Why I charge a fixed fee, not a percentage of your ad spend
The standard agency model pays your marketer more when you spend more — while asking that same person to decide how much you should spend. Here is what I do instead, with the actual numbers.
Most agencies charge a percentage of what you spend on ads. Fifteen percent is common. It sounds reasonable until you write down what it means: the person advising you on your budget earns more every time your budget goes up.
Nobody sets out to abuse that. But it quietly shapes every conversation. When the account plateaus, "increase the budget" is the recommendation that pays. When a campaign should be cut, cutting it costs the advisor money. You will rarely be told to spend less by someone who is paid a share of your spending.
I charge a fixed monthly fee. If I get the same result on a smaller budget, I earn exactly the same — which means telling you to spend less costs me nothing.
What that looks like in practice
I work with a mobile detailing business in South Florida: high-end vehicles, service delivered across a wide metro area, the kind of job where one customer is worth enough to be worth chasing. The commercial structure has two parts and no third one.
A one-time setup fee of $200 USD. That covers conversion tracking and the plumbing underneath it — Google Tag Manager configured properly, conversions defined against real outcomes instead of form fills, a lightweight CRM, and automated notification so a new booking reaches a phone the moment it happens. It is paid before anything starts, because without working measurement there is no honest way to optimise anything later. You would just be guessing with a straight face.
A fixed $350 USD a month to run the account. That number does not move with the budget. Over the time I have run it, the media budget has ranged from roughly $750 to $2,000 a month. My fee at $750 and my fee at $2,000 are the same $350.
The ad budget is his, paid directly to Google. It never passes through my accounts, and I do not count it as my revenue. He funds it weekly or fortnightly if that suits his cash flow better than paying a month up front, and he can stop it without asking me.
The same account, two billing models
The comparison is worth seeing as numbers rather than principle.
| Monthly ad budget | At 15% of spend | Fixed fee | Work involved |
|---|---|---|---|
| $750 | $112.50 | $350 | The same |
| $2,000 | $300 | $350 | The same |
| $5,000 | $750 | $350 | The same |
Two things are visible here that principle alone does not show you.
The first is that at small budgets the percentage is genuinely cheaper, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. If you are spending $750 a month, fifteen percent costs you $112.50 and I cost $350. On that number alone, they win.
The second is that the work in the right-hand column never changes. Structuring campaigns, separating intent, reading search terms by hand, keeping conversion tracking honest — none of that gets harder because the budget went up. The percentage model charges you more for identical work, and the gap widens exactly as you grow.
What I am not claiming
I am not going to show you a return figure for this account, because the advertising phase started recently and any number I gave you would be a number I could not source. What exists today is the structure: tracking that works, campaigns split by intent between search and remarketing, and bookings that reach a phone instantly instead of sitting in an inbox.
That is the part I can stand behind. The results belong in a later article, with the method and the period attached, or they do not get published.
Who this model is wrong for
Fixed fee is not automatically the right answer, and there are cases where you should not choose me on this basis.
If your budget is small and will stay small, a percentage arrangement costs you less and you should take it. The fixed fee starts making sense somewhere around the point where fifteen percent of your spend approaches it — and that is a number you can work out in ten seconds.
If you want someone to carry the budget on their card, that is not this. The account is yours, in your name, funded by you. Some people want the invoice to be one line; I would rather you be able to leave without a negotiation.
If a customer is worth very little to you, none of this works. Paid acquisition needs a ticket large enough to survive an acquisition cost, and no billing model fixes that arithmetic.
The part that is actually about trust
The reason I settled on this is not clever positioning. It is that the conversation gets simpler. There is what it costs to have me run the account, and there is what you choose to put into media. Two numbers, unrelated, both visible.
When those two are tangled together, every recommendation I make has a second reading available to you — is he saying this because it is right, or because it pays him? Removing that question was worth more than the extra revenue the percentage would have brought in on a good month.
Find out what you are actually paying per customer
The acquisition audit reviews your account, your tracking and your funnel, and tells you with numbers whether what you are doing is profitable and which lever to pull first — with the source for every figure. Audit · $200, credited in full if we work together.