--- title: "The 15% Agency Pitch Deck, Annotated" description: "Margin notes on the agency pitch deck: what a $3,500 onboarding fee, a dedicated strategist, quarterly reviews, and a 15% retainer actually buy." image: "https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/6823bbd57170ea42b357cf81/6abc9b5941d552ebd301a565_059b1e70-849c-4c98-acd1-33dbae43b8c4.png" --- September 30, 2026 • min read # The 15% Agency Pitch Deck, Annotated ![Young man with curly hair wearing a black shirt outdoors against green foliage background.](https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/6821efca072e48f6f495a47e/68562d390107b3921a6e3d68_1743932904108.jpg) **Alexander Perleman**, Head Of Product @ groas Ex-Goldman Sachs and Stanford Computer Science alex@groas.ai [LinkedIn](https://groas.com/post/the-percentage-of-spend-agency-pitch-ann#) ![Cover image for: The 15% Agency Pitch Deck, Annotated](https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/6823bbd57170ea42b357cf81/6abc9b5941d552ebd301a565_059b1e70-849c-4c98-acd1-33dbae43b8c4.png) Slide 14 contains the most important sentence in the agency pitch deck: **Investment: 15% of monthly ad spend (minimum $3,000/month).** It sits between a mattress-company case study and a photo of five people laughing at an empty whiteboard. Nobody points at the minimum for long. The presenter says the fee aligns everyone’s incentives. When you grow, the agency grows. That sounds reasonable, especially when [PPC management fees commonly fall between 10% and 20% of media spend](https://www.outerboxdesign.com/search-marketing/pay-per-click-advertising/ppc-management-pricing). The deck invites you to assume that a bigger Google invoice means proportionally more work for the agency. I’ve managed enough accounts to want that relationship explained, not illustrated with interlocking gears labelled *Strategy*, *Execution*, *Synergy*, and *Growth*. Here are my margin notes for the rest of the presentation. They’re the notes I’d want beside the price before deciding whether to sign. #### Slide 16: Your Dedicated Strategist Has Other Accounts The headshot belongs to Julian, who wears a tailored blazer and will be “living and breathing your account.” Under the photo, I’d add the first question the slide skips: **How much of Julian’s month have you bought?** An account manager at a mid-market agency may carry [10 to 15 client accounts](https://anicca.co.uk/blog/how-much-should-i-pay-for-an-agency-to-manage-my-adwords/). At the deck’s $3,000 minimum, a hypothetical blended rate of $150 an hour makes the fee equivalent to 20 hours of agency time. That is not a promise of 20 hours of work, much less 20 hours of Julian personally studying search terms. Calls, preparation, reporting, internal meetings, and emails all draw on the team’s capacity. Julian may be excellent. He may catch a conversion problem before it wrecks your numbers. But “dedicated” tells you who owns the relationship, not how often that person can work on the account. I’ve done the work behind those calls. The meeting does not arrange itself, and the report still needs checking before anyone shares it. If the proposal promises weekly attention, I’d ask what that attention looks like between the meetings. A named contact is useful; a named contact with time to act is better. ![An agency account manager looking at twelve open browser tabs on dual monitors.](https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/6823bbd57170ea42b357cf81/6abc9b5a41d552ebd301a5c7_8bc12499-8ea6-4998-af0b-ea1c14de90fa.png) If you ask why [Google Ads Change History](https://www.reddit.com/r/PPC/comments/147j4w6/how_often_do_you_expect_an_agency_to_tweak_or/) shows a quiet fortnight, the speaker notes offer a useful line: *“We take a disciplined, observational approach to allow Google’s machine learning algorithms to mature without disruptive interference.”* Sometimes restraint is good management. It’s still reasonable to ask what Julian watched, what he learned, and what he decided not to change. Put those decisions in the update, not just the adjective *disciplined*. #### Slide 18: The $3,500 Doorway The next slide calls for **“One-Time Strategic Onboarding & Account Architecture: $3,500.”