What $400 a month
actually buys
We have taken over a lot of these accounts. They fail the same way every time, and it has almost nothing to do with skill.
Nobody is being lazy. There is no time in the price.
A $400 monthly fee has to cover software, overheads and a salary. Whatever is left buys a small number of hours a month across every client on that plan, which means the work has to be front-loaded: build the account once, then report on it.
That is a rational business model and it is not dishonest. It is simply a different product from an account somebody opens every weekday, and the difference does not show up in month one. It shows up in month four, in your cost per lead, by which point the cheap year has already been paid for in wasted ad spend.
Everything below follows from that single constraint. None of it requires anybody at the other agency to be bad at their job.
What we find, and what should be there
These are the six things we check first in any inherited account. They come up together because they all come out of the same shortage of hours.
| What we check | What we usually find | What should be there |
|---|---|---|
| Campaign structure | One campaign covering every service the business sells, with one shared budget. | One campaign per cluster of services that share a buyer, a pitch and a page, each with its own budget. |
| Negative keywords | A handful of obvious terms added at build, then nothing. Sometimes an empty list. | A list that grows every weekday, applied across campaigns, built from your own search terms. |
| Landing page | Ads pointed at the homepage, or at a services page that lists everything. | A page per campaign that answers the search, names the area, and puts the phone number above the fold. |
| Call tracking | None, or a single number with no campaign attribution and no recordings. | Tracked numbers per campaign, recordings you can listen to, calls counted as the leads they are. |
| Testing | The ad copy written at launch, still running unchanged a year later. | New copy in rotation weekly, one landing page variant tested monthly, results reported either way. |
| Account ownership | Account opened inside the agency’s manager account. History does not leave with you. | Opened in your name, on your billing, with everything transferable the day you ask. |
Want this applied to your account? Bring the last 30 days of search terms, change history, landing pages and call tracking to the first call. We will show you where the budget is leaking before we ask you to move it.
The fee is not the expensive part
The management fee is the smallest number in this decision. The large number is your ad spend, and the question that matters is what share of it reaches somebody who could plausibly book a job.
An account with no negative list and a homepage destination wastes a share of every month’s budget on searches that were never going to convert. That waste does not appear as a line item anywhere. It appears as a cost per lead that never improves, and it is usually larger than the entire difference in management fee.
This is the whole argument, and you do not have to take it from us. Ask your current provider for last month’s search terms report and read it yourself.
What your account should actually costWhen a cheap provider is genuinely the right answer
If none of these describes you, the rest of this page applies. If one of them does, hire the cheap provider and spend the difference on something else.
- One service, one small town, little competition. If there are three businesses bidding in your market and the search volume is low, an account genuinely can be built once and left. There is not enough traffic for daily work to find anything.
- A budget that cannot carry a real fee. If your ad spend is small enough that our fee would be a large share of it, the arithmetic does not work and we will tell you that on the call rather than after you sign.
- You want a switch left on, not a channel grown. Some businesses are at capacity and want a steady trickle rather than improvement. That is a maintenance job, and paying for daily optimization you do not want is just an expensive way to stay still.
- You are testing whether advertising works at all. If you have never run ads and want to find out cheaply before committing, that is a reasonable first step. Just make sure the account is opened in your name so the experiment is not wasted.
Questions worth asking any agency
Including the one you are talking to now.
Is a $400 a month agency always bad?
No. It is bad at running an account that needs daily attention, which is most of them. It is perfectly reasonable for keeping a small, stable, single-service campaign switched on in a market with little competition. The failure is not the price, it is the mismatch between the price and the work the account needs.
What am I actually paying for at $1,490 a month?
Roughly twenty minutes a day of a person who knows your trade, across three platforms, plus the landing pages and the tracking underneath them. Divided across Google, Meta and Yelp it is about $497 a platform, which is less than most agencies charge to run one.
How can I tell if my current agency is doing the work?
Ask for three things: your search terms report for last month, your negative keyword list, and the URL your ads point to. If the search terms are full of irrelevant phrases, the negative list is short, and the ads point at your homepage, the account is being reported on rather than worked on.
Do I own my ad account if I switch?
Check before you need to know. If the account was opened under the agency's manager account rather than in your name, you may leave with nothing: no conversion history, no landing pages, and a new account that has to learn your market from zero. It is the single most expensive thing to discover late.
What is the real cost of a cheap account?
Not the fee. It is the ad spend that goes to searches which were never going to book, month after month, because nobody is removing them. On most budgets that wasted spend is larger than the difference in management fee within a quarter, which is what makes the cheap option expensive.
