Paid media
How much a Meta Ads agency costs (and what you should be paying)
It is the question we get asked most before a first call, and almost nobody answers it straight. Let us fix that.
The short answer
A serious Meta Ads agency for ecommerce typically charges $1,000 to $5,000 USD per month, or 10% to 20% of ad spend, depending on volume and scope. Below roughly $800 a month it is very hard for anyone to give your account real attention; above $5,000 you should be getting considerably more than campaign management.
Now the part that matters.
The four pricing models
1. Flat monthly retainer
You pay the same regardless of spend. The most common model and the easiest to budget for.
For: you know exactly what you will pay, and the agency has no incentive to inflate your spend. Against: if you scale hard, the agency works more for the same fee — and sooner or later that shows up in the attention you get.
2. Percentage of ad spend
Usually 10% to 20% of what you spend. Common at higher volumes.
For: cost scales with the size of the operation, which is fair to both sides. Against: the incentive is for you to spend more, not to earn more. With an honest agency that is fine. With a dishonest one, it is exactly the problem.
3. Base fee plus performance
A retainer plus a percentage of attributed revenue or growth.
For: it genuinely aligns interests. Against: attribution is a minefield. If you do not agree upfront which data source rules — the platform, Shopify, or a model of your own — the first invoice will be an argument.
4. Pure commission
Sounds great and rarely is. Someone working on commission alone needs fast results, and that pushes short-term decisions: squeezing remarketing, chasing audiences that were going to buy anyway, and presenting as incremental something that was not.
What the price should already include
If you are paying an agency fee, these are the floor, not extras:
- Measurement setup and audit. Conversions API, clean events, deduplication, consistent UTMs. Optimizing on dirty data is burning money with an extra step.
- A documented campaign structure, with the reasoning behind each decision.
- A real testing calendar: what gets tested, against what, and by what decision criteria.
- Reporting against business numbers. Revenue, margin and acquisition cost. Not ads manager screenshots.
- Access to whoever runs the account, not only to the person who presents it.
What is almost never included (and you should ask about)
Creative production. This is the most expensive gap and the one that surprises people most. Plenty of media agencies run the account but do not produce the ads — and creative is now the single biggest lever on performance.
If your agency does not produce and you do not have a steady flow of new creative either, the account will stall no matter how well optimized it is. The right question on the sales call is blunt: who produces the new ads, and how many per month?
How to tell whether what you pay makes sense
Run this with your own numbers:
- Take your monthly ad spend.
- Add the agency fee.
- Divide the total by revenue attributed to advertising.
That is your real acquisition cost — the one that matters. Compare it to your contribution margin per order. If margin does not comfortably cover it, the problem is not the agency: the cost structure does not close, and that has to be fixed before scaling.
A concrete example. You spend $10,000 USD a month and pay a $2,000 fee. You generate $40,000 in revenue. Platform ROAS says 4.0, but your real ROAS — including the fee — is 3.33. If gross margin is 35%, you have $14,000 of margin against $12,000 of total acquisition cost. That leaves $2,000 before fixed costs. Thin, and no ads manager screenshot was ever going to tell you.
The minimum spend for an agency to make sense
Our rule is $2,500 USD a month in ad spend, and it is not a commercial preference: below that there simply is not enough conversion volume for decisions to be statistically sound. You would be paying for optimization over noise.
If you are below it, you are almost always better off putting that money into creative production and fixing the store. Both improve every dollar you already spend, today, with no recurring fee.
Questions for the sales call
Five questions that separate good agencies from good salespeople:
- Who specifically will run my account day to day?
- How many accounts does that person handle at once?
- Do you produce creative or only manage media?
- Which number will you report against: platform ROAS or actual revenue?
- What happens if the diagnosis shows you cannot help me?
If the fifth question makes them uncomfortable, you have learned a lot.
At QUÁNTIKA we manage Meta, Google and TikTok Ads for ecommerce brands spending over $2,500 USD a month, and we produce the creative that feeds them. For an honest read on your account, book a diagnostic call.