Why Kiezo Growth Works on a Flat Fee, Not a Percentage of Spend
Most ecommerce brands never question how their Google Ads management is priced. The percentage-of-spend model is so standard that it reads as normal rather than as a choice. But pricing is not a billing detail - it is an incentive structure. It decides, in advance, what your agency is rewarded for doing more of.
Kiezo Growth works on a flat fee. No percentage of ad spend, no markup on budget, no revenue share. That is not a pricing gimmick - it is the most honest signal available that my interests and yours point in the same direction. Here is why the alternatives do not, and why the fee model matters more than most brands realise.
The way an agency is paid tells you what it is quietly being paid to do.
The three traditional models, and what each one rewards
Percentage of ad spend
The agency takes a cut of whatever you spend - typically 10% to 20%. The more you spend, the more they earn, regardless of whether that spend made you any money.
Read that back slowly. The agency's income rises when your budget rises, and it falls when your budget falls. So the structurally rational move for that agency is to keep your spend climbing - to push Performance Max harder, to scale into thinner and thinner margin, to treat "we increased budget 40%" as a win in its own right. The one piece of advice a percentage-of-spend agency is financially punished for giving is the most valuable one: spend less here, it has stopped being profitable.
Revenue share
The agency earns a percentage of the revenue the account generates. It sounds more aligned than spend-based pricing, and it is marginally better, but it rewards the wrong number.
Revenue is not profit. A revenue-share agency is incentivised to chase top-line: discount-driven sales, brand-term harvesting that claims credit for customers who were always going to buy, blended ROAS that looks strong because retargeting is doing the heavy lifting. None of that necessarily grows your contribution margin. You can hand over a healthy slice of revenue on sales that lost money once the full cost of fulfilment and acquisition is counted.
On top of that, Agencies operating on this model will calculate their rev share based on Google's in-platform attribution. So whichever sales Google claims as their own (hint- anything it can possibly interact with) end up as line-item on the invoice the agency charges you.
Markup on media, or hidden budget margin
The same problem as percentage-of-spend, with less transparency. The agency buys or manages your media and quietly adds a margin on top, so the more budget flows through them, the more they make - and you often cannot see exactly how much of your spend is fee versus media.
Pure CPA or performance bonuses get pitched as the fully-aligned option, but they create their own pull - towards gaming attribution, claiming easy conversions, and optimising for whatever the bonus is measured on rather than for the health of the account. Alignment is harder to buy than a clever fee structure.
Why this matters more than it looks
A misaligned fee does not show up as a single bad decision. It shows up as a slow drift - a thousand small choices that all lean the same way, towards more spend or more top-line, because that is the way the money flows for the people making them.
This is the same problem from the other side of the table. When a brand starts wondering whether it is time to part ways with its agency, the root cause is almost always here: the agency was doing exactly what its pricing rewarded, and that simply was not the same thing as growing the brand's profit. The incentive was just pointed the wrong way from day one.
How a flat fee changes the incentive
A flat fee is a fixed number, agreed in advance, that does not move when your budget moves. That single difference rewires everything.
The only way to add value is to make the account more profitable
If the fee is fixed, growing your spend does nothing for me. Inflating revenue does nothing for me. The only lever left is the one that actually matters to you - making the account more profitable, measured on contribution margin and the cost of acquiring new customers. My incentive and your CM3 are pointing the same way.
I can tell you to spend less
This is the freedom a percentage-of-spend agency does not have. When the right call is to cut budget, pause a campaign, kill an underperforming Performance Max setup, or pull back to where the margin actually is, a flat fee lets me say so without arguing against my own income. Sometimes the most profitable recommendation is to spend less - and you should be working with someone who can make it.
The cost is predictable and easy to model
A flat fee is a fixed line on your P&L. You know exactly what management costs this month and next, independent of how the budget flexes through peak and quiet seasons. It scales with the value of the work, not against your margin.
Full transparency, and you own everything
No margin buried in your media costs. No guessing how much of your spend is fee. You see precisely what you pay for management, and you keep ownership of the account, the data and the work. There is nothing structurally hidden, because there is nothing that needs hiding.
The obvious objection
The fair question is: if the fee is flat, what stops you doing less once my spend grows?
Two things. First, the work in a Google Ads account is driven by its complexity and its goals, not by the size of the budget number - a £20k account and a £60k account can take similar effort to manage well, and the fee is sized to that scope, not to your spend. Second, this is a solo, retention-led practice. The only thing that keeps a client is results they can see in their own profit. Doing less is the fastest way to lose the account - which is its own form of alignment, and a much stronger one than any clever percentage.
There is a flip side worth being honest about: at low spend, a flat fee can work out more expensive per pound than a small percentage would. That is deliberate. Senior time has a floor, the fee reflects the work rather than the budget, and the model is built for brands where profit-first management pays for itself many times over - not for the lowest possible monthly invoice.
The pattern underneath all of it
Pricing is positioning. A percentage of spend rewards more spend. A revenue share rewards more revenue. A flat fee rewards the only thing you actually care about - a more profitable account - because it is the only lever left once the fee stops moving with your budget.
That is why all Kiezo Growth services are flat fee. Not as a policy line on a pricing page, but as a structural commitment to alignment. The person doing the work is paid to grow your profit, and nothing else.
If your current agency earns more every time you spend more, it is worth asking what that has quietly been steering your account towards. A profit-first audit will tell you.
Further reading
Why Google Ads certifications don't matter
What a wall of badges actually signals - and why the certificate on the wall tells you nothing about whether someone can grow your account profitably.
5 signs it's time to fire your Google Ads agency
The warning signs that your agency is working its own incentives rather than your profit - and what good looks like instead.
Kiezo Growth's Google Ads Approach & Services
The 3-step approach to account management that makes the P&L the priority - not what looks good in the dashboard.