$800 To $3,500 A Month For Most Melbourne Businesses.
If you're a Melbourne service business spending under $10,000 a month on ads, Meta ads management will cost you somewhere between $800 and $3,500 a month in fees, on top of the ad spend itself. Freelancers sit at the bottom of that range, boutique specialists in the middle, and mid-size agencies at the top. Above that, larger agencies charge $3,500 to $7,500 and up, but they generally won't take an account with less than $5,000 a month in spend.
The management fee is always separate from the ad spend. A $1,500 fee with $3,000 in spend is a $4,500 a month commitment, and the ad spend goes straight to Meta. Any agency that bundles the two into one invoice without a breakdown is one to walk away from.
The Fee Tells You Who's In The Account.
Freelancers — $800 to $1,500 a month
One person, usually experienced, running your campaigns alongside a handful of others. You get direct access to the person doing the work, which is a genuine advantage. The trade-off is capacity: creative output is limited, cover when they're away is nil, and if they're good, they'll be full within a year and your fee will go up.
Boutique specialists — $1,000 to $2,500 a month
Small agencies of one to five people, usually built around a founder who came from running ads themselves. This is where most Melbourne service businesses land, and where the fee buys strategy, creative, weekly optimisation and reporting from someone senior. Look closely at what happens to the lead after the form is submitted, because most stop there.
Mid-size agencies — $2,500 to $5,000 a month
An account manager, a media buyer, a designer, and a monthly deck. The strategy is often sound, but the person who talks to you is rarely the person in Ads Manager, and the person in Ads Manager is often a year or two into their career. You're paying for the structure, not the seniority.
Percentage of spend — 10% to 20%
Common above $10,000 a month in spend, and reasonable there. Below it, a percentage model punishes you for staying small, or gives the agency a reason to push your budget up before the campaign has earned it. For a Melbourne trade or clinic spending $2,000 to $5,000 a month, a flat fee is nearly always the better structure.
Fee Divided By Ad Spend Is The Real Price.
Here's the maths most people skip. A $1,000 a month fee on $1,000 a month of ad spend means half your total budget never reaches a single customer. The same fee on $4,000 of spend is 20%, which is what a healthy account looks like.
That's why we set a minimum ad spend of $2,000 a month before we'll take a management client. Below that, the fee eats the results, and you'd be better off building the campaign yourself with someone senior beside you for 90 minutes. We built The Launch Session for exactly that situation, because the honest answer for a $1,000 a month advertiser is not "hire an agency."
Rule of thumb: your management fee should be no more than 30% to 40% of your ad spend. If it's more than half, either the spend is too low or the fee is too high.
Six Things The Fee Has To Cover.
- Strategy tied to your margins — not a generic funnel. The campaign should be built around what a customer is worth to you and what you can afford to pay for one.
- Creative and copy, produced, not just "consulted on" — creative is the single biggest lever in Meta ads. If you're expected to supply it, the fee should be lower.
- Weekly hands-on optimisation — someone in the account every week reading the data and moving budget. Monthly check-ins are not management.
- Conversion tracking that's actually set up — pixel, conversions API, and lead events firing correctly. Wrong tracking is the most common reason a campaign "isn't working."
- You own the account — campaigns built inside your Business Manager, not the agency's. If you leave, the data and history leave with you.
- A clear answer on what happens after the lead comes in — because a form fill is not a customer, and the gap between the two is where most ad spend is lost.
Our Prices, In Public.
Meta ads management with Convert Co is $1,250 a month plus ad spend on one channel, or $1,850 a month running Meta and Google together. That covers strategy, creative, copy, build, weekly optimisation and reporting, built in your own account with no lock-in.
If you want every lead called within the hour, qualified, and booked into your calendar, that's our Full Funnel plan at $2,250 a month, or $2,850 across both channels. The extra $1,000 is the calling and booking, and it's the part that turns leads into jobs.