Digital Marketing Agency Pricing Survey from Credo (updated 2019)

PPC Pricing

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How do PPC agencies price their work? In our day to day, we speak with a lot of companies looking to hire a firm to help with their PPC campaigns and we get this question:

“Well, how much do PPC firms charge?”

There is a quick answer and a longer answer. You will receive both on this page.

The short answer is this:

Most PPC firms and consultants price their work as a base management fee up to a certain spend, then a percentage of spend. For most, their minimum management fee is $1,500 per month and then 15% of spend above $10,000 in spend. This also varies based on number of channels (and pricing can occur per channel managed).

The longer answer is much more complicated. To help with that, we will lean on the data from the survey.

Average PPC pricing worldwide

First let’s look at the average rates of PPC firms worldwide.

PPC firm worldwide hourly rates

Here are the PPC firm worldwide hourly rates, for all company sizes:

The raw data:

PPC firm worldwide project minimums

Here are the project minimums that the PPC firms across the world reported that they take:

The raw data:

Here are the single project minimums for PPC firms worldwide, based on company size:

That chart is a bit busy, so here is the raw data:

The interesting takeaways in this section are:

• As the company gets bigger, their single project minimums go up. In fact, once a PPC firm gets above 5 their minimums are much more likely to be over $5,000.
• A full 53.95% of PPC firms worldwide take single projects under $2,000 in value.
• Only 1.97% of firms do not take one-time projects (eg audits).
• No PPC  firms in our dataset with 20+ employees only do retainers. This is different from SEO.

PPC firm worldwide retainer minimums

Here are the PPC firm worldwide monthly retainer rates as reported by our 152 respondents:

The raw data:

Interesting takeaways include:

• 54.61% of PPC firms worldwide take monthly retainers of less than $2,000;
• Only 10.52% of PPC firms worldwide have a monthly minimum above $4,000.
• 7.24% of firms say they have no minimum.

Average PPC rates in US and UK

Here are the average rates for US and UK PPC firms.

US PPC firm hourly rates

The raw data:

UK PPC firm hourly rates

Here are the average hourly rates for UK PPC firms:

The raw data:

UK PPC firms need to charge more!

Average PPC agency rates

Now let’s look at average PPC agency rates.

PPC agency worldwide hourly rates

Here are the worldwide PPC agency average hourly rates:

Raw data:

PPC agency worldwide project minimums

Here are the reported project minimums for the PPC agencies in our dataset, of which there are 112:

The raw data:

PPC agency project minimums (US)

Here are the US PPC agency project minimums from our dataset:

The raw data:

Interesting takeaways from this section are:

• US PPC agencies are only nominally more picky in the project sizes they take.
• Still a very large number (43.48%) take projects under $2,000 and 17.38% take them under $1,000.

PPC agency worldwide retainer minimums

Here are the worldwide PPC agency retainer minimums from our 112 respondents:

The raw data:

PPC agency monthly retainer minimum (US)

Here are the US PPC agency monthly retainer minimums as reported by our 69 respondents:

The raw data:

Interesting takeaways include:

• A higher percentage of US PPC agencies (compared to worldwide) have a minimum between $1,000-$2,000 per month;
• A full 13% of US PPC agencies have a monthly minimum over $5,000. This is higher than the worldwide average.

US PPC agencies are, from our data, more expensive than the worldwide averages.

Average PPC consultant rates

Now let’s look at PPC consultant rates worldwide and US specific.

PPC consultant worldwide hourly rates

Here are the PPC consultant worldwide hourly rates from our dataset containing 40 PPC consultants:

The raw data:

PPC consultant worldwide project minimums

Here are the PPC consultant worldwide project minimums, of which there were 40 respondents:

The raw data:

US PPC consultant project minimums

Here are the US PPC consultant projects minimums from our dataset, in which there were 20 respondents. Thus, we are showing the raw numbers here instead of percentages:

The raw data:

PPC consultant worldwide retainer minimums

Here are the PPC consultant worldwide monthly retainer minimums from the 40 respondents in our dataset:

The raw data: