There are two costs and they are frequently confused: what you pay Google, and what you pay whoever manages it. Understanding both separately is the only way to judge whether the arrangement is working.
What sets your cost per click
Competition. More advertisers bidding on a term raises the price. Legal, insurance and finance are notoriously expensive; niche B2B terms are often cheap.
Quality Score. Google rates expected click-through rate, ad relevance and landing page experience. A more relevant advertiser can pay less for a better position — which is why improving relevance beats raising bids.
Intent. "Buy X now" costs more than "what is X", because it is worth more.
Device, time and location. All vary, sometimes substantially.
Published average CPC figures for your industry are close to useless. The range within any industry is wider than the difference between industries.
What budget do you need?
Enough for the data to mean something. Ten clicks a week will never tell you which keywords convert.
Work backwards: if your conversion rate is 3 percent, you need roughly 33 clicks per enquiry. At €3 per click, one enquiry costs about €100. If you want ten enquiries a month, that is around €1,000 of media budget. That is a worked example with assumed figures, not our offer.
We manage Google Ads from a minimum agreed Google ad budget of €1,000 a month, which Google charges to you directly. Our management fee is 30% of the agreed monthly ad budget, net, plus 19% VAT — €300 net (€357 including VAT) at €1,000. The minimum is meant to give one clearly bounded area enough real interactions to learn from; below that, organic and conversion work usually returns more per euro.
Management fee models
Percentage of spend. Common and simple. Aligns effort with account size. The criticism — that it rewards spending more — is fair, and worth discussing openly. Our fee is 30% of the agreed monthly ad budget, net, plus 19% VAT; it is based on the budget agreed in advance, not on what Google actually spends, and setup, conversion tracking and ongoing management are included.
Fixed monthly fee. Predictable. Can be poor value for very small accounts and a bargain for large ones.
Performance-based. Attractive and hard to define fairly. Whose conversion counts? Who is responsible when the landing page is the problem?
Hourly. Honest, and it makes ongoing optimisation feel like a cost centre, which discourages the very work that improves results.
Where budget is wasted
- broad match with no negative keyword discipline
- traffic landing on a page that does not match the ad
- conversion tracking counting clicks rather than confirmed submissions
- Search Partners and Display expansion left on by default
- ads running when nobody can answer the phone
- bidding on terms with no commercial intent
Most underperforming accounts have several of these simultaneously.
The total picture
Media spend plus management fee plus the cost of whatever the traffic lands on. A campaign sending good traffic to a weak page is not a cheap campaign, however low the CPC.
Is there a minimum to make it worthwhile?
Practically, yes. Very small budgets cannot gather enough data to optimise, so they stay unoptimised.
Is WebAktive's work included in the €1,000?
No. The €1,000 is the minimum agreed ad budget, which Google charges to the payment card in your own account. Our management fee comes on top: 30% of the agreed budget, net, plus 19% VAT, which is €300 net (€357 including VAT) at €1,000. Google and WebAktive invoice separately.
Who should own the account?
You. Always. An agency should have access, not possession, so you can leave with your own history intact.
Can we run it ourselves?
Yes. The interface is learnable. The recurring failures are structural — negatives, tracking, and reading the search terms report.
Our offer at a glance
Our management fee is a net amount plus 19% VAT; the ad budget is billed by Google directly. The minimum budget is a starting point, not a budget that guarantees a result in every industry. Google Ads services and costs · Services and pricing