15-20% of total ad spend/month. Shouldn't there be an agreement on how much time is spent monitoring/analyzing/optimizing/consulting? In addition, what do you guys consider a decent charge for account setup / account optimization / account complete makeovers (I guess a full makeover would be just considered account setup)? Charged by the hour? By keywords? By adgroups? Interesting to see what is considered "fair".
15% of total budget is about right if you have your own proprietary tracking platform and you can do more than just log in and change a few bids. If not, then about 5% - 10% would be a better price. A minimal amount is spent on all clients, but this is usually never put in writing since the client wants to feel like there are no limitations. Setup fees usually can range from $1k - $10k depending on the complexity of the account and competitive analysis that needs to be done.
We usually charge around $399 to $999 a month for ppc-management. All packages include MSN, Yahoo and Google. No setup fee. I don't give a rats ass how much the customer spends a month on budget - optimizing is just easier the more they spend on adwords. If they have a budget lover than $1000 we simply just don't take them in..
$999 per month for ppc management? I don't mean to be a flamer, but you can't get much quality service for that price. Plus I am sure you don't have proprietary tracking that provides more campaign insight, plus I bet you build your campaigns manually which means you take longer to respond to client and industry actions. You low cost PPC just tells me your service is less than average. $999 is a good price if the only thing you are doing is building small campaigns, and making the occasional bid change
RobertPriolo, since you don't know what type of customers we have, you would know nothing about our service. So don't worry about what we charge I'm not from US either, maybe that has it's reasons aswell.
perhaps... but i imagine the service of PPC SEM management is the same need and want from any business or corporation
I thin charges must be made on Initial Setup fees + %of Spend cost, You can also charge based on amount of sales you generate... say 10% of sales ...
I like the additional Cost Per Click model, not perfect I agree however, provides some reward for performance. Agree an additional reward fee prior to the campaign % of recommended CPC (could be based on Google Estimations for generic keyword), the more clicks you get for their budget the more you are paid. e.g $1 keyword 5cent per click, if you have highly targeted keywords and high QS keywords may be 50 cent so client gets 2 clicks for his dollar and you get 10cent. The main loop hole i can see is if you bid for low cost irrelevant keywords however the reporting of the campaign will soon flag this up. Any thoughts?
We charge 20% of the budget with a minimum fee. We also have a setup fee that varies from client to client. Can't work with fixed prices in this kind of proffesion..
You can check out our rates by clicking on my signature link. We have worked with companies varying from 1 person startups to the Fortune 500.
I believe a minimum fee is required especially if working with smaller business who don't spend over $1000. At higher budgets move to a percentage of spend with a cap in place for client piece of mind. I think purely billing on a percentage of spend you will make peanuts if you run dozens of small accounts. Also recommending higher budgets so that you get a higher management fee is a conflict of interests in my opinion. You can point this out to a client to help justify a minimum fee. So for example it would be $300 minimum / %10 of spend ( so this would kick in once they spend $3001 ) / Capped percentage of spend at $600. Oh also I charge a setup fee. This varies with client. Sometimes I waive it for smaller clients as an incentive. The key is to get them running, once they see the results the account should never switch off.