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How Much Do Marketing Agencies Charge in Australia?
How much do marketing agencies charge in Australia? See real monthly fees for SEO, Google Ads and social media, the hidden costs, and how to judge value per job.
Most Australian marketing agencies charge small businesses between $1,500 and $5,000 a month. Single services start at around $500 a month, and full-service retainers can go past $10,000. That figure is only the agency fee. Ad spend sits on top of it, and so do setup costs. The number that tells you whether you got a fair deal is what each new customer costs once everything is added up.
In my experience, most tradies who feel ripped off by an agency were not overcharged on the fee. They paid for work that never turned into booked jobs, or they did not know what the fee covered. This guide breaks down the real prices so you can read a quote and know what you are buying.
What does the monthly fee actually buy?
An agency fee buys hours of labour. It does not buy results, and it rarely includes the money paid to Google or Facebook for ads.
Most Australian agencies work out their price from an hourly rate of $120 to $220. So a $2,000 monthly retainer buys roughly 10 to 16 hours of work. That time has to cover strategy, setup, writing, reporting and account checks. When you see it in hours, a cheap retainer makes more sense. A $600 package might buy three or four hours a month. That is enough to keep an ad account ticking over. It is not enough to grow a business.
One of my clients, a sparky in a regional town, signed up for a $2,000 a month package. He thought the Google Ads were part of it. At the end of the first month he got a separate bill from Google for $1,700. He was not scammed. The contract said "management fee" and he read it as "all in." This happens all the time.
So split every quote into two buckets:
Agency fee: what you pay the agency for their time and skill.
Media spend: what you pay the ad platforms directly for clicks or views.
If a quote does not show both, ask before you sign.
What does each service cost on its own?
Each service has its own price range, because each needs a different amount of work each month. These are the ranges I see for small Australian businesses in 2026.
Search engine optimization
Local Search engine optimization usually costs $1,000 to $3,500 a month. That pays for fixing your website, writing service pages, building your Google Business Profile and earning links from other sites. The goal is to show up when someone types "plumber near me" into a Search engine.
Anything under $500 a month is a warning sign. In most cases it is a reseller passing your site to an offshore team that buys cheap links in bulk. I know this because a builder I worked with paid $399 a month for two years. When we checked, his site had hundreds of links from spam directories and almost no local rankings. We spent the first three months cleaning it up before we could build anything.
Search engine optimization is slow. Expect four to nine months before calls pick up in a meaningful way. It keeps paying once it works, which is why many tradies end up spending more on it over time.
Pay-per-click
Pay-per-click management on Google Ads costs $500 to $2,000 a month. Some agencies charge 10% to 20% of your ad spend instead. On top of that you pay Google for every click.
For trades, clicks are not cheap. In capital cities, an emergency plumber or electrician can pay $10 to $35 per click. A sensible starting ad budget for most trades is $1,500 to $3,000 a month. Go lower and you often run out of budget by lunchtime, before you collect enough data to improve anything.
The upside is speed. A well-built Pay-per-click campaign can bring calls in the first week.
Social media marketing
Social media marketing splits into two jobs that are priced very differently.
Organic posting: $800 to $2,500 a month for content, captions and scheduling across Facebook and Instagram.
Paid ads on Meta Platforms: $500 to $1,500 a month in management, plus your ad spend paid directly to Meta.
What I found was that organic posting rarely brings in jobs for tradies on its own. It builds trust when people check you out after finding you somewhere else. Paid ads on Meta Platforms work better for planned jobs like bathrooms, decks and solar, where people browse before they buy. They work poorly for urgent work like burst pipes, because nobody scrolls Instagram when water is coming through the ceiling.
Content marketing
Content marketing covers blog posts, project write-ups, videos and guides. A quality blog post costs $150 to $600. Short video edits run $200 to $800 each. Monthly packages sit between $800 and $3,000.
Good content feeds your SEO and gives your ads something to point at. Weak content is a waste. If an agency sends you 2,000-word posts that read like they could be about any business in any country, they will not rank and nobody will read them.
Email marketing
Email marketing costs $500 to $1,500 a month on retainer, or $300 to $800 per campaign. Software adds $20 to $150 a month depending on list size.
Most tradies skip this, and that is a mistake. Email is the cheapest way to get repeat work from people who already trust you. One of my clients, an air con installer, sent a simple service reminder to 1,100 past customers before summer. He booked 64 services from one email. The campaign cost him $450.
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Why do quotes for the same work differ by thousands?
Quotes differ because agencies use different pricing models, and each model rewards the agency in a different way. Once you know the model, the gap makes sense.
Fixed monthly retainer: the most common model. Easy to budget. The risk is that you pay the same whether they work hard or coast.
