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That is the answer. The rest of this page is what the fee covers week to week, how the fee models differ and which one quietly works against you, the four failures that drain a managed account, and how to vet a manager before you hand over the keys. It reads the same way across paid media across Meta, Google, and TikTok, because the weekly loop has the same shape on every platform.

What the work actually is

Managing a PPC account is not "setting up campaigns." Setup is week one. Management is the 51 weeks after it, and it splits into two rhythms.

Week one is an audit and usually a rebuild

Before anything gets optimised, someone has to read the account. That means pulling the search terms report, checking what each conversion action actually counts, tracing where budget goes by campaign and by device, and finding the keywords that spent money without ever producing a lead.

Most inherited accounts are not worth patching. Years of layered edits, paused-but-not-deleted campaigns, and conversion actions nobody can explain make a rebuild faster than a repair. Our rule is to rebuild from scratch in week one and leave the old account paused for reference, so nothing is lost and nothing tangled carries forward. On our Calgary Google Ads work the audit is free, it comes back inside 24 hours, and it includes a written 90 day plan you keep whether or not you hire us.

Then it becomes a weekly loop

The recurring work is unglamorous and it is where the money is:

• Search term mining. Reading what people actually typed, adding the profitable ones as keywords, adding the wasteful ones as negatives. Broad match without a maintained negative list is the single fastest way to burn a budget.
• Conversion integrity. Confirming that a conversion is a lead, not a thank-you page view, a scroll, or a duplicate counted twice. Everything downstream, including automated bidding, learns from this number.
• Bid and budget pacing. Watching where spend concentrates, capping the campaigns that eat budget without returning it, funding the ones that do.
• Creative and asset rotation. Ads fatigue, so ad creative on a schedule beats replacing it when someone remembers. Copy, headlines, images, and video all rotate.
• Landing page testing. Most accounts underperform because the page leaks, not the ads. Traffic quality can be perfect and the form still converts at nothing.
• Attribution health. Conversions API, GA4, and server-side tracking break silently after a site change. Somebody has to notice.
• Reporting. A live dashboard, plus a human who can explain what moved and why.

At Meridian15 that work is split across a strategist, a media buyer, a creative lead, and an editor. All named, all reachable. If you cannot name the person pressing the buttons on your account, that is worth asking about.

What it costs and how the fee is structured

Three fee models are common, and they are not equivalent.

Fixed monthly fee. A flat number, quoted after the audit, separate from spend. Most accounts sit at $1,500 to $3,500 a month for management. The fee does not move when your budget moves, which means nobody has an incentive to talk you into more spend than the account can absorb. This is how we price it.

Percentage of ad spend. Usually 10% to 20% of your budget. It looks fair and it inverts the incentive: the agency gets paid more for spending more, and gets paid less for finding the efficiency that lets you spend less. It also means your bill jumps in your busiest month, when you needed the cash for inventory.

Hourly or per-project. Fine for a one-time audit or a build. It falls apart as an ongoing arrangement, because the value is in the weekly loop and nobody wants to log hours against a 20 minute search term cleanup.

Fee levels move with market and scope. For the local picture across services, this is what a Calgary retainer costs.

Two other numbers matter. First, ad spend should go directly to the platform, on your billing profile, with no agency markup. Second, there is a floor where management stops making sense. Below about $1,000 a month in Google Ads spend, a management fee eats too much of the total and automated bidding does not get enough conversion data to learn from. For a full Meta funnel running prospecting, retargeting, and lookalikes at the same time, the floor is higher, around $3,000 a month in media, because a smaller budget starves every stage of it. Once an account clears those floors, the question turns into when to scale spend rather than whether to run at all.

The four failures that drain a managed account

These show up over and over in audits of accounts that already have a manager.

One, the conversion action is wrong. If the account counts page views, phone clicks that nobody answered, or a form fire plus a redirect as two events, every number in the dashboard is inflated and the bidding algorithm is optimising toward noise. Fix this before touching anything else.

Two, Performance Max is running unsupervised. PMax will happily spend on brand searches you would have won for free and on placements you would never buy. Brand exclusions, account-level negatives, and separate asset groups by product line are the controls. An account with one asset group and no exclusions is not being managed.

Three, the negative keyword list stopped growing. A negative list is a living document. If the last addition was six months ago, nobody has opened the search terms report since.

Four, reporting is a vanity slide. Impressions, clicks, and CTR go up and to the right in almost every account. The numbers that matter are cost per qualified lead, lead-to-sale rate, and revenue. If your monthly report does not connect spend to something your accountant recognises, ask for a different report.

When to keep it in house

PPC management is worth paying for when the account is complex enough that the fee is smaller than the waste it removes. That is usually true above a few thousand a month in spend, across multiple campaign types, with a real sales pipeline behind it.

Keep it in house when your spend is small and stable, you sell one thing, and someone on the team enjoys the weekly loop. A single well-structured search campaign with a tight keyword list, correct conversion tracking, and a maintained negative list can run for a long time on an hour a week. Bring in help when you add a second channel, launch a second product line, or find that the hour a week keeps getting skipped.

The question sitting underneath that one is usually how paid and SEO split a budget.

How to vet a PPC manager in ten minutes

Ask these five questions. The answers tell you almost everything.

1. Who owns the account? The Google Ads and Meta accounts should be created under your billing, with the agency added as a user. If an agency owns the account and takes the history when the relationship ends, walk.
2. What would you change in week one? A real answer names specifics from a look at your account. A vague answer about "optimising for performance" means they have not looked.
3. Can I see a search terms report from a live account? Redacted is fine. It shows whether they actually work at the query level.
4. Who works on my account, by name? Named humans, not a pooled queue.
5. What is the contract? Month to month is the honest default. A 12 month lock on a service that should prove itself in 60 days protects the agency, not you.

One more thing to listen for. Nobody can promise you a cost per lead, a position, or a return, because the auction, your competitors, and your own close rate are not theirs to control. What a manager can commit to is the process: the audit, the rebuild, the weekly loop, and reporting you can read without a translator.

If the account is Google Ads specifically, the same vetting runs longer in our guide to choosing a Google Ads agency.

Frequently asked questions

What does PPC campaign management include?

Account audit and structure, keyword and audience research, ad and creative production or rotation, bid strategy and budget pacing, search term mining and negative keywords, conversion tracking setup, landing page testing, and regular reporting. Ongoing management is the recurring version of all of it, not a one-time setup.

How much does PPC management cost per month?

Most accounts land between $1,500 and $3,500 a month for the management fee, quoted as a fixed number after an audit. Ad spend is separate and goes directly to Google or Meta on your own billing. Some agencies charge 10% to 20% of ad spend instead, which ties their pay to your budget rather than to the work.

Is there a minimum ad spend for PPC management to be worth it?

For Google Ads, about $1,000 a month is the practical floor. Below that the management fee is too large a share of the total and automated bidding does not collect enough conversion data to work with. A full Meta funnel needs more, around $3,000 a month in media, because prospecting, retargeting, and lookalikes each need their own budget.

How long does it take before a new PPC manager makes a difference?

The first two weeks are structural: audit, rebuild, tracking fixes. After that the account goes through a learning period on any new bid strategy, then search term cleanup, then bidding settles. Nobody can guarantee a specific result on a specific date, so treat a promised number with suspicion.

Should I hire a PPC agency or a freelancer?

A freelancer is fine for a single channel with steady spend and no creative needs. An agency makes sense when you are running more than one platform, need creative produced as well as bought, or want cover when one person is away. Ask either one the same five vetting questions.