Google Ads management cost shows up on your bill as two separate lines, and most Vancouver owners compare only one of them. The first line is the management fee you pay the agency. The second is ad spend, the money Google charges you, mostly each time someone clicks your ad. A quote that looks cheap on the first line can turn expensive once you ask what the fee buys.
The two lines on the bill
Start with ad spend, because you control it. You set the budget, change it from one month to the next, and pay it directly to Google. The agency does not hold that money. If a company asks you to send ad spend to them first, ask why.
The management fee is the price of running the account. NG Company's Google Ads management comes in three tiers, in Canadian dollars:
- Starter: $800 a month
- Growth: $1,200 a month
- Pro: 15% of ad spend
A percentage fee grows with the budget. Say a business doubles its ad spend in a month: the fee doubles with it, and the ad spend itself still goes to Google on top. A fee that grows like that only makes sense if the work behind it is visible, so look at what the fee covers.
Paid social ads follow the same two-line logic. Our Targeting service for Facebook and Instagram starts at $650 a month, and the platform budget is a separate line.
What does a management fee cover?
The fee should pay for five jobs:
- keyword research
- ad copy and testing
- conversion tracking
- negative keywords
- a monthly report in plain English
Keyword research decides which searches can trigger your ad. Negative keywords decide which ones cannot. Say a roofer bids on the word roofing with a broad or phrase match. Searches for roofing jobs and roofing courses can trigger the ad too, and every one of those clicks is billed. Someone has to block those searches, and keep adding to the block list as new search terms show up in the account.
Ad copy needs testing. Several versions of a headline run against each other, and the weaker ones get replaced. One version left running for months is a sign that nobody is looking at the account.
Tracking is the job owners skip. Google can only improve toward something it can count. If calls and form submissions are not recorded as leads, the account chases clicks, and clicks do not pay your rent. NG's fee includes conversion tracking, ongoing optimization and a plain-English report, so you can read the result without learning Google's dashboard.
Four questions to ask before you sign
Who owns the account?
Ask whose email and billing sit on the Google Ads account, and whether you have admin access to it. If the account lives under the agency's own login and billing, getting your keyword history and tracking out when you leave can be hard, and you may end up starting over. Paying Google directly for ad spend keeps the money trail in your hands.
What counts as a lead?
A phone call over a set length, a submitted form, a booking. Pick them before launch and have each one tracked. A visit to a page is not a lead. The way an account counts leads steers every bid it places, which is why we wrote about optimizing Google Ads for the wrong thing and about what bad tracking data does to an ad strategy.
How often do bids and keywords change?
Ask for a rhythm. An agency that touches the account twice a year is charging for a login. Ask what gets reviewed each month: search terms, negative keywords, ad versions, how the budget splits between campaigns. A vague answer often means there is no routine.
What does the report show?
A useful report says how many calls and forms came from the ads, how much each one cost, and what was changed during the month. A page of traffic charts with no lead count leaves you unable to tell whether the fee earned anything.
What the cost looked like on one real account
One NG client in home services in Metro Vancouver got 46 customer requests from Google Ads in a month: 25 calls from the ads and 21 booking forms, between Aug 22 and Sep 22, 2026. Each request cost $15.80, down from about $250 when the account started. The month before had 48 requests at $16.44 each.
Those are one client's numbers, and they are not a promise for your account. They show what tracking makes visible: because every call and form was counted, the price of each request could be read off the report every month. The full breakdown is on the home services Google Ads case page.
Putting two quotes side by side
Write both quotes on one sheet with the same rows: monthly fee, who pays Google, what is tracked, what the report contains, contract length, who owns the account. Gaps show up fast. If the lower quote leaves half the rows blank, each blank row is work you will either do yourself or go without.
Both lines also have to fit each other. A large fee next to a modest ad budget means a big share of your money goes to the agency instead of to Google. Percentage pricing ties the fee to what you spend, which is one way to keep the two lines in proportion. Because you can change ad spend every month, start at a level you can watch closely and raise it once the leads justify it.
Contracts and commitments
Ongoing services such as Google Ads are monthly with no long lock-in contract. That matters when you compare fees across Vancouver agencies. A lower monthly number tied to a long term costs more to leave than a higher one you can stop.
To see how much management would cost for your own Vancouver business, send the details through the quote form. Bring the four questions above and ask them of us first.