Outsourcing online advertising: what does it cost and when does it pay off?

Outsourcing online advertising in Belgium usually costs 10 to 20% of your media budget, or a fixed monthly fee. Whether it pays off depends less on the agency than on your own budget and on the number of conversions your account generates. We set the pricing models against the salary cost of an in-house marketer, show from which budget management makes sense and what Google Ads and Meta Ads changed about the job in 2025 and 2026. Already looking for a specific agency? You will find the comparison in our overview of Google Ads agencies in Belgium.

What does it cost to outsource online advertising in Belgium?

Agencies in Belgium and the Netherlands usually charge 10 to 20% of the media budget for managing Google Ads or Meta Ads, or a fixed monthly fee, often with a one-off setup fee on top. We did not find an independent pricing study for Belgium.

What does exist are published starting prices, and they vary widely because the scope differs: the number of campaigns, how measurement is set up, and whether creative is included.

Percentage, fixed fee or hourly rate?

There are three common pricing models:

• Percentage of the media budget. Usually 10 to 20%, often with a minimum fee. The Dutch comparison platform MarketingKiezer cites that range for Google Ads, with the caveat that these are indicative market ranges, not audited research. The American software company AgencyAnalytics calls 10 to 20% the common norm.
• Fixed monthly fee. MarketingKiezer gives €500 to €1,500 per month for Google Ads, on top of the advertising budget. A Belgian agency we checked on 13 October 2026 quotes a fixed fee of €500 to €1,500 per month for Google Ads, with a one-off setup between €500 and €2,000.
• Hourly rate. Mainly for one-off assignments. MarketingKiezer cites €80 to €130 per hour for search engine advertising.

A percentage has a built-in incentive: the fee rises as you spend more, even when that extra spend delivers nothing. A fixed fee does not have that incentive. On its own, it says nothing about the quality of the management.

What is not included in the management fee?

The media budget should be kept separate from the management fee and usually goes straight to Google or Meta. Creative such as images and video, landing pages and the setup of conversion tracking are often billed separately. Google requires agencies to be open about this: under its third-party partner policy, you are entitled to at least the number of clicks, the impressions and the total cost of your ads, and you must be able to understand the total cost, “including any fees your third-party partner charges”. So ask for the agreement in writing, with each fee listed separately.

What does ClickForest charge?

ClickForest manages Google Ads and Meta Ads for SMEs and webshops in Flanders for a fixed management fee from €700 per month, separate from your media budget, plus a one-off setup from €900 to build the campaigns. The advertising budget starts at €1,000 per month and goes directly to the platform. The engagement runs for a minimum of 3 months and can be cancelled monthly after that. What exactly is included in the management is on the page about performance marketing.

Is outsourcing cheaper than hiring an in-house marketer?

In monthly cost, usually yes. An employed digital marketer in Belgium easily costs €3,100 to €5,600 per month, an agency for a single channel a fraction of that. But a marketer does more than manage ads and knows your business from the inside. So the comparison depends on what exactly you want to buy.

The calculation behind that figure is simple. Jobat puts the salary of a digital marketer between €2,500 and €4,500 gross per month. On top of that, an employer in the private sector pays an employer contribution of 25%. That comes to roughly €3,125 to €5,625 per month, or €37,500 to €67,500 per year. It is a floor: holiday pay, the end-of-year bonus, fringe benefits, tools and training are not included. The role Jobat describes is also broader than paid advertising alone.

Time matters too. According to a 2025 survey by Fiverr of nearly 6,000 small business owners in 25 countries, all active users of the platform, 70% of them spend less than five hours a week on marketing. Fiverr itself sells freelance services, so read the figure as a direction.

ClickForest recommends a hybrid model to most SMEs. Strategy, budget and brand direction stay in-house, execution and optimisation go to a specialist, and the data remain yours. That gives you specialist-level execution without creating a full-time position.

From which advertising budget does outsourcing pay off?

