A Birmingham question
What does a Birmingham PPC agency cost?
Most Birmingham PPC agencies do not publish a fee, and the ones that do start at four figures a month or take only businesses spending several thousand pounds on ads. Here the fee is published and flat: £249 a month for ad spend up to £1,000, £399 up to £3,000, £599 up to £8,000, plus £199 once to build the account, with the ad spend paid to Google on your own card.
Daniel Stoychev, Webso Digital · 5 September 2026
The three ways agencies charge
A percentage of ad spend, usually somewhere between 10 and 20 per cent, which rises every time the budget does and gives the agency a reason to recommend spending more. A fixed monthly retainer, often with a minimum spend attached, which is honest but usually set at a level that qualifies out small accounts. Or a flat fee by spend band, which is a retainer that steps up only when your spend crosses a threshold. The third is what this site does, because the fee should pay for the hours the account takes, and the hours are set by the spend, not by how well it goes.
What the big agencies actually ask for
When we read the ten largest UK PPC agency websites on 5 September 2026, one published a full price list starting at £1,500 a month, one published a single figure from £2,500 a month plus VAT, and the rest published nothing. One stated plainly that it works with advertising budgets from £10,000 a month upwards; another asks for established businesses with revenue over a million. None of them is trying to serve a Birmingham business spending £800 a month, and that is the business most of this site is written for.
What the fee here includes, and what it does not
The fee covers the weekly read of the search terms report, the tracking, the bids and budgets, the ads, changes to the landing page from the Growth tier up, and the written monthly report, by one named person. It does not cover the ad spend, which goes to Google on your card and is never marked up, or a landing page built from scratch, which is quoted separately. The £150 written audit is optional and credited against the setup fee; the 72-hour check is free.
The all-in figure to compare
Compare agencies on ad spend plus fee per enquiry, not on the fee alone. A business spending £1,000 on ads pays £1,249 a month all-in here; if that buys twenty enquiries, each cost about £62. A percentage agency charging 15 per cent would charge £150 on the same spend, which is cheaper, and would rarely take an account that size at all. At £3,000 of spend the percentage fee is £450 against £399 here, and at £8,000 it is £1,200 against £599. The flat fee is dearer at the bottom and much cheaper at the top, and it does not move when the budget does.
The one thing to check in any quote
Ask what happens to the fee if the agency cuts your spend by a third by removing waste. A flat-fee agency says nothing happens. A percentage agency has just been asked to explain why doing its job would cost it money.
Read on
The page that does this for you is Pricing, with the terms on the page; the long version is the guide Choosing a PPC agency in Birmingham.
People then ask
- Is VAT added to the fee?
- Yes, VAT is added to the management fee. Google bills its own VAT on the ad spend separately, on your card.
- Is there a contract?
- A 3-month minimum, because the first month is spent cutting waste and proving tracking and the third is the first worth judging. After that it is monthly with a month's notice.
- Does the fee change if the campaigns do well?
- No. It changes only when your ad spend crosses into another band, and you are told before that happens.