Most agencies ask the price question backwards. They ask what a white-label PPC specialist charges, get a number, and then try to work out whether it fits. The useful order is the other way around: start from what you’re billing the client, subtract the margin you need, and see what is left for fulfillment. That remainder is your budget, and it tells you immediately whether you’re shopping for a senior specialist or for someone junior with supervision.

This is the money half of how white-label PPC works.

The three structures

Almost every arrangement is one of these, or a blend.

Per-project. A fixed scope for a fixed price: an account audit, a campaign build, a tracking implementation, a migration. The agency knows the cost before quoting. Best for one-off work and for the first engagement with a specialist you haven’t worked with.

Monthly block of hours. The agency buys a set number of hours per month and spends them wherever they’re needed that month. Predictable for both sides, flexible across accounts, and the easiest to renew. Most ongoing relationships end up here.

Per-account retainer. A flat monthly fee per client account under management. Cleanest when the agency has several accounts of similar size and complexity, because the cost line scales with the revenue line.

There’s a fourth that gets proposed and should usually be refused: percentage of ad spend paid to the specialist. It’s fine as a way for an agency to bill a client. It’s bad between agency and specialist, because it makes the specialist’s income depend on a number the agency’s client controls, and it creates an incentive nobody wants to defend in a QBR.

What the numbers actually look like

Rates vary by market, seniority and how much of the client relationship the specialist carries. Broad ranges for English-speaking markets, as of 2026:

  • Junior to mid specialist, offshore or lower-cost market: roughly USD 25–50/hour. You are buying execution. Budget for supervision.
  • Senior specialist, remote, several years running accounts unsupervised: roughly USD 60–120/hour, or USD 800–2,500/month per account depending on size and channel count.
  • Senior specialist who joins client calls and writes the client-facing analysis: the top of that range and up, because you’re buying account management as well as execution.

Per-project work lands wherever the scope lands. A genuine audit of a mid-size Google Ads account — structure, tracking, search terms, landing pages, a prioritized list of fixes — is typically a one-to-two week piece of work, and gets priced like one.

Treat these as orientation, not a quote. The number that matters is the one in the next section.

The margin check, in four lines

Before you agree to anything, do this on paper:

  1. What you bill the client per month. Use the real number, not the list price.
  2. Minus the fulfillment cost. The specialist’s retainer, or their hourly rate times the hours the account genuinely needs — not the hours you hope it needs.
  3. Minus your internal cost. The account manager’s time, the reporting, the client calls, the scope conversations. This is the line agencies forget, and it’s rarely under five hours a month.
  4. What’s left is your margin.

If step four comes out under about 40%, the arrangement is fragile. One difficult client, one month of scope creep, one round of extra reporting, and you’re working for free on that account.

A worked example. You bill the client USD 3,000/month for Google Ads management on USD 40,000 of spend. A senior specialist at USD 1,500/month runs it. Your account manager spends six hours on the client at a loaded cost of roughly USD 300. Margin: USD 1,200, or 40%. That works — as long as the hours hold.

Now the same account with a specialist at USD 800/month who needs supervision. On paper the margin jumps to USD 1,900. In practice your senior spends four hours a month reviewing and correcting, the client notices the reports are thinner, and the renewal conversation gets harder. The cheaper line item bought you a worse account.

Why the cheapest hour is usually the most expensive

The thing you’re buying from a senior specialist is not hours. It’s that the account doesn’t need supervision and that the decisions inside it are defensible when the client asks.

The cost of a junior arrangement shows up in places that don’t appear on the invoice: your senior person’s attention, the accumulated drift in an account nobody is auditing, the client who churns at month eight for reasons nobody logged. Agencies that have run both arrangements usually stop comparing hourly rates and start comparing cost per account that renews.

That said, junior is the right call when the work genuinely is execution — bulk campaign builds, feed maintenance, routine reporting — and you have someone senior reviewing it on a schedule. The mistake isn’t hiring junior. It’s hiring junior and then not budgeting for the supervision.

What should be in the price, and what shouldn’t

Agree explicitly on which of these are included:

  • Campaign builds and ongoing optimization — almost always included.
  • Monthly reporting — usually included, but agree on what report. See white-label PPC reporting, because this is where scope quietly doubles.
  • Tracking and measurement fixes — often not included, and often the most valuable work available. Price it separately as a project.
  • Landing page and CRO recommendations — recommendations included, implementation separate.
  • Creative production — not included. That’s an agency function, not a paid media one.
  • Client calls — depends on the model. Say which one you’re buying.

The pattern: anything that happens every month belongs in the retainer, anything that happens once belongs in a project, and anything that involves another team belongs in a separate conversation.

Three things to settle before the first invoice

A cap on hours, or a trigger for renegotiating. An uncapped hourly arrangement makes your margin unpredictable, which is how these relationships turn adversarial by month four.

What happens when spend grows. If the client’s budget triples, the work grows but not proportionally. Decide in advance whether the fee moves, and on what trigger — a spend threshold, a campaign count, a new market.

Payment terms that don’t make you the bank. If you pay the specialist net 15 and your client pays you net 60, you’re financing the engagement. Match the terms or price the gap in.

The short version

Work out the margin before you shop for a rate. Refuse percentage-of-spend between agency and specialist. Write down what’s in the monthly fee and what’s a project. Cap the hours. And when you compare two quotes, compare the supervision each one implies, not the hourly rate.

Related reading: the white-label PPC agreement and the clauses that matter, and outsource or hire for your agency’s Google Ads.

If you want the numbers checked against a specific account before you quote it, this is how I work with agencies — rates, scope and the cases where I say no are all on that page.