Most small businesses in Peterborough, Ontario should expect to pay $300 to $600 a month for Google Ads management, plus ad spend paid directly to Google. Budgets over $2,000 a month in ad spend usually move to a custom quote or a percentage of spend. Below $150 a month, nobody is really managing your account. Above $1,000 a month in fees on a $1,000 ad budget, you're paying for overhead, not results.

The rest of this explains where your number should land based on your budget, and how to tell if a quote is fair.

Two bills, not one

This is the part that confuses almost everyone the first time.

Google Ads has two separate costs:

Ad spend. What you pay Google for clicks. It goes straight from your credit card to Google. Your agency should never touch it or mark it up.
Management. What you pay a person to build, run, and improve the campaigns. This is the agency or freelancer fee.

When you compare quotes, compare the management fee to the management fee. A "$999 a month all-in" package with a hidden $400 of ad spend inside it is a $599 management fee and a very small ad budget. Ask them to split it. If they won't, that tells you something. Even better, I always think it’s a good idea to get your Ad spend on your own company credit card. You’ll be able to expense that advertising and any promotional credits from Google will benefit you with the reduced charges.

If you're still working out the ad spend side, I wrote a whole post on how much a small business should spend on Google Ads. In this post, we’ll focus more on the fee.

The three ways agencies charge

Flat monthly fee. A set price each month, usually tiered by how much you spend on ads. Easiest to budget. This is how most small local accounts are priced, and it's how I price mine for small business clients.

Percentage of ad spend. Typically 10% to 20% across Canada, sometimes up to 30% for small accounts. It scales with the account, which makes sense at $10,000 a month. At $800 a month, 15% is $120, which isn't enough to pay anyone to do real work, so these agencies almost always add a minimum fee on top.

Hourly. Freelancers and consultants in Canada bill anywhere from $75 to $300 an hour. Fine for a one-time build or an audit. Hard to budget for ongoing management, because you never quite know what next month costs. If you’re looking at a longer-term relationship with your ads manager, even if you start out hourly, consider discussing going to a monthly fee that make sense for both parties.

None of these pricing strategies is a scam. The model matters less than what's actually getting done for the money.

What Peterborough pricing actually looks like

Here's what I charge, so you have a real number to compare against, not a range designed to get you on a call:

Your monthly ad budget	Management fee	What it's for
Under $500	$320/month	Testing whether search demand exists for what you sell
$500 to $2,000	$480/month	Steady lead flow, optimized weekly
Over $2,000	Custom quote	Bigger campaigns, more services, more locations

All month-to-month. Ad spend separate, paid directly to Google, in your own account.

For comparison, Canadian pricing guides put flat fees for accounts spending under $2,500 a month at roughly $400 to $900 a month, with bigger-city agencies at the top of that range and above.

You're not getting a worse campaign by paying less here. You're skipping a cost structure: the downtown office, the account manager who reports to a strategist who reports to a director, and the sales team. The work on your account is the same keyword research, the same negative keyword lists, the same conversion tracking.

What $300 to $500 a month should buy you

At this level, for a local service business, you should expect:

Conversion tracking that actually works. Calls, forms, and bookings recorded as conversions, not just clicks. If this isn't set up, nothing else on this list matters.
Search campaigns built around what people in your area actually type. Not a broad "Performance Max" campaign left to guess.
Weekly attention in the first 60 days. Search terms reviewed, junk traffic blocked, bids adjusted.
Ongoing negative keywords. Job seekers, DIY searchers, "free" searchers, and the wrong Peterborough (yes, the one in England) filtered out.
Ad copy tested and rotated. Not written once at launch and forgotten.
A monthly report you can read in two minutes. Leads, cost per lead, and what changed. Not 14 pages of impressions.
Access. You own the account. You can log in any time.

What it doesn't usually buy: landing page design, video ads, or a full website rebuild. Those are separate projects. Ask up front.

