Agency choice
How much should I pay for Google Ads management?
Why this matters
The right number depends on how much spend you are managing, how complex the catalogue is, and what the agency actually delivers. The mistake is comparing fees in isolation rather than fees plus scope plus opportunity cost.
At £10k–£30k/month ad spend, specialist UK ecommerce agencies typically sit between £2k and £4k/month fixed fee. At £30k–£100k/month, fees stretch to £4k–£8k as catalogue complexity grows. Above £100k/month, percentage-of-spend models become more common at 8–15% of media, which sounds clean but can become expensive at scale without a margin governor.
Freelancers run cheaper: £1.5k–£3k/month at lower spend tiers, but bring single-point-of-failure risk: no cover, no second pair of eyes, limited benchmark data. They are right for brands at £3k–£15k/month spend where dedicated agency overhead is hard to justify.
An in-house senior PPC manager in the UK is roughly £55k–£75k salary plus £15k–£20k tools (feed software, reporting, analytics) plus management overhead. Realistic fully-loaded cost is £100k+/year. That math makes in-house attractive above ~£500k/year ad spend and rarely below it.
How JudeLuxe approaches this
JudeLuxe charges a fixed monthly fee scoped to catalogue complexity and spend, with a £2k/month minimum and £10k/month minimum ad spend. We do not take percentage of spend because the incentives misalign as you grow.
If you want a like-for-like comparison against your current arrangement, the Profit Audit produces a costed view of where spend is leaking and what tighter management would realistically recover.
Related reading: Retained Google Ads management.
Related questions
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