Marketing agency pricing: what 27 agencies actually charge.

For a small or mid-sized business, the honest range is $500 to $10,000 a month, with most credible single-channel work landing between $1,500 and $5,000. Below $500 you are buying a template run by nobody in particular. Above $10,000 you are buying a multi-channel team, enterprise media budgets, or both.

Those are not guesses. The agencies whose documents we reviewed ranged from a $59-a-month Facebook ads product for dentists, which still required a minimum $150 in ad spend, to a signed university contract paying a $60,000 annual agency fee on $600,000 of media. The middle of that distribution, where most local businesses live, clusters tightly around a $1,500 monthly floor for paid ads management and $1,000 to $3,000 a month for SEO.

One number to keep in mind throughout: the agency fee and the media budget are separate. When an agency says "$1,500 a month," that is usually their fee. What you pay Google or Meta is on top, and the total is what actually leaves your account.

Almost every quote you will receive is one of four structures, or a hybrid. Knowing which one you are looking at is most of the work of comparing them.

Monthly retainer

A flat fee for a defined scope. The most common model for SEO, content and social media, and the easiest to budget. In our sample, single-channel retainers for small businesses ran $500 to $3,750 a month, and multi-channel retainers ran $3,000 to $15,000. The risk is scope drift in both directions: you can pay for hours that were not used, or the agency can quietly do less as the months go by. Ask what the retainer covers in hours or deliverables, and ask what happens to the difference.

Percentage of ad spend

The agency takes a cut of your media budget, typically 10 to 20 percent. We saw 10 percent in a signed contract, 20 percent on two published rate cards, 22 percent on an automotive program, and a 30-25-20 percent ladder that steps down as the budget grows. The model scales with your spend, which is its virtue and its conflict of interest: the agency earns more when you spend more, whether or not the extra spend was a good idea. Any agency using this model should be able to show you cost per booked customer on the first page of the report, because that is the number that keeps them honest.

Floor or percentage, whichever is greater

The hybrid that most experienced paid media shops have converged on. A minimum monthly fee covers the work at small budgets, and the percentage takes over once the budget is large enough for it to exceed the floor. Three agencies in our sample use it independently, with floors of $1,500 and crossovers around $5,000 to $7,500 in spend. It solves the problem that a 15 percent fee on a $3,000 budget does not pay for a senior person to look at the account, and it is the model we use ourselves.

Project, hourly and performance-based

Website builds, audits and strategy sprints are usually priced as projects: we saw consulting packages at $1,025, $2,050 and $4,100, built on a flat $205 an hour, and website redesigns from $5,000 for a visual refresh to $40,000 for a full build. Hourly rates ran from $100 an hour on a municipal bid to $300 and up at boutique shops. Performance pricing, where you pay per lead or per sale, sounds ideal and usually is not: the agency controls what counts as a lead, and the cheapest way to hit a lead target is to lower the bar.

These are the ranges from the documents, not from surveys of what agencies say they charge. Where a range is wide, the low end is a productized package from a small shop and the high end is a senior team.

Google Ads and PPC management

$500 to $1,500 a month for productized small-business tiers, $1,500 to $10,000 for managed accounts, plus the media. Setup fees are nearly universal and ran from $195 to $3,500, with $2,500 the most common figure at the serious end. One agency's signed agreement charged $1,500 a month plus 10 percent of spend, with a $2,500 first month and, usefully, a $500 a month pause fee instead of cancellation. Our guide to how to build an ad campaign explains what the setup fee should actually buy you.

SEO

$300 to $700 a month offshore, $500 to $2,000 from productized North American packages, and $1,750 to $3,750 for senior-led work, with enterprise programs well above that. One agency's own survey reported that most businesses pay $2,500 to $5,000 a month. SEO is the service where the cheap option is most likely to do nothing, because the work that moves rankings, real content and real links, cannot be templated. We wrote a longer piece on how much SEO costs and how to judge a quote.

Social media management and paid social

$375 to $650 a month for entry tiers, $1,200 to $2,200 for mid tiers, and $2,000 to $2,950 for full programs, often with a setup fee of $500 to $950. Several rate cards required a minimum boosted-post or ad budget per tier, from $100 to $2,000 a month, which is the right instinct: organic social alone rarely moves a local business, and an agency that says so up front is being straight with you.

Website design

$500 to $1,500 for a template build, $5,000 for a visual refresh of an existing site, and $10,000 to $40,000 for a custom build. The price that matters is not the build but what it converts afterward. A $5,000 site that turns one visitor in fifty into a call beats a $30,000 site that turns one in two hundred. Our website work starts from that math.

Strategy and fractional leadership

$1,000 to $4,100 for packaged consulting blocks of five to twenty hours, and $3,000 to $10,000 a month for ongoing fractional CMO or growth leadership. This is the service small businesses most often skip and most often needed first, because it is the one that decides whether the other budgets are pointed at the right thing. It is also why we diagnose before we prescribe on every engagement.

AI search and answer-engine optimization

The new category. Several agencies now advertise getting you cited in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI answers, and not one of the twenty-seven publishes a price for it. Expect it to be bundled into SEO retainers for now. If an agency quotes it as a separate line, ask what they measure, because "AI visibility" without a number is a slogan.

• Your media budget. Under percentage models the fee moves with it. Under retainers it sets the floor, because a $20,000 account takes more hours than a $2,000 one.
• Who does the work. Senior operators cost more than a junior following a playbook, and it shows in month three. Ask who will be in your account every week, by name.
• How competitive your market is. Legal, medical, home services and financial keywords cost more to rank for and more to bid on. An honest agency prices the difficulty, not the industry label.
• What is included. Landing pages, creative, call tracking and reporting tools are sometimes inside the fee and sometimes billed through at cost. One agency we reviewed lists its tools as visible line items, which is the right way to do it.
• Contract length. Month to month costs slightly more per month and far less in regret. Twelve-month contracts at a discount are how bad agencies keep clients.

• What is the minimum media budget this plan assumes, and what happens to your fee if I spend less?
• Is your fee calculated on what I approve or on what the platform actually spends?
• What is included in the setup fee, and what do I own if we stop after month one?
• What number will be on the first line of my monthly report?
• Can I pause instead of cancel, and what does that cost?
• Who, by name, will work on my account each week?

If the answers are vague, the price is not the problem. For the fuller version of this, read how to choose marketing services and how to find a marketing agency near you.

We said we would, so here it is. For paid media management, Mining Wells charges a $2,500 one-time build that covers account architecture, conversion tracking, the offer and landing page work, the first creative set and the measurement baseline. After that, the fee is $1,500 a month or 20 percent of your approved media budget, whichever is greater, with a $3,000 a month minimum media budget. The percentage steps down as budgets grow, in marginal bands rather than cliffs, so a client crossing a threshold never sees the bill jump. You can pause for $500 a month instead of cancelling, and everything you pay for stays yours.

The $1,500 floor breaks down as $1,000 of campaign management, $250 of tracking and call attribution, and $250 of reporting and the written monthly read. Below about $7,500 in spend you are paying for a senior operator's attention, not for a percentage, and we would rather say that plainly than have you work it out. SEO, websites and strategy are scoped per engagement, because no two businesses need the same thing, and we will give you a real number after we have looked at yours.

If you want that diagnosis, send us a message. We will tell you which of the services above is actually worth your first dollar, and it may not be the one you came in asking about.