Flat monthly fee, never a percentage of your ad spend. You keep the account, we build the landing page, and if your budget is too small to work we will tell you before you pay us anything.
Maple Web Design is a small studio in Port Coquitlam. You work directly with the person running your campaigns.
Why Percentage of Ad Spend Works Against You
Most agencies in this market charge 10 to 20 percent of whatever you spend on ads. It sounds fair until you follow the logic. If you spend $5,000 they earn $750. If they persuade you to spend $10,000 they earn $1,500, and the work has not doubled.
That structure quietly rewards a bigger budget and punishes the agency for telling you to spend less. Which is exactly the advice you need when a campaign is bleeding money on the wrong searches.
We charge a flat monthly fee. It does not move when your budget moves. If the honest recommendation is to cut your spend in half, we lose nothing by saying so.
What Clicks Actually Cost in Canada
Before anyone quotes you a management fee, you should know what the clicks themselves cost, because that is where most of your money goes. Rough Canadian averages:
- Legal services, $12 to $30 a click
- Financial services and insurance, $8 to $20
- Healthcare and clinics, $5 to $15
- Home improvement and trades, $3 to $10
- B2B software, $6 to $18
- Retail and e-commerce, $1 to $4
Vancouver sits above these averages, not below. It is one of the more expensive ad auctions in the country, and anyone quoting you national numbers is understating your cost. That matters because a $1,000 monthly budget buys a home services business roughly 150 clicks, and buys a law firm about 50.
The Minimum Budget Worth Starting With
Google has no official minimum. Practically, you need enough budget to generate conversion data, and in most categories that means at least $1,000 a month in ad spend. Below that in an expensive vertical, a handful of clicks a day exhausts your budget and the campaign never gathers enough data to optimise itself.
So if your total budget including management is under about $1,500 a month, we will usually tell you to spend it on local SEO instead and come back to ads when there is more room. That advice costs us a client and saves you a wasted quarter.
What We Find in Most Accounts We Review
Audits across this industry routinely find 20 to 40 percent of spend going to waste in accounts that were never structured properly. On a $3,000 monthly budget that is $600 to $1,200 disappearing every month. Here is where it usually goes.
- No negative keywords. You are paying for searches containing “free”, “jobs”, “DIY” and your competitors’ brand names.
- Broad match with no supervision. Google decides what your ads show for, and it is generous with your money.
- Conversion tracking that counts the wrong thing. Page views counted as leads makes a failing campaign look successful.
- Ads pointing at the homepage. Someone searching for one specific service lands on a page about everything you do.
- Location targeting set to “interested in” rather than “in”. A default that quietly shows your ads across the country.
- No call tracking. If most of your leads phone you, and most local service leads do, an account without call tracking is guessing.
Ads or SEO, Which One First
Ads buy you the top of the page today and stop the moment you stop paying. Search rankings take months and keep working after. Neither is better, they answer different questions.
Ads make sense when you need leads this month, when you are testing whether a service or a market is worth pursuing, when your season is short and you cannot wait, or when the search term is so competitive that ranking would take a year. Ranking makes more sense when your margins cannot absorb $15 a click, when you are in it for years, or when you are a local business whose real problem is an unfinished Google Business Profile.
Most businesses eventually run both, and the two feed each other. Ad data tells you which keywords actually convert, which is the fastest way to know what to write SEO content about. We run both, so we are not arguing for whichever one we happen to sell.
Who Owns the Ad Account
You do, and this matters more than most people realise. Some agencies build campaigns inside their own account. When the relationship ends you lose the campaign history, the conversion data, and everything the algorithm has learned about your customers, which can be years of optimisation.
We build in your account, under your billing, with us added as a manager. If you leave, you remove our access and keep everything. Ask any agency this before you sign, and ask them to put the answer in writing.
Who Owns the Ad Account
You can win the auction and still lose the customer. If your ad promises furnace repair and the click lands on a homepage listing nine services, most of that traffic leaves. Agencies that do not build websites either charge separately for landing pages, commonly $1,000 to $5,000 each, or send your paid traffic to whatever page already exists.
We build WordPress sites, so a dedicated landing page is part of the campaign build rather than a separate invoice. If your existing site is too slow to convert paid traffic, we will say so and quote a redesign instead of charging you monthly to send clicks at a page that cannot hold them.
What Management Costs
Across Canada, agencies charge either 10 to 20 percent of ad spend or a flat fee, typically $500 to $2,500 a month for small and mid sized accounts. Setup fees of $500 to $5,000 are common and often not mentioned until the proposal arrives.
Our pricing is flat, published, and includes the things others bill separately.
Campaign Build, $900 one time
Account structure, keyword and competitor research, negative keyword list, ad copy, conversion tracking and call tracking configured properly, and one dedicated landing page designed and built.
If you already have an account, this becomes a rebuild rather than a fresh setup at the same price.