Google and Meta impose a threshold in conversions. Meta writes that an ad set usually exits the learning phase after about 50 results in the week after the last significant edit. Google recommends evaluating performance over a period with at least 30 conversions, and 50 for a target ROAS bid strategy.

ClickForest therefore uses €1,000 per month in media budget as its own minimum for ongoing management. That threshold is our own recommendation.

A simple calculation shows what that means. €1,000 per month is about €231 per week. To reach 50 results per week, a single result can then cost at most around €4.60. Under that Meta guideline, a webshop with a cost per purchase of €20 needs about €1,000 per week, roughly €4,300 per month.

With a smaller budget there are two ways out. You let the campaign optimise for a step that happens more often, such as an add to cart, or you concentrate the budget in fewer campaigns and ad sets.

Weigh the ratio as well. With a €1,000 media budget, a fixed fee of €500 to €700 is half or more of what you put into ads, and the management has to earn that cost back first. At that budget, a one-off audit of your ad account often delivers more than ongoing management.

What changed in Google Ads and Meta Ads in 2025 and 2026?

The manual work is shifting. According to Google’s Ads Liaison, AI Max is on by default in new Search campaigns. Performance Max now shows per channel where the budget goes, and Meta removed exclusions from detailed targeting. In the EU, consent has become the biggest measurement problem. An agency that keeps up works mainly on settings, tests and measurement. Individual keywords and audiences carry less weight than they used to.

What does AI Max do in your Search campaigns?

AI Max for Search is a layer on top of existing Search campaigns, not a new campaign type. Turn it on and three features are enabled by default: broader matching of search terms, customised ad text and expansion to other landing pages on your site. Each feature can be switched off separately. Google announced AI Max in May 2025 and itself claims typically 14% more conversions or conversion value at a similar CPA or ROAS. According to Search Engine Land, Google has since confirmed that AI Max is the default setting for new Search campaigns, and the automatic migration of Dynamic Search Ads has been pushed back to February 2027.

So ask an agency whether it tested AI Max with an experiment, on versus off, and which features it deliberately switched off per campaign. Google itself states that those features require conversion-based Smart Bidding. Without reliable conversion tracking, AI Max has little to go on.

Is Performance Max still a black box?

Less than before. In 2025 Google added a channel performance report, doubled the number of search themes from 25 to 50 per asset group, and made campaign-level negative keywords and a search terms report available for all Performance Max campaigns. So an agency can show you how much of your budget goes to Search, Shopping, YouTube or Display. If you are not shown that, ask for it.

What changed at Meta?

On 31 March 2025 Meta removed exclusions from detailed targeting and merged interest categories. In its own test, the median cost per conversion was 22.6% lower without those exclusions; that is Meta’s own figure. Campaigns still using removed options stopped delivering on 15 January 2026. The work therefore shifts to creative: enough variations of images and videos, and reliable conversion data. How Google Ads and Meta Ads relate to each other for a webshop is covered in Google Ads vs Facebook Ads for Shopify.

Why does consent matter more than cookies?

Because cookies are staying in Chrome. In October 2025 Google confirmed that it is keeping third-party cookies in Chrome, with a choice for the user. The real measurement problem in the EU is consent. With Consent Mode v2, Google receives two extra signals about what a visitor allows, and without consent Google shows no personalised ads or remarketing in the European Economic Area.

Google can model missing conversions, but only from 700 ad clicks in 7 days, per country and domain. At €1,000 per month you only reach that with a cost per click below roughly €0.33, so many small accounts probably do not qualify (our own calculation). What the setup involves in practice is explained in the glossary under Consent Mode and in our guide to GA4 for Shopify.

How long before you see results?

Count in conversions. Google writes that a bid strategy typically needs 1 to 2 conversion cycles to calibrate, and Meta mentions about 50 results per week per ad set. An account with many conversions is therefore out of the learning phase within a few weeks. A small B2B account with a few leads a week can stay stuck in it for a long time.

