Short answer: one campaign, managed weekly, measured in leads, spend paid to Google
At TurnKey, $600 a month buys the management of one focused Google Search campaign for one service in one market: weekly search-term review and negative keywords, bid and budget control, ad copy testing, landing page fixes, conversion tracking for calls and forms, and a plain-English monthly report. The one-time setup is quoted per campaign, and the ad spend itself is paid to Google on your own card, separate from the management fee.
This page separates setup from monthly, itemizes what the monthly covers, shows what you pay Google and how Google’s budget rules work, lays out the first 90 days, and is honest about when Ads is the wrong tool and what a small budget can produce. The Google Ads service page has the overview; the SEO vs Google Ads guide helps you choose between the two channels.
Setup versus monthly
Setup is the launch work, done once. Account and campaign build (or cleanup of an account you already have), keyword research with a spend forecast, the keyword structure and match types, ad copy, the landing page or fixes to an existing page, conversion tracking for calls and forms in GA4 and Google Tag Manager, and a baseline report so month three can be compared with something. It is quoted per campaign because a plumber with one service and an existing tracked site needs less of it than a clinic with no tracking and no landing page.
Monthly is the management after launch. It is where the campaign gets better or quietly gets worse. The $600 starter covers one service in one market. Two markets or several services are two campaigns and are quoted as such, because the weekly work doubles.
What the monthly fee covers
- Search-term review and negatives. Every week, the actual phrases people typed before clicking are read, and the ones that will never become customers (“free,” “jobs,” “DIY,” the wrong city, a competitor’s brand) are added as negatives. In month one this is most of the work; it is also where most wasted budget in unmanaged accounts goes.
- Bids and budget. Bid strategy adjusted to what is converting, budget pacing watched so the month does not run out on the 20th, and device, schedule, and location adjustments based on data rather than defaults.
- Ad testing. Headlines and descriptions rotated against each other, with the floors and the reply promise in the copy so the click is pre-qualified.
- Landing page. The page the ad sends to is checked against the search terms that convert, and headline, proof, and form changes are made when the data says so.
- Conversion tracking. Call clicks, form submissions, and booking actions confirmed each month, because a broken event makes every other decision wrong.
- Reporting. A monthly note in plain English: spend, clicks, the search terms that produced leads, cost per lead, and what changes next. The account is in your name and you can open it any day.
What you pay Google, and how its budget rules work
Ad spend is separate and goes to Google on your card. You set an average daily budget; Google’s own help page explains that you will never pay more than “two times your average daily budget for most campaigns” on any single day, or more than “30.4 times your average daily budget” in a month (Google Ads Help, About average daily budgets). So a $20 daily budget can spend $40 on a busy Tuesday but will not exceed about $608 in the month.
Click prices vary widely by category. In many Phoenix service categories a click costs several dollars; in legal, HVAC, and some medical searches it can cost several tens of dollars. That is why the forecast is part of setup and why the first month’s search-term data matters more than any projection.
The first 90 days
Swipe or scroll horizontally to view every column.
| Period | Focus | What ships | What you can judge |
|---|---|---|---|
| Before launch (setup) | Build and measure | Campaign structure, keywords and forecast, ads, landing page, call and form tracking tested, baseline report | Whether a test call and a test form show up as conversions before any money is spent |
| Days 1 to 30 | Find the real search terms | Weekly negatives, bid corrections, first ad rotation, budget pacing | Click volume and click prices in your category; share of spend going to relevant searches rising week by week |
| Days 31 to 60 | Tune around what converted | Bids shifted toward converting terms and schedules, landing page edits from the data, ad copy round two | First cost per lead, lead quality from your own call and form log |
| Days 61 to 90 | The honest read | Written 90-day read: cost per lead, which searches produce customers, and a recommendation to scale, hold, or stop | Whether a lead costs less than it is worth to you, which is the only question that matters |
When Ads is the wrong tool
I turn down Ads work in these situations, and you should be wary of anyone who does not:
- A lead is worth too little. If an average new customer is worth $150 and clicks cost $25, the arithmetic rarely works. Ads suits businesses where one new customer pays for a month of clicks.
- Nobody answers. Paid leads call now. If the phone goes to voicemail and forms wait two days, the budget buys your competitor’s customers. The leads diagnosis guide puts phone handling in the checklist for exactly this reason.
- The site cannot convert. A slow page with no visible phone number or form on a phone wastes every click. Fix the page first; sometimes that is a landing page inside setup, sometimes it is the website itself.
- People do not search for it. Ads works on demand that already exists. A new category or a referral-driven service needs something else.
- The budget cannot buy enough clicks to learn. If spend only buys ten clicks a month, there is no data to manage. A small budget is fine; a budget too small to produce a signal is not.
In most of those cases the better first dollar is the site or local SEO. The $1,400 guide shows what that program contains.
Honest expectations for a small budget
A small Ads budget run well produces a steady trickle of qualified calls and a very clear picture of what your market actually types into Google, which also tells you which service pages to build next. It does not produce a flood, it stops the day the budget stops, and the first month’s numbers are usually worse than the third month’s because the junk has not been cleaned out yet. The right way to run a small budget is as a 90-day test with a written decision rule at the end: scale it, hold it, or stop it and put the money into the site or SEO.
I am Ryan Kee, the owner, and I manage the campaigns and write the monthly note myself. Google Ads management starts at $600 per month, month to month, with setup quoted per campaign and ad spend paid to Google. Google Ad Grants management for verified nonprofits runs on the same program. Ryan Kee replies, usually the same business day.
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