The 9 Best PPC Agencies in Manchester

Using the rates these firms publish, management sits between roughly £1,250 and £3,000 a month for a small to mid-sized account, on top of the ad spend itself. Dark Horse publishes £1,250 a month, Victor Serban £1,500. Made by Factory targets brands spending £2,000 to £50,000 a month and slides its fee with account size. Everyone else on this list quotes only after a call. Beware anything advertised at £100 to £400 a month, at that price nobody is in your account weekly, and you are usually buying an automated rules script and a monthly PDF.

It should be, and on this list it always is. You pay Google or Microsoft directly for the media on your own card, and you pay the agency for the work. Be careful with anyone who wants to bill you a single blended number: it hides what the management actually costs, it makes leaving harder because the billing relationship sits with them, and in the worst case you never see the real spend figures. A percentage-of-spend model is legitimate but has an obvious incentive problem, it pays more when you spend more, whether or not spending more is right.

It depends on what breaks first. A specialist means the senior person is actually in the account, which is the single biggest predictor of whether paid search works, and it is usually cheaper for the same seniority. An agency buys you coverage, someone answers in August, someone else knows Meta, someone else can rebuild the feed, and a bench you can escalate to. The failure mode of a specialist is holidays and capacity. The failure mode of an agency is being sold by a director and serviced by a graduate. Ask, directly and by name, who will be in the account each week.

Everything, under your own account. The Google Ads account should sit under your billing with the agency added as a user, not the other way round. Same for Google Analytics, Search Console, Merchant Center, Tag Manager and any Meta assets. If an agency runs your ads inside its own MCC on its own billing, leaving means starting a new account with no history, and account history is worth real money in learning-phase terms. Put ownership in the contract before the first invoice.

Faster than SEO and slower than the pitch deck implies. Structural fixes to a badly built account can move things inside two or three weeks. A rebuilt account needs a conversion-data window before its bidding is worth anything, which in practice is 30 to 60 days at meaningful volume. Performance Max and other automated campaign types are worse for this: they need the data before they behave. Budget for at least three months before you judge it, and make sure conversion tracking is genuinely correct on day one, because everything downstream is built on it.

Below roughly £1,000 a month in media there is usually not enough data for anyone to optimise against, and the management fee becomes a larger share of your spend than the media. At that level you are better off running a tightly targeted brand and high-intent keyword account yourself, or paying for a one-off build and audit rather than an ongoing retainer. Most agencies on this list are set up for accounts spending £2,000 a month upwards, and the honest ones will tell you when you are below their floor.