Hourly billing: $120 to $220 an hour. Fair for one-off jobs like fixing a broken ad account.
Percentage of ad spend: usually 10% to 20%. This gives the agency a reason to tell you to spend more, even when more spend will not bring more jobs.
Pay per lead: $30 to $150 per enquiry for most trades. It sounds safe, but lead quality often drops. You can end up paying for tyre-kickers and wrong numbers.
When I tried pay-per-lead pricing with a roofing client, his lead volume went up and his booked jobs went down. The leads were real people. They just wanted free quotes on jobs two suburbs outside his area. We moved him back to a flat fee with tighter targeting, and his close rate doubled within two months.
The other reason for big gaps is who does the work. A senior specialist in Sydney costs more than a junior working from a template. Neither is wrong. Just ask who will touch your account each month and how many other clients they manage. Someone looking after 60 accounts cannot give yours much attention.
Which costs never show up in the quote?
The most common hidden costs are setup fees, lock-in contracts and losing ownership of your own accounts. Each one can cost more than the monthly fee itself.
Setup fees. Expect $500 to $3,000 to build campaigns, install tracking and audit your site. This is fair if real work is done. Ask for a list of what the setup covers.
Lock-in contracts. Six to 12 month terms are common. Some agencies need three months to show results, which is reasonable. Twelve months with no exit clause is not. A painter I spoke with was stuck paying $1,800 a month for nine months after the agency stopped replying to his emails.
Account ownership. This is the one most articles miss. Some agencies set up your Google Ads account, your Meta ad account, your website or even your Google Business Profile under their own login. When you leave, you lose the data, the history and sometimes your reviews. Always insist that every account sits in your business name, with the agency added as a user.
Extras. Call tracking software costs $50 to $150 a month. Landing pages can be $500 to $2,000 each. Some agencies insist on rebuilding your website before they start, which can add $3,000 to $15,000.
How do you tell if an agency is worth the money?
An agency is worth the money when your Customer acquisition cost is well below the profit from each job. That is the only test that counts. Rankings, clicks and likes are only steps along the way.
Here is how to work it out. Add up everything you spent in a month: the agency fee, the ad spend and any software. Divide that by the number of jobs you actually won, not the number of enquiries.
Say you pay a $2,000 agency fee and $2,500 in Google ad spend. That is $4,500. You won 15 jobs. Your Customer acquisition cost is $300 per job.
Now compare that to profit. If your average job is $1,800 and your margin is 35%, each job makes you $630 in profit. You spent $300 to earn $630. That is a strong Return on investment, and you would be happy to spend more on the same results.
Flip it around. If the same $4,500 brought in four jobs, each one cost $1,125. You lose money on every customer unless they come back for more work.
I know this because I sat with a fencing contractor who was sure his agency was doing a great job. His monthly report showed 140 clicks and 38 leads. When we matched those leads to his job book, he had won five jobs. His real cost per job was nearly double his profit per job. The report looked good. The bank account did not.
Ask any agency you talk to how they will track calls and forms back to booked jobs. If they only report clicks and impressions, you will never know your true Return on investment.
What should you expect to spend at your stage of business?
Your total budget should match the work you can handle. More leads than your crew can service just wastes money and burns your reputation.
Solo tradie, building a local name: $800 to $2,000 a month in total. Focus on your Google Business Profile, a basic website and a small Pay-per-click campaign. Skip organic social posting for now.
Small crew of two to five: $2,500 to $6,000 a month in total, including ad spend. Add local SEO and some content marketing for your best-paying services.
Established business with several crews: $6,000 to $15,000 a month. This is where full-service retainers make sense, with SEO, Google Ads, Meta ads and email marketing working together.
Notice these numbers include ad spend. Many tradies budget $2,000 for "marketing" and then sign a $2,000 agency fee, leaving nothing for the ads. Plan the total first, then split it.
What should you do before you sign with an agency?
Judge every agency by the cost per booked job it can deliver, never by the monthly fee alone.
Before you sign, take these steps:
Work out your target cost per job. Take your average profit per job and decide the most you would pay to win one. For most trades this is 20% to 40% of the profit.
Ask for a written split. Make the agency show the management fee and the expected ad spend as separate lines.
Check account ownership. Get it in writing that your Google, Meta and website accounts belong to your business.
Limit the lock-in. Accept three to six months at most, with a 30-day exit clause after that.
Demand job-level tracking. Ask how they will connect leads to booked work, and what your report will show each month.
Ask who does the work. Find out the name of the person running your account and how many clients they handle.
Do these six things and you will know within 90 days whether your agency earns its fee. If it does, scale up. If not, you can leave with your accounts and data intact.
Related guides: Is It Worth It to Hire a Marketing Agency?.
