Question 1

How Our Billing Works

Accepted Answer

Whether you’ve worked with an agency before or it’s your first time, understanding your contract can be confusing—especially when it comes to the billing process.

Fortunately, our billing is simple and straightforward. And in this article, we’ll show you how it works, help alleviate any confusion, and set expectations so you can manage your budget and payment a whole lot easier.

Getting Started: Initial Invoice & Campaign Creation

For all new accounts, we configure all settings and complete the account build based on the data you provide us. This is called a “campaign creation.”

Upon the effective date of the paid advertising management agreement, we’ll send the first invoice that will cover the first month of work which will contain account setup, campaign build, and potentially campaign launch depending on any potential setup hurdles. .

This initial invoice amount is dependent on two things:

Your Starting Budget
Pricing Tier

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For Example: If you have an initial ad budget of $15,000, you would fall into the first pricing tier, so your initial invoice amount would be $1,500.

What Happens During Month 2 and Beyond?

Once the campaign is created and all set up, it’s time to manage and optimize.

This means we’ll do all the account optimizations needed to improve the performance of your account, including:

Bid Management
Strategy Optimization
Keyword Expansion and Negation
Supplementary Campaign Creation
Weekly Performance Updates
And other relevant optimizations according to your optimization schedule based on your account’s ad budget.

This is all part of our management process.

30 days after the initial invoice, we’ll send out an invoice every 30 days based on the monthly management fee plus the agreed percentage of the approved ad budget.

Learn more about why we charge an ad budget fee and why we bill according to the approved ad budget.

How Your Ad Percentage Fee is Calculated

The amount you are billed for your ad spend percentage is determined again by this chart:

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The above chart works much in the same way as tax brackets, where the amount of ad budget for each tier is calculated at different percentages.

For example: If you have an ad budget of $150,000, your first $50,000 would be billed at a 10% rate, then your next $50,000 at an 8%, and then the final $50,000 at a 6% rate.

To make this easy on you, we have a calculator HERE that will tell you exactly what your monthly invoice will be depending on your chosen ad spend budget. The “Total Fee w/ Base” number will be your final invoiced amount each month.

IF we can include the actual calculator directly into this section, that would be ideal

Question 2

Why Do You Bill According to Approved Advertising Budget, Not Ad Spend?

Accepted Answer

The “approved monthly ad spend” is a budget set by the Advertiser. Solutions 8 bills according to the approved budget regardless of the actual ad spend.

Let’s take a moment to explain this line in our PPC Agreement.

It sounds simple: set a budget, spend the money, increase traffic.

But the truth is, a whole lot of work goes into spending money effectively in Google Ads. In fact, Google often limits the amount of money you can spend on any given campaign. This means we have to do extra work to find new avenues for your ad spend in order to fulfill your budget.

So, let’s say we created three campaigns for your business and your approved budget is $10,000.

What happens if Google limits us to $2,000 on each campaign?

Well, with $4,000 left in the budget, we get to work.

The work behind the ad spend.

With money left over in the budget ($4,000 in this example), our team of strategists get to work to find new opportunities and pockets of traffic. What does this look like?

Conducting additional keyword research
Testing new bidding strategies
A/B testing new campaigns
Building different channels like YouTube and Display to expand outreach
Creating new ad copy

Traffic is inventory.

To visualize this spending challenge, let’s pretend that instead of asking us to purchase traffic for your site, you’re asking us to purchase apples—$10,000 worth of apples, to be exact.

We go to the nearest grocery store and purchase all the apples they have. But, we could only spend $6,000 (I know, that’s a lot of apples).

Now, we have to drive to every other grocery store nearby—maybe hours away or at tiny farmers markets—in order to spend the remaining $4,000.

Whether we hit our goal budget or not, the effort it took to drive around and find every apple possible was just as difficult (if not more difficult) as spending the full budget in one grocery trip.

To take this analogy another step further, this chase gets more difficult if the product is more obscure, like passion fruit or horned melon.

We’re not going to let your budget stay at an attempted threshold.

Overshooting your budget doesn’t benefit either of us.

If we have a difficult time meeting your requested ad budget in our first month together, we may give it another go—but we’ll never let your budget stay at a hard-to-match goal for long.

Basing our fees off the ad budget rather than spend holds us both accountable.

I’ll close with this:

Billing according to your ad budget enforces appropriate expectations by both parties. This keeps you from overspending and keeps us from depleting our resources chasing traffic inventory.

Additionally, there will be no surprises in your monthly billing; this keeps us from the meticulous nickel-and-diming that leads to management nightmares on both ends.

Watch our CEO, Kasim Aslam, explain this in more detail.

Have any other questions? We’re here to help!

Question 3

Why do you charge a 10% fee?

Accepted Answer

Nearly all of our costs are based on how much we spend (this includes click fraud prevention, vendors, and software and monitoring tools, such as Google Keyword Planner, iSpionage, SpyFu, and SEMrush).

So, we simply cannot scale profitably without a benchmark set against spend.

More to the point:

**The larger a campaign gets, the larger the workload to manage. **

As data-driven marketers, everything we do is based on data-driven optimization. Every dollar spent is a data point and every data point requires action.

The more you spend, the more work involved in managing and optimizing the campaign.

The benefit to both of us is you'll never choose to spend more without a high-performing campaign. So, the system ends up being meritocratic in construct.

And, because we charge a base, plus a small percentage (unlike many high-end agencies that simply charge a much larger percentage across the board), our campaigns become more profitable as a percentage as you grow.

As far as the agencies that don't charge a percentage fee…

They're actually showing their hand in doing so.

In fact, we would bet every single one of them is using automated bidding tools to attempt to manage your campaign through the use of "AI" — without the expenditure in human capital.

Still concerned about the fee? Let’s talk about it.