What PPC and Google Ads Management Costs in Melbourne

Line 1: the management fee, and why it refuses to move

$750+GST a month buys the build and the running of it: keyword research, campaign structure, writing and testing the ads, negative keywords, bid management, and the conversion tracking that shows which clicks turned into a phone call or a form. Setup is $0. Account settings, tracking and analytics sit inside the fee, and every service you advertise gets its own landing page built free rather than being pointed at a homepage that talks about 9 other things.

The flat part matters more than the number. Percentage-of-spend pricing quietly pays an agency to talk you into a bigger budget whether or not the account has earned one. Ours is the same $750+GST at $1,500 a month of spend as it is at 10 times that, so the only reason we would ever suggest scaling up is that the results already justify it. No lock-in contract either, which is the other half of the same idea.

Line 2: your ad spend, in an account with your name on it

This money never passes through us. It goes from your card to Google, in an account registered to your business, and you keep that account. Around $1,500/mo is the usual starting point because it gives Google enough volume to learn from instead of dribbling out a handful of impressions a day.

Ownership sounds like paperwork right up until the day you change agencies. Every search term report, every conversion, every hard-won bit of account history stays with you rather than vanishing into somebody’s reseller login. Plenty of shops set it up the other way around. Ask whoever you are considering who the account belongs to, and pay attention to how long the answer takes.

Line 3: what a click costs, and why we will not guess

An “average Melbourne cost per click” is a number somebody invented. Prices are set keyword by keyword in a live auction, and 2 phrases describing the same job can sit nowhere near each other. So we do not put a figure in a pitch. We open Google’s planner, pull the current click cost for your exact search terms across the suburbs you actually service, and build the budget on what comes back.

A fixed “cost per lead” offered before anyone has looked at your keywords deserves the same trust as a quote for a job nobody has been out to inspect.

How the 3 lines turn into enquiries

Spend divided by click cost gives you clicks. What happens in the 10 seconds after the click is where the money is won or lost, and 2 decisions drive it: where the ad is allowed to appear, and what the visitor lands on. This city punishes lazy targeting, because a fat radius drawn around the CBD will cheerfully show your ad to someone an hour past the edge of your run. Tighten the geo to the suburbs you will actually drive to, then give each service a page written for that service alone.

A South Australian roofing account we manage runs on about $230 a day and shows what that discipline is worth. The roof-replacement campaign converts at 31.13% and $75.79 per enquiry; the gutter-replacement campaign at 30.00% and $55.31 per enquiry, measured October 2025 to July 2026. A conversion there means a tracked call, a form submission or a tap on a phone link. Not a booked job, not revenue. We report what the tracking can prove and nothing beyond it.

Every inclusion is listed on the Google Ads management pricing page, or send your keywords through for a free Melbourne budget breakdown.