Paid Search for SMBs: understanding who earns what before you sign
A percentage of ad spend is the historical model of French Google Ads agencies. It is also the one everybody discusses and nobody publishes a rate for. The more you spend, the more the agency earns, and the market acknowledges the bias that produces. Here is what it implies for a small business, what a campaign really costs in 2026, and why we bill differently.
published French rate cards billing on percentage
the monthly retainer on those same rate cards
the only first-hand French cost per click measured
before a reliable first verdict on a campaign
The model nobody publishes a rate for
It gets quoted on every page that discusses agency pricing. It appears on none of the rate cards those same agencies publish.
The principle is simple: the agency takes a share of what you spend with Google or Meta. Ten to twenty percent is the range you will read everywhere. Take a media budget of 5,000 euros a month. At fifteen percent, the agency bills 750 euros. Double the budget and its fee doubles too, without its work doubling.
We opened nine French agency and consultant rate cards that actually publish their prices. Not one bills a percentage of media budget: all are flat retainers, from 99 to 690 euros excl. VAT a month. The percentage model is the one whose rate you will find nowhere.
What the market says about itself
La Fabrique du Net, a comparison site that earns its living from the agencies it lists, publishes the budgets of 374 paid search engagements. It notes that fees take the form of a flat retainer in the majority of cases, and only sometimes a percentage of media spend.
The same survey warns, in its own words, that an agency paid a percentage of media budget without a performance commitment can be pushed to make you spend more rather than better. Coming from a site funded by those very agencies, the warning is harder to dismiss than the same sentence from a competitor.
The moment it shows
It arrives at roughly the same place every time. A campaign runs correctly, enquiries come in, and the question comes up: should the budget go up?
The right answer depends on your capacity to handle more enquiries, your margin, your production lead times. Sometimes it is no. An agency paid on percentage will rarely volunteer that answer. This is not a question of individual honesty, it is a question of incentive.
The argument for it
Supporters of the model argue that interests are aligned: the agency wants your budget to produce results, so it wants to spend it well.
True up to a point. What the reasoning leaves out is the question of the amount. Spending well and spending more are two different objectives, and only one of them raises the invoice.
What we do with it
At Synerium, ad management sits inside the monthly subscription. Our fee does not move by a single euro depending on what you invest with Google or Meta.
Which means that when we advise you to lower a budget, cut a campaign or hold off on a new channel, it costs us nothing. It is the kind of detail nobody notices at signature and everybody notices six months in. The plans are on the Synerium Infinity page.
The four ways an agency can bill you
Worth knowing before you compare two proposals, because they do not compare directly.
A percentage of media budget
Ten to twenty percent of your monthly ad spend, in the ranges that circulate. Real advantage: you pay no large fee while you start small.
Structural drawback: the bias described above, and an invoice that climbs mechanically with your growth. Worth noting that the ranges quoted vary from one source to the next, which says a good deal about how they were established.
The fixed monthly retainer
An amount independent of your ad budget. Published French rate cards start around 99 euros excl. VAT for a narrow scope, and full multi-channel management sits closer to 2,000 to 4,000 euros.
Advantage: predictable, and the agency has no interest in inflating your spend. Drawback: on a small media budget, fees can exceed the advertising itself, which makes no sense.
Time and materials
Billed by the day, or by the hour. Transparent on paper, hard to verify in practice: you will never really know how many hours went in.
One useful marker: French platform data puts the day rate of an experienced web marketing consultant around 525 euros, with junior profiles well below. No French rate card publishes an hourly rate for management, so any hourly figure you read has been reconstructed by whoever wrote it.
Payment on results
The agency is paid on the enquiries or sales generated. Rare, because it shifts the risk onto the provider, and reserved for accounts with solid history.
Be wary when it is offered upfront on a brand new account: nobody can commit to results that no data announces.
The threshold below which nothing happens
A marker that holds for every model. One agency that publishes its rate card puts the work at eight to fifteen hours a month as soon as several channels are involved.
Do the division against the market day rate. A retainer of two or three hundred euros does not fund that time. What it funds is an automated report. It is the same finding as on search work, and for the same reason: what you are buying is human time.
What a campaign really costs in 2026
Three separate line items, and a great many commercial proposals blend them.
The media budget is what you pay Google or Meta directly. It is never included in an agency fee, absent explicit mention, and it should appear separately in any serious proposal. Cost per click is set by auction, query by query: Google recalculates it on every search, factoring in your bid, the quality of your ad and its landing page, and the context of the search.
