Three shapes exist: a flat fee, a percentage of ad spend, and a percentage of revenue. We do not price PPC separately, it sits inside the $800 to $2,400 monthly tiers with everything else. If someone quotes PPC alone, ask what happens to the listing that the ads point at.
The short version
- Three pricing shapes, and the differences only become visible once your budget moves.
- Standalone PPC pricing creates a boundary problem. The campaigns and the listing they point at end up owned by different people.
- Percentage of ad spend indexes the fee to your budget, which is the one variable you were hiring someone to discipline.
- Ask what the fee buys besides bid changes. Keyword work, creative, and the research behind both.
- Compare at two budget levels. Current spend and double it, then look at the numbers again.
You are probably comparing two quotes right now
One is a flat monthly figure. The other is a percentage, either of ad spend or of attributed revenue, and it looks smaller today. That is the entire difficulty with this question: the models are not comparable at a single point in time, and the point in time you are looking at is the one the seller of the percentage model chose.
So compare at two budgets, not one.
| Flat fee | Percentage of ad spend | Percentage of revenue | |
|---|---|---|---|
| At $3,000 monthly spend | Unchanged | Small | Depends on conversion |
| At $9,000 monthly spend | Unchanged | Triples with your budget | Rises with sales |
| Who benefits from more spend | Nobody in the room | The agency | Both, if it converts |
| Who benefits from efficiency | You, and no conflict | Nobody | Both |
| Best fit | Most brands | Rare, when budget is controlled by you | Established brands at scale |
| Our position | Flat tiers, $800 to $2,400 | Not offered | Above $50,000 monthly profit, 10 to 20 percent, no fixed fee |
The decision rule
If the fee rises when your budget rises, you have hired someone whose revenue improves when your discipline slips. That can still be the right choice if you control the budget yourself and the agency purely executes. In every other case, take the model where the fee is unchanged by how much of your money moves.
Why we do not sell PPC on its own
Campaigns point at a listing. The images, the title, the bullets, the A+ content and the review base decide what happens after the click, and none of that belongs to an advertising vendor working on a campaign-only mandate. When those two jobs sit with different people, the reporting splits in a predictable way: the ads look better every month while the account does not improve.
That is a structural problem, not a competence problem. It is why PPC sits inside our full tier rather than beside it, and why the honest advice for a seller with a broken listing is to fix the listing before increasing anyone's advertising mandate.
If you do buy PPC standalone, at least name the owner of the post-click experience in writing. Someone has to be accountable for the page the traffic lands on.
What the fee should actually buy
Bid management is the cheapest part of this and the part most quotes are implicitly priced on. What should sit behind it:
- Keyword research grounded in the market, not harvested only from your own search term report.
- Creative that can be changed quickly when a test says the main image is the constraint. Ours comes from an in-house studio in Dubai.
- Frameworks with history behind them. Ours were built across more than 500 brands, alongside an in-house sourcing studio in Guangzhou that informs what is worth advertising in the first place.
- Tooling. We have an internal technology team building our advertising, marketing and brand valuation tools rather than reselling someone else's dashboard.
- A stated position on when to stop. Advertising is the easiest place in this business to spend money without a decision point.
Any candidate can be asked for their version of those five. The answers price the fee far better than a rate card does.
What most agencies will not tell you about PPC pricing
The percentage of ad spend model dominates this category because it is easy to sell and easy to scale, not because it serves sellers well. It sounds performance-linked while measuring nothing about performance. The metric it is actually indexed to is how much of your money moved this month.
The second thing: a large share of what gets billed as PPC management is work that software already does adequately. Bid adjustments, dayparting rules and negative keyword harvesting are largely automatable now. What is not automatable is judgment about which products deserve budget at all, which campaigns to shut down, and when the constraint has moved from advertising to the listing. Price the judgment. Do not pay a premium for the automation.
Related answers
- Amazon PPC and brand management bundled cost
- Alternatives to percentage of ad spend model
- Fixed fee vs rev share for Amazon agencies
- How to choose an Amazon FBA marketing partner
- Amazon agency pricing and economics: the complete guide
Advertising is included at every tier, and the tiers are published at Flapen.
