Ask three agencies for an ad management proposal and three differently structured documents come back. One quotes a fixed monthly amount, one asks for a percentage of your ad spend, the third combines the two and adds a bonus on top. Because the numbers sit far apart, the first reflex is to pick the lowest. But the three documents are not describing the same service; they load different risks onto different parties.
This article is not a price list. It explains how the fee is constructed in ad management, whose interest each model works in, and the clause in the contract that is more decisive than price — who owns the account. There are no figures, because a figure on its own is not comparable information: any amount quoted without the scope and the model written down is a number whose contents are unknown.
Why the same service comes back at such different prices
Most of the difference between proposals comes from three variables, and all three are missing from most documents.
The first is scope. On one side, "ad management" can mean nothing more than weekly maintenance of existing campaigns; on the other it can cover account setup, building conversion measurement, landing page edits, producing visuals and copy, the monthly report and the meeting. Two documents carry the same heading while one describes several times the work of the other.
The second is the number of channels. A single search campaign and a setup running search, display, shopping and social media together do not demand the same effort. If the channel names are not written out one by one in the proposal, the comparison cannot be built in the first place.
The third, and the least discussed, is the fee model itself. A fixed fee and a percentage of spend produce completely different amounts for the same service, and they move in different directions over time. Most of the inconsistent ranges circulating in Turkish-language sources come from here: different models described under the same name.
That is why the first question should not be "how much" but "on which model and with which scope". The one area where we publish pricing is search visibility, and there we wrote the scope out item by item; our SEO pricing page can be read as an example of what makes a proposal legible.
Four fee models and the logic behind each
The models circulating in the market vary in name but come down to four main patterns.
Fixed monthly fee. The scope is written down, the amount is fixed, and it is independent of spend. Because it is predictable it is easy to budget for, and the supplier has no incentive to grow the media budget. Its weakness is that the scope does not stretch: when the work grows, extra items become a negotiation; when the work shrinks, the fee stays the same.
Percentage of spend. The fee is a proportion of the ad spend published that month. It rests on the assumption that on large and volatile budgets effort rises with volume. Its weakness is structural: as the budget grows the fee grows, and when the budget is cut the fee shrinks. It is dealt with under its own heading below.
Hybrid model. A small fixed base combined with a spend-linked component. The aim is to cover the supplier's costs in low-budget months and scale the effort in high-budget ones. This is the most common model in practice; but when the ratio between the two components is not written down it becomes impossible to compare.
Performance bonus. An additional payment on top of a fixed or hybrid base, tied to a predefined outcome. There is one condition for it to work healthily: the definition of the outcome the bonus rests on, and the method of measuring it, must be written into the contract. If it is unclear whose dashboard the measurement happens in and under which definition, the bonus turns into an argument repeated every month.
No model is absolutely superior to the others. The choice depends on the size of your budget, how much it fluctuates, and how mature your measurement setup is.
The hidden incentive in the percentage-of-spend model
The problem with this model is not bad faith, it is the direction of the incentive. When the fee is tied to spend, cutting the budget lowers the supplier's revenue. That does not make the right decision impossible, but it does make it harder, and it at least deserves to be discussed openly.
In concrete terms it looks like this: when a diagnosis shows that a campaign should be shut down, the recommendation arrives as "let us optimise it" rather than "let us close it". Or a low-performing channel is kept open to protect the spend base. None of this is proof of bad faith on its own; but ignoring the pressure the model creates is not realistic either.
There are three practices that balance the model. The first is a fee rate that steps down as the budget rises — so that growth stops being an unbounded earnings curve for the supplier. The second is defining a floor and a ceiling: the fee does not move outside a given range. The third is making budget-reduction recommendations a reportable line item; that is, giving the sentence "this month we recommend pausing this item" a place in the report template.
The fastest way to tell whether the model choice is right is to ask this: if a finding emerged that required me to halve my budget, who would tell me, and would telling me be in their own interest? The answer to that question says more than the number in the proposal. We built the steps for how to request diagnostic output, and what counts as evidence, in our article on ad spend going out with no conversions coming in.
Why media budget and management fee should be separate lines
The most common ambiguity is a failure to separate how much of what you pay goes to the platforms and how much goes to the agency. When you see a single total, you lose three things.