There is no public French cost-per-click benchmark. The four to five euro figures circulating in French are euro conversions of measurements taken on American campaigns: the French values are each the American ones multiplied by a constant factor, and the conversion is never declared. The only first-hand French measurement we found, published in July 2026 on one agency portfolio and roughly 460,000 euros of real spend, puts the median at 0.58 euro on Google.
Sector averages lie
Some sectors do push bids up, legal services first among them: the American benchmarks put it at nearly twice the all-industry reference.
Insurance is the useful counter-example. A few of its keywords cost a fortune, but the sector average comes out below the general reference. A sector average tells you nothing about the price of your query.
Management fees
Depending on model, between 300 and 3,000 euros a month for a small business. Add initial setup, which the published rate cards place between 200 and 1,000 euros.
Wider ranges circulate. None of them rests on a rate card you can open.
Tools
Conversion tracking, tagging, dashboards. Between 50 and 300 euros a month depending on needs.
The line item most often forgotten, and without it you are flying blind.
The learning budget nobody mentions
This is the most important point and the least explained. A campaign needs a minimum volume before its data becomes usable, and Google does not reason in euros here but in conversions: its automated bidding asks for at least fifteen conversions over thirty days to target a return on ad spend on Search. Below that, the algorithm has nothing to learn from.
One revealing detail on the published rate cards: the recommended media budget often exceeds the fees themselves. An agency at 690 euros a month that recommends 1,200 euros of media is asking you to pay twice. Better to know before you start. We will tell you if that is your case.
How we run advertising at Synerium
Four commitments, three of which are written into our terms rather than into a sales pitch.
Your accounts belong to you
We create the Google Ads and Meta Business Manager accounts in your name, and they remain your property. It is written into our terms, not promised in a meeting.
This looks obvious and it is not. Some agencies work on their own account, which means that when you leave you lose the history, the audiences and the accumulated learning. It is one of the questions to ask systematically before signing.
The budget stays with you
You pay your ad budget straight to Google or Meta, on your account, with your payment method. We do not advance it and we do not bill it.
You validate the budgets before any activation. You know at any moment what is being spent and why.
We arbitrate with search, not against it
Paid and organic answer different horizons. Advertising produces within days and stops the moment you stop paying. Search optimization takes months, and Google long quoted four months to a year before removing that mention from its documentation in June 2026.
Since we do both inside the same subscription, we have no interest in steering you towards one or the other. Generated answers add a third front, which we cover on our page about AI search optimization.
What we measure, and what we refuse to
Cost per qualified enquiry and what becomes of it, not impressions or click-through rate. A report listing flattering indicators without saying how many customers arrived proves nothing.
And we will tell you when a campaign is no longer worth keeping, including when it represents a sizeable share of your budget.
When advertising is not your priority
We would rather spare you a pointless expense, even if it means selling nothing.
When your landing page does not convert
The most frequent case and the most expensive. Paying to bring visitors to a page that does not convert amounts to buying traffic for nothing, and advertising makes that loss immediate instead of diluting it.
Before launching a campaign, we always look at where it will land. If the page does not hold up, we work on it first.
When you cannot handle more enquiries
A campaign that works produces calls and forms. If your order book is full for three months, you will pay for enquiries you cannot honour, and disappoint people along the way.
When your media budget is too small to learn
Below the volume needed for the algorithm to calibrate, data arrives too slowly to steer by. You spend without ever knowing what works.
When you are after something lasting
Advertising stops the day you stop paying, leaving nothing behind. If your goal is to build acquisition that holds over time, it can only be a complement, never the foundation.
The mistakes we see most often
Comparing two quotes on the headline figure
Management at 750 euros on percentage and a 1,200-euro retainer do not compare directly. The first climbs with your growth, the second does not. Over eighteen months, the gap can reverse completely.
Always ask for the twelve-month total, at constant budget then at double. The same reflex applies to any agency quote, which we break down in our guide to reading a web agency quote.
Handing your ad accounts to the agency
When you leave, you lose the history, the audiences you built and the algorithms learning. Some agencies deliberately make it a retention device. Insist that the accounts be opened in your name, from day one.
Launching without conversion tracking
Without correct tagging, you will know how many clicks you paid for and nothing more. Not how many enquiries, not how many customers, not what each one cost you. It is the first thing to install, before the first campaign.
Stacking channels at launch
Google, Meta and LinkedIn at once, on a budget that would barely cover one. Each channel needs its own learning volume. Better one channel steered properly than three groping in the dark.