What follows from this runs against intuition: frequent adjustments make it slower. Meta writes that editing an ad, ad set or campaign during the learning phase restarts the learning. Good management in that phase is mostly restraint. Set up alerts for real errors, such as a broken conversion tag or a budget that runs out too fast, and otherwise wait until there is enough data.

Automation does not make people redundant. Frederick Vallaeys, co-founder of Optmyzr and a former Googler, put it this way in 2019:

“(…) even with ‘fully automated’ solutions, there’s still quite a bit of management involved. (…) When PPC professionals add their own human experience, intelligence, and creativity to the ‘smart’ system’s recommendations, you get better results.”

— Frederick Vallaeys, co-founder of Optmyzr, in Futureproofing your role as a PPC expert (2019)

How do you measure whether your agency actually delivers?

Look at profit and customers. For an SME with €1,000 to €3,000 in media budget per month, the platforms’ own lift measurements are out of reach: Google requires at least 1,000 conversions and a campaign budget of US$5,000 for Conversion Lift, and Meta requires at least US$5,000 in spend and 500 conversions for a conversion lift test.

What you can do:

• Set the total cost against the margin. Add up media budget and fee and compare them with the gross profit on the sales. That way you steer on POAS, a stricter measure than ROAS. The difference is explained in POAS vs ROAS.
• Follow leads until they become customers. In B2B, what counts is how many leads in your CRM turned into a quote and an order. The cost per acquisition only tells you something once you know what a customer is worth.
• Judge over enough data. A week with three conversions tells you nothing. Google itself works with at least 30.
• Have the agency show its tests. Which experiment ran, what came out of it, and what was changed afterwards?

That is why ClickForest steers the ads of webshops in Flanders on POAS. How to build campaigns across the whole customer journey is covered in advertising strategy per stage of the funnel. What a campaign approach looks like for a client is shown in the case of caterer Bastiano.

How do you know whether a Google Ads agency really has expertise?

A badge says less than you think. To become a Google Partner, an agency needs an optimisation score of at least 70%, at least US$10,000 in ad spend over 90 days across its managed accounts, and a Google Ads certification for at least half of the staff who manage campaigns for clients. Premier Partner is reserved for the top 3% per country.

A badge shows that an agency manages budget and earns its certifications. What it does for your profit, you cannot read from it. At Meta, the old Business Partner badge for agencies ends on 31 December 2026; Meta advises agencies to become a Meta Certified Company.

Three practical questions matter more:

1. Who owns the ad account? If an agency creates the Google Ads account itself from its manager account, the agency becomes the owner. So have the account created in your own company name. At Meta, you share access with a partner through your own business portfolio, and the account stays yours.
2. Do you get to see everything? Google requires agencies to give you your customer ID on request and to report costs, clicks and impressions per account every month, or to let you log in yourself.
3. How does the agency test? Ask about a recent experiment and what it delivered.

How seven Belgian agencies handle margin, Meta Ads, account ownership and partner status is covered in our overview of Google Ads agencies for webshops. If you mainly advertise B2B on LinkedIn, other rules of thumb apply; you will find them in LinkedIn marketing for B2B leads and on the page about LinkedIn Ads.

Conclusion: outsourcing pays off when your budget can feed the learning phase

In monthly cost, outsourcing is usually cheaper than an in-house marketer. It only pays off when your account generates enough conversions to teach the algorithms something. Below €1,000 in media budget per month, an audit is often wiser than ongoing management. Above that, you choose a partner on three things: who owns the account, what you get to see and how they test.

ClickForest manages Google Ads, Meta Ads and LinkedIn Ads for SMEs and webshops in Flanders. You work directly with Frederiek Pascal, without an account manager in between, and the campaigns steer on margin. Want to know where your account stands first? Have your ad account reviewed or get in touch. More about the approach is on the page about online marketing and in the explanation of performance marketing.