The first is the ability to compare. You cannot work out which of two proposals buys more media space and which charges more for labour. The second is performance reading: the cost base you use to evaluate ad results becomes blurred, and the cost-per-conversion calculation rests on a number whose contents are unclear. The third is flexibility: when you want to raise or lower the budget, you do not know in advance how the fee will change.
A proper proposal shows three separate lines: the media budget going to the platforms, the management fee, and any production items (visuals, video, landing pages). The separation should be kept on the invoicing side too; which account the media spend is made from, on which card and in whose name, is a separate matter and the subject of the next section.
That separation is also an audit tool. The question "how much did we spend on advertising" can only be answered correctly at year end if the two items are kept apart.
In whose name should the account be opened
This clause produces more lasting consequences than the fee model. Whoever owns the ad account owns everything that accumulates inside it: campaign history, conversion data, learned bidding models, the audience lists that have been built, past performance comparisons, and the version history of the ad copy.
The correct setup is this: the ad account is opened in the business's name, using the business's own corporate email address. The agency is added to that account with administrator or standard access. The payment method is the business's own card or its own billing setup. The agency manages the account from its own manager account; but ownership does not change hands.
The wrong setup is the account being opened under the agency's own ownership, with only reports shown to you. In that case nothing is left behind when the relationship ends. The new supplier starts from zero: a new account, a new learning period, lost audience lists and a history that cannot be compared. What is lost is not only data but the time that data was bought with.
The same principle applies to the measurement and analytics side: the analytics property, the tag manager container, search console ownership and the conversion definitions should all sit in the business's account. A supplier objecting to this clause is a signal on its own. We wrote out how to interrogate access and handover clauses as a set of nine questions in our article on auditing your existing agency; those questions work exactly the same way for an ad account.
What you lose when the agency runs ads in its own account
In some cases the supplier proposes running several clients under a single umbrella account. The stated reason is usually operational convenience. On your side there are four concrete costs.
History cannot be transferred. Campaign history and learned signals are attached to the account; if the account is not yours, they cannot be moved.
Audiences are lost. Remarketing audiences built from site visitors and customer lists are the result of months of accumulation, and they have to accumulate again in a new account.
Auditing gets harder. You see the full breakdown of spend, the real trajectory of cost per click and the change history only through a report; you have no access to the raw data.
Negotiating power shifts. At renewal time you come to the table as a business whose data sits on the other side of it.
None of these points means the supplier proposing an umbrella account is a bad one. What it means is this: it is a convenience choice, and you are paying for it. If you are going to accept the cost, at the very least what gets handed over at the end of the relationship has to be in writing.
Clauses to look for in the contract
There are five headings to check in an ad management contract after price. None of them is an unusual request; suppliers who work well already write these clauses.
Scope. Which channels, how many campaigns, which production items, how often reports and meetings happen. How out-of-scope work will be priced belongs here too.
Access and ownership. In whose name the accounts will be opened, who will have which level of access, who holds the copyright on the content and visuals produced.
Reporting. Which metrics the report will contain, under which definitions they will be measured, and on which date it will be delivered. The phrase "monthly report" is not a commitment on its own.
Termination and handover. Notice period, the list of assets to be transferred, and the time allowed for the handover. If the handover list is not enumerated in the clause, it becomes a negotiation at the moment of departure.
Confidentiality and competition. How your data will be stored, and whether the supplier will work with your direct competitors. The second is not necessary in every sector, but it matters in narrow markets.
All five headings fit on a single page. If they do not fit, the problem is not the contract, it is that the scope has not been settled.
Why a guarantee is a red flag
Promises like "first page guaranteed", "we guarantee this many conversions" and "if you get no results we take no fee" look attractive. The problem is that these promises rest on variables outside the control of whoever is promising them: competitors' budgets, demand swings in the sector, changes to the platform's own rules, and the conversion capacity of your own website.
A party guaranteeing an outcome is either claiming it can control those variables, or has anchored the guarantee to a definition with no technical substance behind it. The second case is more common: the guaranteed "outcome" is usually an intermediate metric that is easy to produce — impressions, clicks, or an "engagement" with no clear definition.
The reasonable form of commitment is different: commit to the work, not the outcome. This many campaigns built, optimisation at this frequency, reporting under this definition, the measurement setup verified within this period. Those are measurable and within the supplier's control. The outcome is a shared goal, not a one-sided commitment.
The same distinction holds for supplier selection in general; we collected the criteria you can use to put candidates side by side in our agency comparison article.