** The presenter lists a technical audit, audience segmentation, and a proprietary keyword taxonomy. Upfront PPC onboarding fees can [run from $1,000 to $5,000](https://thirdmarblemarketing.com/google-ads-management-price-comparison/), so the amount won’t look strange in a comparison table. The margin note should ask what happens after the presentation. I remember when a large account build meant weekends in Google Ads Editor: Single Keyword Ad Groups, modified broad terms mapped against exact match phrases, cross-negative lists, and manual mobile bid adjustments tracked in Excel. That was painstaking production. I wouldn’t want to pay someone to recreate it for nostalgia, but I know why the hours appeared on an invoice. Today, Smart Bidding, broad match, and automated assets have changed that build. There’s less reason to charge for every piece of mechanical scaffolding an operator once made by hand. That does **not** mean a sound account takes 45 minutes to set up. Conversion tracking has to work. A Merchant Center feed can have disapprovals. Landing pages still need checking. Those are the tasks I’d look for in the scope. The slide lists activities; I’d ask for outputs. An audit that finds a tracking problem is not the same as a working fix. A feed review that flags disapprovals leaves an awkward question if nobody owns the next step. The distinction matters because onboarding is when the account’s measurements become the basis for every confident chart that follows. A fee buys more than a campaign shell only if somebody is responsible for verifying what the shell measures. Before approving the onboarding line, I’d ask for the deliverables and the owner of each one: Who checks the tags? Who resolves feed problems? Who tests the landing pages? Those questions are less photogenic than *proprietary taxonomy*, but [scope exclusions are where a tidy agency price can get expensive](https://groas.com/post/google-ads-agency-pricing-red-flags-2026-hidden-fees-to-avoid). #### Slide 22: The Quarterly Review Has Excellent Lighting Slide 22 promises weekly Slack updates, monthly executive summaries, and a 60-minute Quarterly Business Review. The QBR gets the capital letters. It also gets a dashboard that can make an ordinary Tuesday in Google Ads look like a board-level event. The presenter’s script celebrates an 18% rise in search impressions and a 12% fall in cost per click. Julian has a multicoloured chart for assisted conversion paths. If your cost per qualified pipeline opportunity rose by 34%, that figure deserves a place near the front, even if it spoils the colour scheme. **Cheaper clicks are not the same thing as cheaper customers.** ![A miniature theatre stage showing glowing charts under spotlights, with mechanical gears idle behind the curtain.](https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/6823bbd57170ea42b357cf81/6abc9b5a41d552ebd301a5ca_acc385af-74c0-4655-80c5-33129867d65b.png) The prepared answer is *“Search is an upper-funnel discovery mechanism that builds brand equity across extended buying journeys.”* It might be. I’d still want to know whether the campaigns were meant to produce pipeline now, what changed during the quarter, and what the team plans to do about the cost of an opportunity. A QBR can be useful when those questions drive it. Without them, the meeting is a well-lit reading of charts you could have opened yourself. There is room on this slide for the previous review’s commitments, too. If the team said it would investigate a costly set of queries, the next meeting should say what it found and what it did. Otherwise each quarter gets a fresh opening act, and the same problem can sit in the audience indefinitely. The speaker notes should include a page the client can inspect afterward: decisions made, tests run, problems found, and results tied to the goal in the brief. [Change History](https://www.reddit.com/r/PPC/comments/1eyl24a/what_shows_up_in_change_history/) can help you ask sharper questions about account activity. It cannot, by itself, tell you whether a quiet period was careful management or neglect. Make Julian explain the difference in plain English. #### Slide 25: Your Budget Grows, So the Invoice Grows The stair-step graphic on slide 25 is called **“Long-Term Partnership & Growth Scaling.”** Start with the numbers, then admire the stairs. At $20,000 a month in ad spend, a 15% fee is $3,000. At $40,000, it is $6,000. That’s another $3,000 a month in management fees before anyone has shown you the additional management work. The deck’s $3,000 minimum matters at the other end too. At $10,000 in spend, 15% works out to $1,500, but the stated minimum makes the invoice $3,000. The percentage becomes the important figure once spend reaches $20,000; below that, the minimum does the collecting. I would put both calculations on the slide rather than leave the prospect to discover the distinction in the contract. A larger budget can demand more judgment. Someone may need to reassess targets, search intent, creative, and whether the extra spend can acquire customers at a sensible cost. But the **fee increases automatically; the work has to be demonstrated**. No extra line in Google’s invoice tells Julian which queries deserve attention or whether another dollar of spend is worth it. That’s the question I’d write beside the graphic: What specific work does the agency do at $40,000 in spend that it wasn’t doing at $20,000? I’m happy to pay for a good answer. “Your investment has grown” is a description of my budget. If the answer is more testing or closer oversight, put that work on the slide. If the answer is the same work at twice the fee, at least stop calling the graphic a plan. Percentage-of-spend pricing comes from a media-buying model built around a different kind of labour. Google’s automated auction now handles bidding and delivery that once took far more manual attention. The agency still has important decisions to make, but [a fee pegged to spend gives it more revenue when you spend more](https://groas.com/post/percentage-of-spend-pricing-fails-google-ads-agencies-clients). That incentive deserves scrutiny whenever the recommendation is to raise the budget. Ask for the expected effect on acquisition cost, not another stair-step illustration. #### Slide 26: The Alternative Has to Do the Work Too The proposal’s appendix lists alternatives under a heading designed to end the conversation: *Self-Service Tools*. It says software still needs a person to interpret it. That point is fair. A dashboard with a subscription is not an account manager, however attractive its charts. For a business spending $20,000 a month, the 15% retainer costs $3,000 monthly or $36,000 over a year, before creative or landing-page costs. If you compare that with software, look beyond the subscription price: spend thresholds, seats, and who will actually diagnose a broken campaign. A cheaper licence is no bargain if the work lands back on the same overextended person at your company. Nor does removing the agency invoice help much if you inherit its weekly list of tasks. ![A two-tone line-art illustration comparing an escalating ad-spend tax meter with a streamlined engine block.](https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/6823bbd57170ea42b357cf81/6abc9b5a41d552ebd301a5cd_f1030a32-f6ab-4347-b673-47cbd315f1d6.png) That is where I’d put [groas](https://groas.com/) in the comparison. Its flat monthly fee doesn’t rise with ad spend, and there’s no setup fee. Specialized models execute campaign, bidding, targeting, budget, and optimization work continuously while a named human strategist sets direction and guardrails. It isn’t a subscription that hands you a list of recommendations to interpret after lunch. It’s an alternative operating model for the work the deck says your retainer covers. I would still ask the same hard questions I asked Julian: What actions were taken? What happened to qualified pipeline, acquisition cost, or revenue? Who is accountable when those numbers move the wrong way? A flat fee fixes the automatic price rise. Execution and accountability are what make the flat fee worth paying. #### Slide 28: The Transaction, Without the Template The final slide is meant to show a sunrise and a line about partnership. My version keeps the price list. It reads more clearly without the stock photo: - **“Strategic Discovery & Account Architecture ($3,500)”**: We will audit and build the account. Ask us which tracking, feed, and landing-page checks are included, and who handles anything they uncover. - **“Dedicated Account Strategist”**: Julian is your point of contact. Ask how much time the team can give your account after calls and reporting, and what evidence of its decisions you’ll receive. - **“15% Management Fee on Ad Spend”**: At $20,000 a month in media spend, our fee is $3,000. At $40,000, it is $6,000. Ask what additional work comes with the extra $3,000. - **“Quarterly Business Reviews”**: We will present the account’s performance every 90 days. Bring the acquisition and revenue figures you actually use to run the business. I don’t object to paying for an operator who finds costly mistakes and makes better decisions than I would. I object to a price that rises on its own while the explanation for the work stays fixed. Before signing the 15% deck, calculate the fee at your target spend and ask what will change in the account when the invoice doubles. If nobody can tell you, close the PDF. ## Related Posts [![](https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/plugins/Basic/assets/placeholder.60f9b1840c.svg) ##### Agency AEO: Managing Knowledge Graphs and Auto-Publishing to Client CMS Guide for agencies on evaluating AEO software for knowledge-graph and citation management and auto-publishing to client CMS, and how groas documents that workflow. 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