Agency choice
Should I pay percentage of spend or fixed fee for Google Ads management?
Why this matters
The model you pick changes the conversation. Under percentage-of-spend, every recommendation to 'add budget' or 'expand into new campaigns' grows the agency's fee at the same time. That is not corrupt: the work usually scales too, but the incentive bias is real, especially when margin is fragile.
Fixed fee removes that conflict at the cost of flexibility. A fixed scope priced for a £20k/month account becomes underwater if the account jumps to £80k/month: so fixed-fee agencies typically reprice every six to twelve months as spend bands shift, or scope explicitly by catalogue size.
Percentage models suit enterprise spend where the absolute pound cost is justified by team capacity and multi-channel coordination. Fixed fee suits the £10k–£500k/month band where margin discipline is the lever and you want the agency optimising to profit, not to media.
Hybrid models exist: a fixed retainer with a small performance component on POAS or contribution profit, and they can work if the performance metric is genuinely commercial rather than a ROAS proxy.
How JudeLuxe approaches this
JudeLuxe runs on fixed monthly fee only. The fee is scoped to catalogue complexity and spend band, not to budget. If your spend doubles, our recommendation is the same one we would make at half the spend: only push budget where margin supports it.
That principle is the reason we built BOI™: to make SKU-level commercial decisions defensible rather than blended.
Related reading: Retained Google Ads management.
Related questions
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