Every advertising engagement involves two very different numbers: the media budget — what Google or Meta charges to run your ads — and the management fee, what the agency charges to run them well. Those numbers should never touch. In much of the local-marketing industry, they do, and the blending is where the trouble starts.
How percentage-of-spend billing works
Under the common model, the agency bills you one figure for “advertising,” pays the platforms out of it, and keeps a percentage — or blends its fee and the media cost into a single invoice line. Sometimes the split is disclosed. Often it is not, and the platform’s own invoice — the one document that would show exactly what your ads cost — is something you never see, because the account the ads run in belongs to the agency.
We will not put a number on how much of a typical blended bill is fee rather than media, because we would be guessing about other people’s invoices. The structure is the problem, whatever the percentage is.
The incentive it creates
When an agency’s revenue is a percentage of your spend, it earns more when you spend more — whether or not the spending performs. That is not an accusation of bad faith; most people in this industry work honestly inside the model they were handed. But incentives shape behavior over time, and this one points the wrong way. It rewards bigger budgets over better campaigns, and it makes “you should increase spend” a recommendation the agency profits from making.
An advisor whose pay rises with your costs is not neutral about your costs. That is the whole problem, stated once.
Our model: two numbers that never touch
When we manage advertising, your ads run in your own Google and Meta accounts, and the platforms bill your card directly. We take $0 markup on ad spend — we never touch the media bill. Our management fee is a separate, flat, known number, listed with the rest of our pricing. You can audit both sides whenever you like, because both invoices are yours.
The consequence is that our only way to earn the fee is results. Each month you get a plain-terms report: what was spent, what it produced, and what we changed. If a report needs a translator, it is hiding something — so ours don’t.
Four questions to ask any agency
- Who owns the ad account my campaigns run in?
- Can I see the platform’s own invoice — Google’s bill, not yours?
- What is your fee, as a number separate from the media budget?
- If we part ways, do I keep the account and its history?
A transparent agency answers all four without flinching. We will show you our answers before you ask.