Guide · 4 min read
How advertising budgets work when an agency manages your ads
Why your ad spend and our management fee are two separate things, who owns the ad account, and what to expect from reporting.
If you've never worked with an agency on paid advertising, the money side can be confusing. Some agencies bundle your ad spend into one invoice. We don't, on purpose. Here's how it works with SocialBuzzUp.
Two separate costs
- Your media budget: the money the platform (Meta, Google, TikTok, LinkedIn, Pinterest) charges to run the ads. You pay this directly to the platform from your own ad account, with your own payment method.
- Our management fee: what you pay SocialBuzzUp for planning, building, optimising and reporting on the campaigns. It's a fixed monthly amount listed on the service page.
Why we keep them apart
- Transparency: you see exactly what the platform charged and exactly what we charged. No blended numbers.
- Ownership: the ad account, its history and its data stay yours. If we part ways, nothing moves.
- No incentive to spend more: our fee doesn't change with your budget, so there's no reason for us to push it up.
What access we need
Partner or employee access to your ad account and tracking, granted from your side. We never ask for your login. You can remove our access at any time from your own settings.
What reporting looks like
- A monthly report showing what ran, what it cost, what it produced according to the platform's own data, and what we changed and why.
- For larger plans, a testing roadmap and a log of every test so decisions are traceable.
- No invented benchmarks. If a number is from the platform, we say so. If it's our estimate, we say that too.
What we won't promise
A return on ad spend, a cost per lead, or any specific result. Campaign performance depends on your offer, pricing, landing page, creative, market and the platform's auction. We manage the parts we can control and report clearly on the rest.