Managed, $750 a month
For ad spend up to $3,000 a month.
Weekly search term review and negative keyword work, bid and budget adjustments, ad testing, and a one page monthly report tied to leads rather than impressions.
Managed Plus, $1,200 a month
For ad spend between $3,000 and $15,000. Everything above plus additional campaign types where they fit, more landing pages as needed, and a call every two weeks.
Above $15,000 in spend we quote individually.
Why flat costs more at small budgets, and less at large ones
Be honest with the maths. At $3,000 in monthly spend, a 15 percent fee would be $450 and ours is $750. The reason is that no account is run properly for $450 a month, which is why agencies quoting a percentage also have minimum fees of $500 to $1,000 that rarely appear on their pricing page.
The trade goes the other way as you grow. At $10,000 in monthly spend, 15 percent is $1,500 and ours stays at $1,200. At $20,000 it is $3,000 against our quoted rate. The more successful your account gets, the more the flat model saves you, and the less reason we have to push your budget up for our own benefit.
No lock in. Three months minimum, because a campaign judged earlier than that is being judged on noise, then month to month with thirty days notice.
How Long Before You Can Judge It
Ads produce traffic on day one, which is the point of them, but traffic is not the same as a working campaign.
Expect the first useful signals in two to four weeks, and expect the account to need 60 to 90 days of consistent spend before the optimisation data is meaningful enough to trust.
Anyone promising a profitable campaign in week one is describing luck. What we will commit to is that by day 90 you will know your cost per lead, and whether that number works against what a customer is worth to you. If it does not, we will say so rather than quietly renewing.
When Google Ads Is the Wrong Spend
We would rather turn down the work than take a retainer for something that will not pay.
Ads are usually wrong if nobody searches for what you sell, because ads capture demand rather than create it. They are wrong if your total budget is under about $1,500 all in. They are wrong if you cannot answer the phone during business hours, since paid leads go cold in minutes. And they are wrong if your website cannot convert, because paying for traffic to a broken page is the most expensive mistake in digital marketing.
In those cases we will point you at local SEO, a new website, or nothing at all.
How the First 90 Days Run
Weeks 1 and 2, build
Keyword and competitor research, account structure, negative keyword list built before launch rather than after, conversion and call tracking verified with test submissions, and your landing page designed and built.
Weeks 3 to 6, control the waste
This is the phase that decides whether the account works. Daily search term reviews, negatives added, poor performing keywords paused, ad copy tested.
Most of the 20 to 40 percent waste in a typical account was allowed in during these weeks.
Weeks 7 to 12, optimise toward cost per lead
Bid strategy tuned against real conversion data, budget shifted toward what converts, landing page adjusted based on what people actually click.
By day 90 you have a cost per lead you can plan around.
What Your Monthly Report Shows
One page. Spend, leads, cost per lead, which campaigns and search terms produced them, what we changed and why, and what is planned.
Not impressions and click through rate, which tell you the ad exists rather than whether it worked.
If a report cannot connect to something that happened in your business, it is not a report.
Campaign Types We Run and Skip
Search is where most local businesses should start and often finish. Someone typing your service into Google is the highest intent traffic that exists.
Remarketing brings back people who visited and did not act. Cheap, and usually the second campaign we add.
Shopping for online stores, where product images and prices appear directly in results. Pairs with an e-commerce build.
Display and YouTube we are more careful with. They build awareness and spend budget quickly, and for a small local business that budget is nearly always better spent on search. We will say no to these more often than yes.
Questions Before You Hand Over a Budget
Who is actually managing my account?
Arash Khalaj, who has been building and marketing websites for over 17 years and runs Maple Web Design out of Port Coquitlam. No account manager layer, no offshoring.
Do I pay you the ad spend or pay Google?
You pay Google directly with your own card, on your own account. We never handle your ad budget. That way you see every dollar and there is no markup you cannot check.
Can you take over an existing account?
Yes, and it is often faster than starting over because the history has value. We review it first and tell you honestly whether it is worth rebuilding or restructuring.
What if my ads are already running and not working?
Book the free review. Most underperforming accounts have two or three specific problems rather than a hundred, and you will get the list whether or not you hire us.
Do you guarantee results?
No, and nobody honest does. The auction is not ours to control. What we control is structure, targeting, waste and tracking, and those are what separate an account that works from one that does not.
Can you run Meta or TikTok ads too?
Google Search is where we do our best work and it is where local intent lives. For most of our clients that is enough. If your business genuinely needs social advertising, we will say so rather than pretending it is our strength.
Start With a Free Account Review
Thirty minutes, no pitch. If you are already running ads, we will look at your search terms, your tracking and your targeting and tell you where the waste is.
If you are not running ads yet, we will estimate what clicks cost in your category and whether your budget is enough to bother.
Serving Vancouver, Burnaby, Coquitlam, Port Coquitlam, Port Moody, New Westminster, Richmond and Surrey.
