The fee model tells you more about a Google Ads agency than the pitch does. There are three in common use, they are not interchangeable, and two of them pay the agency more when your account gets worse. That single question separates shops faster than any case study, and it is the one most Miami owners never ask because the quote arrives as a number rather than as a structure.
This page is the paid half of how we think about this market. It covers the three models and what each one hides, whether Google and Meta belong with the same vendor, the bilingual question that most accounts here get wrong, and what changes now that assistants answer a lot of commercial questions before anyone clicks an ad. For the whole picture, start at the Miami marketing agency guide.
Ask which of these three a quote uses before you compare it to anything. The same monthly figure means a different deal under each one.
| Model | How it works | What it hides |
|---|---|---|
| Percentage of ad spend | The fee is a share of what you spend on the platforms | The agency is paid more to raise budget, not to lower cost per lead |
| Flat monthly retainer | A fixed fee for a defined scope, whatever the budget does | Nothing structural, but scope creep is on you to police |
| Base plus performance | A smaller fixed fee plus a share of a named result | Which result counts, and who gets to define a conversion |
Percentage of ad spend is the most common arrangement and the only one with a built in conflict. If the fee rises with the budget, then every recommendation to spend more is also a recommendation to pay the agency more, and the honest version of that recommendation looks identical to the self interested one from where you sit. It is workable with a competent partner. It is simply worth naming out loud.
Base plus performance sounds like the answer and usually is not, because the argument moves from price to definitions. If the performance share is paid on conversions, then whoever configures the conversion decides the invoice. A form view, a phone click and a booked job are three different things, and only one of them is revenue. Agree the definition in writing before the model, not after.
We went looking for this directly rather than relying on impressions. In a first party teardown of competitor agency sites, 11/11 published no pricing at all, 8/11 showed no outcomes, and 6/11 offered no clear way to make contact. One of the eleven explained what happens after you reach out. All eleven were other agencies, so this is a read on the category rather than on ourselves.
It is not only agencies. Siteline reviewed the pricing pages of the 100 leading B2B software products in June 2026 and found 14 of 100 publish no price at all. Opacity is the category norm, which is exactly why it is a weak signal when you meet it. A missing number tells you nothing about quality in either direction.
What it does tell you is that comparing two Miami quotes requires you to reconstruct the scope yourself. Ask each shop, in writing, how many campaigns the fee covers, who writes the ad copy, who builds the landing pages, whether Spanish is included or billed separately, how often the account is actually touched, and who you speak to when something breaks at 7pm on a Friday. Two quotes are only comparable once those six answers are.
AdMax publishes its own floor, which is $300/mo for the Basic retainer. Retainers above Basic are set in a conversation, because the scope is what moves, and we would rather quote a real scope than advertise a band we would then renegotiate. The full breakdown sits on the AdMax pricing page, and the local SEO side of the same question is on Miami local SEO pricing.
For a single location, usually not, and splitting them is how the number that matters gets orphaned. Google Ads harvests intent that already exists. Someone types the service and a neighborhood, and the account competes for that moment. Meta Ads does the opposite job. It creates the demand that later shows up as a search, which means its contribution is mostly invisible inside Google Ads reporting.
Run them under two vendors and each one reports the version of the truth that flatters it. The Meta shop claims the branded searches. The Google shop claims the conversions those searches produced. Nobody owns cost per booked job, which is the only figure that tells you whether the whole program works. Putting both channels under a single owner is less about efficiency than about having a party who cannot hide behind the other.
Split them when one channel has genuinely outgrown a generalist, when a creative pipeline is the constraint rather than media buying, or when a platform specific account structure needs full time attention. That is a real threshold and it arrives later than most agencies suggest.
Whichever way you go, the test is the same. Ask who writes the creative and how many variants ship a week, because on Meta the creative is the targeting. How that works inside our own model is on the paid media service page.
Miami is two search markets sharing a map, and a paid account that treats Spanish as a translation layer leaves the cheaper half of its inventory on the table. The failure is rarely the translation itself. It is that every input downstream of the language is assumed to carry over when none of them do.
So ask for a Spanish search terms report, not a promise. An agency actually running Spanish can produce one in a minute, and one that has been checking a box cannot. The organic side of the same split is covered in bilingual Spanish local SEO, and the budget side in Miami cost per lead by industry.
Paid search still works. What changed is the surface above it. A growing share of commercial questions now get answered by an assistant before anyone reaches a result page, and whether you appear inside that answer is decided by a different mechanism than your bids. That makes the two jobs complements rather than substitutes, and it makes the agencies that only do one of them a partial answer.
There is real published work on how the answer side is won. Aggarwal, Murahari, Rajpurohit, Kalyan, Narasimhan and Deshpande, in the KDD 2024 paper that introduced the term generative engine optimization, benchmarked methods across 10,000 queries and 25 domains. Their best method improved visibility by 41% on Position-Adjusted Word Count and 28% on Subjective Impression against an unoptimized baseline. The three methods that carried most of that gain were citing sources, adding quotations and adding statistics, worth 30 to 40% on Position-Adjusted Word Count and 15 to 30% on Subjective Impression.
The finding we take most seriously from that paper is about who benefits. Citing sources produced a 115.1% visibility increase for sites ranked fifth in the search results, while the top ranked site lost visibility on average. The mechanics reward the challenger, which is the position most Miami businesses are actually in.
Practically, this means your paid account and your answer engine visibility should be read on the same page by the same people. Paid is the lever you can pull this week. Answer engine work is the one that compounds and cannot be switched on in a month. We run the second as its own discipline on the AEO and GEO service, and what the research does and does not support is set out in AI marketing in Miami.
Shortlist two or three shops, ask every one of them the same six scope questions from section 02, and make each name its fee model before quoting a number. Then ask the question that is hardest to fake. Ask what ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews currently say about a business like yours in your part of Miami, and watch whether the answer is a demonstration or a deflection.
That is also what our own first call is. We ask the assistants what they say about your business in your city, read you the answer, and tell you what we would do about it. It is free and it takes thirty minutes, there is no deck, and the only offer at the end is a scope.
Paid media is one of seven services here, and it is run by senior strategists with the AAAT, our 13 named AI agents plus a studio of 9 specialists, working underneath them. The wider decision about hiring in this market, including the shops worth shortlisting against us, is laid out in the Miami marketing agency guide and in our honest list of Miami agencies.
Want AdMax to do the AEO and GEO work for your brand? Book a thirty-minute call with a senior strategist.