How do paid media agencies charge for their work?
Most paid media agencies charge a percentage of ad spend, a flat retainer, or a hybrid of the two, and the model shapes behavior more than the price does. We use a flat monthly retainer plus a small percentage of spend.
A pure percentage model pays the agency more when you spend more, even when the extra spend is inefficient. A pure flat fee can drift toward doing the minimum once the account is built. A hybrid keeps the base predictable and ties only a small part of the fee to scale, so budget growth is not the main way the agency earns.
Whatever the model, ask three things: what is included, how the fee changes if you cut spend, and what the notice period is. Ours: most engagements run $2,000 to $15,000 a month, the minimum is $2,000 in management with at least $3,000 in ad spend, and you can cancel with 30 days' notice. Each platform bills media to you directly. See Google Ads management for how that works on a single channel.
What is the difference between paid, owned and earned media?
Paid media is attention you buy, like search ads, social ads and YouTube. Owned media is what you control, like your website, email list and social profiles. Earned media is what others say about you: reviews, press, word of mouth and organic mentions.
The three work best together. Paid media gets you in front of people fast, but it lands on owned media, so a weak website caps what any ad can do. Earned media makes both work harder, because a searcher who sees your ad and then reads strong reviews is far easier to convert.
The lines keep blurring. AI answers in Google and ChatGPT summarize reviews, forums and websites, and they sit right next to the ads. For budgeting, I treat paid media as the throttle and owned and earned as the engine. If the engine is weak, more throttle mostly burns fuel. That is why we often pair paid work with SEO and web fixes before we raise spend.
Should I hire a paid media agency or build an in-house team?
Use an agency or senior consultant until paid media is big enough to justify at least one experienced full-time specialist, and even then many companies keep outside help for depth. The hard part of in-house is not the salary. It is experience.
Getting genuinely good at paid media takes years of reps across many accounts. I have put the state of PPC skills across the industry at about a two out of ten, largely because new people get handed accounts and a wiki and are told to figure it out. One in-house hire sees one account. An agency strategist has seen the same problem many times and knows which fix to try first.
In-house wins when your product is complex, approvals are slow, or paid media is core to the business every day. A setup that works well: an in-house marketer owns goals, offers and creative, and an outside team runs the accounts and measurement. We also partner with in-house teams on AI implementation and run white-label paid media for agencies.
How should I split my budget across Google, Meta and other channels?
Split it by the cost of the next conversion on each channel, not by a fixed percentage. The channel that delivers the cheapest additional customer at your target cost earns the next dollar, until it stops doing so.
In practice we start with the channel closest to intent, usually Google Search, and fund it until extra spend stops producing conversions at your target. Then the next dollar goes where it can do more: Microsoft Ads for the same intent, Meta or YouTube to create demand. We revisit this monthly, because the answer moves with seasonality and competition.
Two rules keep the split honest. First, each channel needs enough budget to collect real conversion data; five channels on a small budget means none of them learn. Second, judge each channel by new customers, not its own dashboard, since every platform will claim the same sale. A quick check: if a channel's reported conversions rise but total leads in your CRM stay flat, it is taking credit, not adding customers. Our measurement work exists for exactly that problem.
How do I know if my paid media is actually driving new business?
Run a holdout test: turn a channel or campaign off in a slice of your market for a few weeks and measure what you lose. Platform-reported conversions alone cannot answer this, because each platform grades its own homework.
The simplest version I recommend is geographic. Exclude a ZIP code or small region from a campaign for three to four weeks and compare leads or sales there against similar areas where ads kept running. You can also flip it and advertise only in one area. Pausing during set hours, or splitting brand and non-brand into separate campaigns, answers the same question from different angles.
Run one clean test at a time and keep everything else steady so the result means something. Measure the outcome in your CRM or store, not in the ad platform. If the business barely notices when a campaign goes dark, that spend was mostly reaching customers you would have won anyway. For more on choosing the right numbers, read are you measuring what matters.
How does automation fit into paid media management?
Automation should handle the repeatable work in a fixed order: clean the search queries, protect the budget, label the structure, and only then let AI suggest bids and copy. Run it out of order and the AI optimizes noise.
We think of it as four stages. Query mining finds the search terms spending money with zero conversions and turns them into negatives. Budget pacing then guards what is left against your target cost per acquisition. Labels tag every campaign by funnel stage and status, so people and agents both know what each object is for. The AI layer comes last, drafting negatives, ad copy and bid changes from data that is already clean.
Each stage removes an error the next one would amplify. Pace before mining and you spread waste more evenly. Turn on AI copy first and it writes headlines from terms that never convert. In our accounts, Buddy runs each stage as a separate sub-agent, and a person reviews exceptions and approves changes. For the scripts side of this, see our Google Ads scripts.
What should I have ready before hiring a paid media agency?
Have admin access to your ad accounts, a clear definition of what counts as a lead or sale, and a rough idea of what a customer is worth to you. With those three, an agency can do useful work in week one instead of week six.
Access means you, not a former employee or an old agency, are the admin on Google Ads, Meta Business Manager, GA4 and Tag Manager. Recovering a lost account can stall a launch for weeks. The lead definition matters because bidding systems optimize toward whatever you mark as a conversion, and a newsletter signup should not count the same as a booked appointment.
Customer value is the number most businesses skip. Even a rough figure, like average first order and how often customers come back, tells us what you can afford to pay per acquisition. A CRM export showing which leads became customers is a bonus, because it lets us judge campaigns on revenue. If you have none of this yet, that is fine. Our free audit starts by mapping what exists and what is missing.
