When people ask what PPC costs, they usually mean two different things. One is what you pay Google, Meta or LinkedIn for clicks. The other is what you pay a person or agency to run the campaigns. Mixing them up leads to confusing quotes and unpleasant surprises.

Cost one: ad spend

Ad spend is the money the platforms charge for clicks or impressions. You pay it directly to them, from an account you own. How much you need depends on:

  • What a click costs in your market. Some Miami categories are far more competitive than others.
  • How many leads you want. More volume needs more clicks.
  • How well your site converts. A site that turns more visitors into calls needs less spend for the same result.

Cost two: the management fee

This pays for the work: strategy, setup, writing ads, building audiences, monitoring, testing and reporting. Fees are usually structured one of three ways:

  • Flat monthly fee. Predictable. Good when the scope is clear.
  • Percentage of spend. The fee grows with the budget. It can reward spending more, so ask how that is handled.
  • Hybrid. A base fee plus a share above a threshold.

Ask what the fee covers. Landing pages, creative, call tracking and conversion setup are sometimes extra.

How to set a starting budget

Work backwards from the result you want:

  1. Decide how many customers you need from ads each month.
  2. Estimate how many leads it takes to win one customer, using your own close rate.
  3. Multiply to get the leads you need.
  4. Multiply by what a lead is likely to cost in your market to get a starting budget, and plan to adjust it after the first few weeks of real data.

This is far more useful than picking a number that feels comfortable and hoping it works.

What actually matters: cost per lead and return

The monthly bill is not the measure. Cost per lead, cost per booked call and revenue per dollar are. A campaign that costs more but books more customers can be the cheaper option. That only works if every lead is tracked to the ad that produced it, including phone calls.

Questions to ask

  • Do I own the ad accounts and the data?
  • Is the ad spend billed to me directly by the platform?
  • What is included in the fee, and what is extra?
  • How will you track calls and form fills back to the ads?
  • How often will I see reports, and what will they show?

Red flags

  • The agency runs ads from its own account and you cannot see the history.
  • The fee and the ad spend are bundled into a single number.
  • Reports focus on clicks and impressions, with no leads or revenue.
  • A promise of a specific cost per lead before they have seen your market.

How we work

Ad spend is paid directly to the platforms, in accounts you own, and reported next to every lead it produced. Management is scoped to your goals and agreed in writing before any work starts. Start with a free proposal and we will tell you which parts are worth doing first.