Judging too early
Google itself recommends running a test for four to six weeks, discarding the first seven days while the campaign ramps up. Cutting after ten days because the cost per enquiry looks high means throwing away the initial investment right before it starts to produce.
Taking a market figure at face value
Most of the prices and cost-per-click figures published in French on paid search cite no source, or cite one another. We checked them one by one before writing this page, and several did not survive.
Before you build a decision on a figure, ask where it was measured, on what sample, and in which country.
What it looks like in your subscription
Ad management is part of the Premium plan, at 2,990 euros excl. VAT per month on a three-month commitment, or 2,492 euros on an annual one.
No line, no percentage, no setup fee
That same plan covers design, search, content, newsletters, social ads and landing pages. There is no Google Ads management line on your invoice, no percentage taken from your budget, and no setup fee.
The media budget stays your responsibility and on your account, as it should be.
The comparison that matters
On the market, a small business investing 5,000 euros of media pays several hundred euros in monthly fees for ad management alone, plus initial setup.
With us, that work sits inside a subscription that also handles the rest of your digital presence. The plans are detailed on the Synerium Infinity page. If you are starting from a site that needs rebuilding entirely, Synerium Studio finances the full creation over thirty-six months, with ownership from delivery.
What does Google Ads management cost in 2026?
Between 300 and 3,000 euros a month for a small business, depending on the model. On French rate cards that are actually published, retainers start around 99 euros excl. VAT, and full multi-channel management sits closer to 2,000 to 4,000. The percentage of media budget gets quoted everywhere at ten to twenty percent, without a single agency publishing its rate. Add initial setup, which published rate cards place between 200 and 1,000 euros. At Synerium, management sits inside the Premium plan, with no separate fee.
Is the ad budget included in your fees?
No, and it is included nowhere else either, absent explicit mention. Media budget goes straight to Google or Meta, on your account, with your payment method. Any proposal that blends the two deserves a precise question: how much goes to advertising, and how much stays with the provider.
Why bill a flat retainer rather than a percentage?
Because the percentage creates a bias the market acknowledges itself. La Fabrique du Net, a comparison site that earns its living from the agencies it lists, writes in its pricing survey that an agency paid a percentage of media budget without a performance commitment can be pushed to make you spend more rather than better. With a retainer, our fee does not move with your budget, so advising you to cut spend costs us nothing.
What minimum ad budget should I plan for?
Enough for the data to become usable. Google does not reason in euros but in conversions: its automated bidding asks for at least fifteen conversions over thirty days to target a return on ad spend on Search. Below that, the algorithm has nothing to learn from. On published rate cards, the recommended media budget often exceeds the fees themselves, which gives you a sense of scale. If yours is too tight, we will say so before we start rather than after.
What does a click cost on Google in 2026?
There is no rate: cost is set by auction, query by query. And no public French cost-per-click benchmark exists. The four to five euro figures circulating in French are euro conversions of measurements taken on American campaigns, by a publisher that sells the service itself. The only first-hand French measurement we found, published in July 2026 on one agency's portfolio and roughly 460,000 euros of real spend, puts the median at 0.58 euro on Google. Your sector matters far more than any national average.
Who owns the advertising accounts?
You do. We create the Google Ads and Meta Business Manager accounts in your name and they remain your property, which is written into our terms. Ask the question systematically elsewhere: some agencies work on their own account, and you lose the history and the audiences when you leave.
How long before results?
First clicks arrive on launch day, but a campaign needs several weeks to leave its learning phase. Google itself recommends running a test for four to six weeks, discarding the first seven days while the campaign ramps up. Count six to eight weeks for a reliable first verdict.
Paid search or organic search?
They answer different horizons. Advertising produces within days and stops the moment you stop paying. Search optimization takes months: Google long quoted a range of four months to a year, before removing that mention from its documentation in June 2026. Since we do both inside the same subscription, we have no interest in steering you towards one or the other.
What happens if I stop the campaigns?
Traffic stops the same day. That is the fundamental difference with search optimization, which keeps producing after the work stops. An advertising campaign builds no asset, apart from your accounts learning and the audiences you have built, which stay with you since the accounts are in your name.
Do I need conversion tracking before launching?
Yes, and it is not negotiable. Without correct tagging you will know how many clicks you paid for and nothing else: not the number of enquiries, not the number of customers, not the cost of either. It is the first thing we install, before the first campaign.
Not sure advertising is your priority?
The first question to settle is not the budget, it is whether advertising is your priority right now. It is not always, and we will say so. If it is, the order matters: landing page first, conversion tracking next, campaigns last.