A handover checklist for changing agencies
When leaving comes onto the agenda, what has to be transferred falls into four headings. Preparing this inventory in a month when the relationship is running smoothly, rather than at the moment of separation, makes it both faster and less contentious.
Access. Ad account ownership, billing setup, analytics property, tag manager container, search console, product data feed account and social media ads manager. The rule is fixed: ownership stays on the business's corporate address, the supplier is added only as a user.
Assets. Source files for ad copy and visuals, the source of the landing pages, the rules for the product data feed, negative keyword lists and audience definitions. The negative list matters especially: it is accumulated knowledge that takes months to rebuild.
Records. The list of conversion definitions, the change history, the archive of monthly reports and the history of spend by channel. Without that archive the new supplier starts from zero.
Knowledge. Why each campaign was opened, which experiments did not work, which queries were deliberately left out. This is the item nobody asks for and the one whose loss is most expensive; half an hour added to the closing meeting costs less than months spent trying the same routes again.
We laid out the full inventory item by item, including the domain, hosting, admin panels and social accounts beyond advertising, in our digital asset handover checklist.
Whether the work is run in-house or with an external supplier is a separate decision; we built a framework that puts the options side by side in our in-house versus agency decision matrix.
Eight questions that make proposals comparable
If the proposals in front of you arrived in different structures, ask all of them the eight questions below in the same form and ask for the answers in writing. The aim is not to find the cheapest, it is to be sure you are comparing the same thing.
- Which fee model do you use, and how does the fee change if my budget doubles?
- Are the media budget and the management fee separate lines on the invoice?
- In whose name will the ad account be opened, and which account will payment come from?
- Which channels are included in scope, and which production items are excluded?
- Who builds the measurement setup, and who approves the conversion definition?
- Which metrics will appear in the report, under which definitions and at what frequency?
- If a finding recommends cutting the budget, where in the report does it appear?
- If the relationship ends, which assets are transferred and over what period?
Put the answers to those eight questions side by side and the real difference between proposals emerges, and the amounts can be read on the same scale for the first time. We wrote out our own scope and way of working on our ad management service page; to read the proposals in front of you against these eight questions together, get in touch.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is the ad agency fee paid separately from the ad budget?
A healthy setup keeps the two apart: the ad budget goes directly to the platforms, the management fee goes to the agency, and they appear as separate lines on the invoice. When everything runs through a single total, how much of the money went to media space and how much to labour becomes invisible, which makes it impossible both to compare proposals and to calculate cost per conversion correctly. Asking for the separation at the contract stage is far easier than asking for it afterwards.
What do I lose if the ad account is opened in the agency's name?
You take on the risk of losing everything that accumulates in the account: campaign history, conversion data, learned bidding signals, remarketing audiences and the ability to compare against the past. All of it is attached to the account, and if the account is not yours it cannot be moved. The correct setup is for the account to be opened in the business's name with the business's own corporate email, with the agency added at administrator access. The same principle applies to the analytics property, the tag manager container and search console.
When does the percentage-of-spend model make sense?
It is a defensible model on large and volatile media budgets, in setups where effort genuinely rises with volume. Its risk is structural: because the fee is tied to spend, cutting the budget lowers the supplier's revenue. There are three ways to balance that risk — a rate that steps down as the budget grows, a floor and a ceiling on the fee, and budget-reduction recommendations appearing as their own line item in the report template. On small and stable budgets a fixed fee is usually the more legible arrangement.
How do I take over campaign history when leaving an agency?
The handover depends on whose name the account was opened in. If the account is in your name, all that has to happen is removing the agency's access and adding the new supplier; the history stays where it is. If the account is the agency's property, part of the history cannot be moved and the handover turns into a negotiation. In either case, ask for these four headings in writing: the list of accesses, source files for ad copy and visuals, negative keyword and audience definitions, and an itemised list of conversion definitions along with the change history.
Can an ad agency guarantee rankings or conversions?
It cannot; and if it does, it is either claiming to control variables outside its control or has tied the guarantee to an intermediate metric that is easy to produce. Some of the variables that determine an advertising outcome — competitors' budgets, demand swings, platform rules and your own site's conversion capacity — sit outside the supplier. The reasonable form of commitment is to commit to the work rather than the outcome: which setup will be done by when, at what frequency optimisation will run, and under which definitions the report will be produced. Those are measurable and within the supplier's control.