SEO V Google AdWords Management Pricing

SEO VS Google AdWords

[Tess77]

Sorry if this has been asked before guys but what do you charge your clients for setting up and maintaining a Google AdWords Campaign?
I am always happy to charge a decent setup fee, but how do you work out what to charge on a monthly basis? I know companies that charge a percentage of the monthly spend but then how do you bill them? Do you setup the clients account with their own Credit Card or do you use your own and then bill the client twice as much for their campaign?
I currently just charge a flat monthly fee for all clients but find that some clients require a lot more work than others and I want the monthly fee to reflect that.
It' easier with my SEO Packages I basically charge for the results I produce and clients are more than happy to pay.

Thanks for your advice in advance :)
Tess

[Dave_Davis]

First of all, I would caution you against using your own credit card and billing your client separately. There are a THOUSAND reasons you shouldn't do this and in general, it's bad form when it comes to parting ways with your client.

Why not charge your clients on a performance basis like you do with your SEO? Or are you not confident that you can actually improve their results? :)

There are many different billing options, experiment with them all until you find one that suits you. There's no right answer to that question.

[RhinoFish]

D_D is spot on!

[ogletree]

There are 3 ways that I know of.

1. Charge Hourly
2. Percentage of monthly spend most agencies charge 20%. It really is still an hourly thing because they are going to expect you to put in the work for what they are paying for.
3. Pay for performance. This is hard to do for some clients because of conversion tracking. This is about the same thing as being an affiliate except you get to present yourself as the company and they pay the Google fees.

I charge hourly.

Like everybody else said never use your credit card for clients.

[eWhisper]

If you invoice upfront; then using your own CC can be a great idea.

I can't count the number of CC points we've racked up over the years using our own cards. There comes a point where you will run into CC issues (too many charges in too little of time) where you need to move to invoicing; but don't discount what millions of CC points are capable of buying. We used one set of points for 100+ Aeron chairs at one agency.

I'm a fan of charging by % of spend or pay for performance. The advantage of those models is that if you can gain additional time efficiencies (using 3rd party tools, internal workflows, etc) then you can scale your profits while still maintaining good results for the client. If you can use tools to go 20 hours of work in 10 hours; you get to keep the other 10 hours of payment (although some might go to paying tool vendors).

If I'm charging a percentage of spend, I'll do a sliding scale where at very small amounts you might charge 30%+ and for very large accounts you might only charge 5-10% of spend.

Don't undercharge yourself. I see plenty of people who enter this space and get great results, but because they undercharge, they can't afford to hire staff, pay for tools, upgrade their office, etc.