Performance marketing agency, minus the creative bottleneck.

A performance marketing agency buys and manages paid media against a measurable action rather than against reach, and is judged on cost per that action rather than on deliverables shipped. The action is a lead, a sale, an app install or a signup, and the work sits inside the ad platforms.

It is broader than a PPC agency, which specializes in paid search inventory, and narrower than a growth agency, which also owns landing pages, lifecycle, SEO and product experiments. SEO, content, email, landing page work and lifecycle strategy typically sit outside the scope.

Published monthly retainers start at about EUR 2,000 for boutique scope and run past EUR 25,000 for full-service multi-market work at the one agency publishing in euros. The two agencies publishing in US dollars put paid media management at $8,000 to $25,000 a month, a full-stack partnership at $30,000 to $75,000, and small local accounts at $1,000 to $2,500 rising to $8,000 to $20,000 and above.

All three also publish a percentage model at 10 to 20 percent of monthly media budget. The fee is quoted separately from the media, so none of the retainer reaches the platforms. No figure here has been converted between currencies.

A PPC agency specializes in paid search inventory, while a performance marketing agency spans search alongside paid social, programmatic, app and affiliate channels. Both are bought against a measurable action rather than against reach. The performance agency is the broader remit and, at equivalent scope, usually the larger retainer.

Almost no agency publishes a number at all, and the one we found that does commits its $8,000 to $12,000 a month creative tier to 25 to 40 static assets and 5 to 10 video assets a month. Its tier below, at $5,000 to $8,000, commits to 15 to 25 statics and 3 to 5 video edits with one round of revisions per asset.

Converted to a weekly figure, the $8,000 to $12,000 tier is roughly 7 to 11 assets a week. That weekly figure is our arithmetic on Darkroom's published monthly counts rather than something Darkroom states, and we are not claiming the tier is typical. No survey of the category exists, so a market-wide average creative volume is not something anyone can honestly quote.

Almost none of them says. Most published retainers describe channels in scope, reporting frequency and call cadence, and stop short of any countable output, which leaves the buyer agreeing to a level of effort rather than to a quantity of work.

Darkroom is the exception we found. It publishes asset counts against price tiers, committing its $5,000 to $8,000 creative tier to 15 to 25 statics and 3 to 5 video edits a month and its $8,000 to $12,000 tier to 25 to 40 statics and 5 to 10 videos. That is one agency's own page, not a category norm. No survey of agency deliverable volume exists, so if you are quoted a market average for this, ask where the number came from.

Six to twelve months with 30 to 60 day exit clauses is the range most commonly published, with a three to six month floor cited elsewhere. The stated reason is sound: paid search and paid social are published as needing 60 to 90 days before the data is stable enough to judge.

The cost of that runway is optionality. An auto-renewal clause requiring 90 days' notice before a twelve-month term ends opens the cancellation window nine months into the contract, and a 90-day notice period on a month-to-month agreement is a four-month commitment in practice.

The two published figures we found disagree by roughly three times, and the reason is what each one measures. Admiral Media publishes EUR 8,000 to 15,000 a month per channel before creative testing and bidding have enough data to work with. Clicks Geek puts the floor for a percentage-of-spend fee at $10,000 a month in total media spend.

Neither figure is a survey finding. Both are agency-published guidance, and quoting either without saying whether it is per channel or total gives you a number that is wrong by a factor of about three.

Yes, but the job has moved. Google Performance Max and Meta Advantage+ automate bidding and placement selection inside a single campaign, so the hours a buyer once spent on bid adjustments and placement exclusions now go into account structure, offer, budget decisions and judgment about what to feed the delivery system.

What is left for the advertiser to control is how many distinct creative assets that system has to choose between. Meta's own documentation asks for a wide variety of diverse creative assets and publishes a Creative limited and a Creative fatigue status keyed to rising cost per result. The buyer still matters. The variable they work with has changed.

Both platforms document the automation themselves, Google in its Ads help centre and Meta in its Business Help Centre. Google Ads Help, About Performance Max campaigns, https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/10724817 · Meta Business Help Centre, About Advantage+ sales campaigns, https://www.facebook.com/business/help/1362234537597370

It can, and it also runs alongside one. Brands with a media buyer they rate keep that person and add the production layer behind them, and brands paying a retainer mainly for creative can move that scope across without touching the rest of the arrangement.

All five Quickads service lines are available, from creative intelligence through campaign management, which means the account can sit with us or stay where it is. What does not change either way is the weekly volume of finished ad creative going into it.