When a small business decides to hire someone for digital marketing, price is usually the primary filter. That's understandable — budgets are tight, and it's hard to evaluate quality in a field where everyone promises the same outcomes. But consistently, the businesses that make the cheapest initial choice end up spending more in total — through months of fees for work that doesn't move anything, through Google Ads budgets wasted on unmanaged accounts, and through the time and cost of fixing what needs to be undone before anything useful can be built.

Here's how the maths actually works, and what to look for instead.

What "cheap" actually means in practice

An agency charging €200/month for SEO is not doing SEO. At that price point, they cannot be — the time required to do meaningful SEO work, even for a small local business, is measured in hours per month, not minutes. What they're doing is maintaining a retainer relationship that's cheap enough for you not to cancel, while sending reports with metrics that look positive but don't correspond to any business outcome.

The same applies to Google Ads management. An agency charging €150/month to manage campaigns is not actively managing them. Proper Google Ads management — reviewing search terms, adjusting bids, testing ad copy, monitoring conversion data — takes real time. A low fee means low attention, and low attention on a Google Ads account means quiet, sustained budget waste.

A useful question: Ask your agency exactly what they did in the account last month. If they can't give you a specific, verifiable answer — changes made, results compared, decisions taken — you have your answer about what the fee is buying.

The compounding cost

The real cost of bad marketing isn't just the monthly fee. It's the twelve months of fees paid while nothing happens. It's the six months of Google Ads spend managed poorly — often €500–€1,500/month — going to irrelevant clicks with no conversion tracking. It's the SEO work that needs to be undone or rebuilt because it was done incorrectly. And it's the time you didn't spend finding a better solution because the monthly retainer felt like progress was being made.

Businesses that have been with a cheap agency for a year and then switch to someone good often find that they're essentially starting from scratch — with a smaller budget than they would have had if they'd chosen correctly at the beginning.

What to look for instead

A fair fee doesn't guarantee good work. But it does make good work possible. When evaluating anyone for digital marketing, the questions that actually matter are:

  • Can I see examples of real results? Not case studies with vague "increased traffic" claims — specific numbers, specific timeframes, specific clients (even if unnamed).
  • Will I own my accounts? Google Ads, Google Analytics, Search Console — these should all be in your name. If an agency sets them up under their own account, you lose everything when you leave.
  • What does reporting look like? You should receive clear, plain English explanations of what happened and why — not just data exports.
  • Who will actually do the work? In larger agencies, you'll often be onboarded by a senior person and then handed to a junior account manager. Know who is in your account day-to-day.
  • What are the contract terms? Long contracts with early termination penalties are not in your interest. Monthly arrangements put the pressure on the agency to perform.

Price is not cost

The price of a service is what you pay each month. The cost is what you pay in total, including opportunity cost, wasted ad spend, and the time it takes to recover from work done badly. On that measure, the €200/month agency almost always costs more than the €800/month one.

The question to ask is not "how cheap can I get this done?" but "what would it actually take to do this well, and is the person or agency I'm talking to capable of that?"

If the answer to the second part is unclear, that's the answer.

If you'd like a second opinion on what you're currently getting from your marketing, get in touch. I'll give you an honest view, with no obligation to work with me.