Because I’m invested in getting you the best results possible from your ad campaigns, I do include landing page work as part of my monthly ad management retainers. I build and test landing page variations in addition to ad copy to make sure they match and get you better conversions.

What the $99-a-month offers are really doing

You'll see them. "Google Ads management from $99." Sometimes $149.

At that price, there's no time for a human to review your search terms every week. What you usually get is a template campaign, automated bidding left on autopilot, and a report generated by software. Clicks come in. Leads mostly don't.

The real cost of this type of offer creeps up on you. The campaign "runs," the report looks busy, and you spend $600 a month on ad clicks for a year before anyone asks why the phone isn't ringing. The management was cheap. The ad spend wasn't.

If your ads are running but not producing, that's usually a setup problem, not a budget problem. Here are the 7 fixes I make first when Google Ads aren't converting.

Red flags in a Google Ads quote

Before you sign with anyone, including me, check for these:

They own the ad account. If you leave, you lose years of data. The account should be in your name, on your card.
Ad spend and management are bundled. You can't tell what's going to Google and what's going to them.
A 12-month contract on a new account. Month-to-month means they have to earn it every month. Six months is sometimes reasonable for bigger builds. Twelve on a small local account isn't.
No mention of conversion tracking. If they talk about clicks, impressions, and "reach" but never ask how you get leads, they're going to report on clicks.
Guaranteed results. Nobody controls what Google charges per click or what your competitors do next week. Realistic projections are great though and an experienced marketer should be able to at least give you some signs of what to expect. Guarantees lead to false hope.

I cover more of this in how to choose a marketing agency in Peterborough.

How to tell if the fee is worth it

Do the math before you sign.

Say you're paying $480 a month in management and $800 in ad spend. That's $1,280 a month all-in. If an average new customer is worth $400 to you in profit, you need about four new customers a month to break even. Everything after that is profit.

If your average customer is worth $40, Google Ads is probably the wrong channel, and a good agency should tell you that before taking your money.

For a real example: a massage clinic here in Peterborough went from 68 monthly bookings to 171 in the first 90 days, at about $14 per booking. The management fee was a rounding error next to the revenue. Here's the full Flow Spa case study.

And a realistic timeline: most local campaigns start producing leads within 7 to 14 days of launch, then get noticeably cheaper per lead over the first 60 to 90 days as the account learns what works.

When to skip management entirely

Full management isn't always the right move.

You spend under $300 a month and your category is cheap. You may be better off with a one-time setup and doing the light upkeep yourself.
Your account already exists and you just don't know what's wrong with it. Get an audit first. My Google Ads Powerups audit is $147 flat: a diagnosis of what's leaking money, and a 90-day plan you can run yourself or hand to anyone.
You're a trade or home service business. Look at Local Services Ads too. You pay per lead, not per click. Here's how LSAs compare to regular search ads.
You can't afford to wait two or three months for the account to settle. Google Ads is fast compared to SEO, but it isn't instant. If you're weighing the two, here's what SEO costs in Peterborough for comparison.

The short version

Expect $300 to $600 a month in management for a typical Peterborough small business, plus ad spend.
Ad spend goes to Google. Management goes to the person running it. Keep them separate.
Own your account. Avoid long contracts. Insist on conversion tracking.
Under $150 a month isn't management. Over $1,000 a month on a small budget is overhead.
Do the break-even math before you sign anything so you have some clear goals of what a new lead is worth to you.

Where Kayser Marketing fits

I'm a one-person shop in Peterborough. I run Google Ads for local service businesses: clinics, trades, wellness, and professional services. You deal with me, not an account manager. Pricing is on the Google Ads page, month-to-month, and you own everything.

If you want to know what a realistic budget and fee looks like for your business, book a free 30-minute call. You'll leave with a number that will help you to decide if it’s worth it or not.

How much does Google Ads management cost in Peterborough? Real numbers, not 'let's hop on a call'