What PPC management actually includes
“PPC management” describes arrangements that differ enormously in what is actually done each month. It is worth knowing which one you are buying.
At the light end, management means checking the account periodically, adjusting budgets, and producing a report. Campaigns were built once and largely left alone. This is common at the low end of agency pricing and it can be adequate for a simple account in a low-competition category.
At the other end it means someone is in the account every week: reviewing the search terms your ads actually matched, adding negatives, rotating creative, moving budget between campaigns, and adjusting the conversion signals the bidding algorithm optimises toward. That work compounds. The account gets cheaper per qualified lead over time rather than drifting.
The practical way to tell the difference is to ask what changed last week and why. A managed account always has an answer.
The part most B2B accounts get wrong
Ad platforms optimise toward whatever you tell them counts as a conversion. In most B2B accounts, that is a form submission.
The problem is that a form submission is not a sale, and in B2B the gap between the two is wide. Students, competitors, job seekers, and unqualified prospects all fill in forms. If those count as conversions, Smart Bidding will notice they are cheap and plentiful, and it will efficiently buy more of them. Cost per conversion falls, everyone reports success, and the sales team quietly stops trusting marketing.
The fix is to send outcomes back. When a lead is marked qualified in your CRM, or reaches an opportunity stage, that outcome is imported back into the ad platform as the conversion that matters. Bidding then optimises toward the leads your sales team accepts. It is unglamorous marketing engineering work and it is usually the highest-leverage change available in a B2B account.
That single change is what produced $5M in qualified pipeline in 45 days on the account above, on $87,700 of media. The campaigns were not rebuilt from scratch. The conversion signal was.
How PPC management is priced, and what to watch for
There are three common models.
Percentage of ad spend, usually 10 to 20 percent, is the most widespread. It is simple, and it creates a conflict: the agency earns more when you spend more, and the recommendation to increase budget always arrives with an interest attached. It also scales cost with spend rather than with work, which rarely matches reality.
Flat monthly fee, which is how we work, prices the management rather than the media. Typical B2B accounts run $2,000 to $8,000 per month for management depending on complexity; ours sit at $4,000 to $6,000. The fee stays the same when your budget doubles, which means recommending more spend is a recommendation and not a raise.
Performance-based pricing, paid per lead or on a share of revenue, sounds aligned and often is not. It usually incentivises volume over quality, and in a long B2B sales cycle the attribution required to settle the invoice becomes its own argument.
Whichever model you choose, two questions are worth asking directly: does the agency mark up media, and who owns the ad account. Markup should be disclosed and usually is not. Account ownership determines whether you can leave.
What budget you actually need
The honest floor for B2B paid search is around $5,000 a month in media, and $10,000 is where things get comfortable.
The reason is statistical rather than commercial. Bidding algorithms need conversion volume to learn. In B2B, where a click can cost $15 to $50 in competitive categories and conversion rates sit in low single digits, a small budget produces too few conversions per month for the platform to optimise on. You end up paying for a learning period that never finishes.
If your budget is below that, paid search is usually the wrong first channel. Organic, a tighter conversion path on the pages you already have, or outbound will typically return more per dollar until there is enough budget to give paid a fair test. We would rather say that at the outset than take a retainer for a campaign that cannot work.
If you want to test the arithmetic against your own numbers before committing a budget, our paid search ROI calculator takes deal size, close rate, and target cost per click and tells you what the channel has to deliver to pay for itself.
When paid search is the wrong choice
Paid search captures existing demand. Somebody is typing a query because they already know they have the problem. That makes it excellent for categories with established search behaviour and poor for genuinely new ones.
If nobody is searching for what you sell, paid search has nothing to buy. That is a demand-creation problem, and the answer is paid social, content, or outbound, where you can reach people who do not yet know the category exists.
It is also a poor fit when the sales cycle is very long and the deal value is low, because the cost of acquiring enough qualified conversations exceeds what the deals return. And it works badly on top of a broken conversion path: if the site does not convert organic traffic, paid traffic will convert worse, because it arrives colder and costs money.
Advertising inside AI assistants
OpenAI began placing ads inside ChatGPT during 2026, and the channel is early enough that most agencies have not run a campaign on it. We have, and the honest summary is that it is worth understanding now and worth a small test budget rather than a reallocation.
What makes it different from search is the shape of the query. Someone typing into a search engine uses two or three words. Someone asking an assistant describes a situation in a sentence or two, often including constraints, budget, and what they have already ruled out. That is far more context than a keyword, and it changes what good targeting looks like.
What has not changed is the fundamentals. Landing pages still have to convert, tracking still has to be wired, and the traffic still has to be judged against pipeline rather than against clicks. Agencies treating this as an entirely new discipline are mostly selling novelty.
Our current guidance for B2B: treat it as a test line inside an existing paid budget, not as a replacement for search. Demand is real and growing, inventory is still limited, and costs are unsettled while the auction matures. Early is an advantage here mainly because the learning compounds, not because the volume is there yet.
How to tell whether your current account is working
Four checks, in the order we run them on an audit.
Look at the search terms report, not the keyword list. The keywords are what you asked for; the search terms are what you actually paid for. In neglected accounts, a substantial share of spend goes to terms nobody would have chosen.
Check what a conversion is defined as. Open the conversion actions and see what is counted, whether duplicates are included, and whether anything from the CRM is imported. If every form on the site counts equally, bidding is being steered by the least valuable action on the page.
Compare platform conversions against CRM records for the same period. They will not match exactly, and the size of the gap tells you how much of the reporting is fiction.
Ask what changed in the last month and why. If the answer is budget adjustments and a report, the account is being monitored rather than managed.
Those four checks are most of what a paid search audit covers, and you can run them yourself. If you would rather we did it, ask for one. We will tell you what we find whether or not it leads anywhere, because an account with a measurement problem underneath is worth knowing about either way.
Paid search is one channel. If the wider problem is that nobody is running the marketing operation, PPC management sits inside Marketing as a Service, where paid, organic, creative, and the technical layer are run by one team against one set of numbers.