Google Ads management, South Africa
Your Google Ads account, run properly and priced in public
Monthly management runs R6,500 to R10,500, flat fee, month to month, never a cut of your media budget. If your budget is under R7,500 a month, I will tell you to set it up once and run it yourself.
- Published rates, so you know the price before you book a call
- A flat monthly fee, never a percentage of your media budget
- Month to month, so the work has to earn the next invoice
- Reporting on tracked enquiries and cost per lead, not clicks
Tell me what you are running
Your website and rough monthly budget is plenty. I reply within a day.
The rates
What it costs, before you book a call.
Almost nobody in this market publishes a price. These are the figures I quote, and when they change I change this page.
Monthly management
R6,500 to R10,500 / month
Month to month
Campaign builds, keyword and search-term work, ad copy, landing page fixes where they block performance, and a report on real enquiries.
Tracking rescue
R4,500 to R8,000 once-off
Fixed project
Rebuilds your measurement: conversion actions, tags, forms, call tracking, and a lead register you own.
Setup only
For budgets under R7,500
No monthly fee
A once-off setup done properly, plus an hour of training, so you can run the account yourself.
The arithmetic that should decide it
The fee only makes sense when one extra customer a month covers it. Same fee, two different budgets.
Worth paying for
- Media budget
- R15,000 / month
- Management fee
- R7,500 / month
- Fee as share of total
- 33%
- Break-even
- One good customer a month
Not yet
- Media budget
- R5,000 / month
- Management fee
- R7,500 / month
- Fee as share of total
- 60%
- Break-even
- Rivals the budget itself
My working rule: if your media budget is under about R7,500 a month, do not pay me or anyone else a management fee, because the fee would rival the budget it manages. At that size a once-off setup plus an hour of training is the honest recommendation, and I will say so on a call even though it earns me less.
What you get each month
Campaign builds
Search campaigns structured around the keywords your buyers actually type.
Search terms reviewed
Junk queries added as negatives, so budget stops leaking on the wrong searches.
Ad copy tested
Ads written against your real offers and tested against each other rather than left to age.
Landing page fixes
Changes to the page where the page, rather than the account, is blocking enquiries.
Tracking kept honest
Conversion counts checked against your own record of calls and form fills.
A readable report
Spend, cost per lead and ROAS (return on ad spend) in five minutes of plain language.
How the account gets run
Set up tracking first
Before anything is spent, I confirm conversions fire correctly through GA4 (Google Analytics 4) and GTM (Google Tag Manager), so the numbers can be trusted.
Build around buying intent
Campaigns are structured by the searches most likely to buy, with the traffic that wastes money excluded from the start.
Launch lean
The account starts focused rather than spread thin, then I watch which search terms turn into actual enquiries.
Optimise weekly, report plainly
I cut what is not working, push budget toward what is, and report in language you can repeat to your team.
Accounts I run now
Most of this runs under other brands or through agencies, so the names stay private. The systems are real.
Industrial equipment
A national equipment distributor
Monthly retainer, ongoing
- Google Ads search across every business line, with around a hundred keywords structured so each division is measured on its own.
- Page-level copy and keyword work to lift the Google Ads Quality Score and bring the cost per click down.
- A daily lead digest that sorts every enquiry by channel and division, so the client sees what the spend returns.
Hospitality
A boutique hotel group near an industrial hub
Built and run
- Meta and Google ads weighted 70/30 between steady bookings and event-specific pushes.
- WhatsApp Business set up for booking and tracking, because that is how guests here reach a hotel.
- Google call ads for the people who would rather just phone.
Over a decade managing paid budgets, including work for brands like Coca-Cola, Audi and HP through agencies. More of the work.
Questions people ask before they hire
How much does Google Ads management cost in South Africa?
My monthly management runs R6,500 to R10,500 a month depending on scope, on a month-to-month basis. A conversion tracking rescue, when measurement is broken, is a fixed project at R4,500 to R8,000 once-off. Those are the rates I quote, published rather than handed out on a call.
How much media budget do I need before management makes sense?
About R7,500 a month. Below that, a management fee rivals the budget it manages, so I will tell you not to pay me or anyone else. At that size a once-off setup done properly, plus an hour of training so you can run it yourself, is the honest recommendation, and I will say so on a call even though it earns me less.
Do you charge a percentage of ad spend?
No. The fee is flat, because it keeps the incentive clean: the fee buys work and the media budget buys customers. A percentage of spend, commonly ten to twenty percent, quietly rewards the manager for asking you to spend more whether or not more is working. With a flat fee, a bigger budget does not automatically mean a bigger invoice.
Is there a setup fee?
There is no separate setup charge stacked on top of management. Most accounts I take over have broken tracking, so the first engagement is usually the conversion tracking rescue at R4,500 to R8,000 once-off. It rebuilds conversion actions, tags, forms, call tracking and a lead register you own, because nothing else can be evaluated until measurement works.
What is the minimum contract?
Month to month. There is no annual retainer to sign and no lock-in period. The work has to earn the next invoice, which is the arrangement I want as much as you do.
Do you work with businesses outside Johannesburg and Cape Town?
Yes. The work is remote, so I run accounts for businesses anywhere in South Africa, and for international companies as well. Nothing about managing a Google Ads account needs me in your office.
How do I know it is working?
You judge the account on tracked enquiries and cost per lead rather than clicks and impressions. Conversion counts are matched against your own record of calls and form fills, so the report reflects real enquiries rather than Google's optimism. The monthly report is written so a non-marketer can read it in five minutes.
Find out what your account is worth running.
Send me your site and your rough monthly budget. If a fee does not make sense yet, I will say so.
Written on Google Ads
- The Google Ad Grant, and the rule that quietly kills most accountsThe Ad Grant gives an eligible non-profit $10,000 a month in free Google Search ads. Most granted accounts go quiet because of a click-through rate rule that runs in the background and deactivates accounts that fall below it.
- What smart bidding is, and the three ways it goes wrongSmart bidding is Google Ads setting your bids automatically toward whatever your conversion actions count. It is genuinely good on clean data, and it fails in three predictable ways: fed fake conversions, starved of data, or judged too soon after a fix.
- What remarketing is, and why untagged days never come backPlain definitions of remarketing and audience decay, and the reason a broken tracking tag is an urgent problem rather than a cosmetic one: every untagged day shrinks an audience you can never rebuild.
- What a conversion action is in Google Ads, and why yours might be lyingA conversion action is the event you tell Google Ads to count as a success, and every report and bidding decision hangs off it. Here is how it works, how the counting setting should be set, and how to check yours in ten minutes.