What You Should Pay a DTC Agency in 2026: Real Pricing Benchmarks | EP 37
How much should you pay a DTC agency in 2026?
For Meta ads management on its own, the market has settled between $2,500 and $5,000 a month, and paying above $5,000 only makes sense when the brand spends six figures a month or the scope adds creative, forecasting, and CRO. Creative is the one line item worth paying at the top of the market, because a single breakout ad can add $20,000 to $50,000 a month in profitable spend. Percentage-of-spend deals are fair when they carry a hard cap and a CPA or ROAS target attached, and they should never be charged against branded search.
DTC agency pricing is all over the map, so Andrew Foxwell, Brad Ploch, and Zach Stuck break down what you should actually pay in 2026 using a Foxwell Founders survey of 200+ agencies. You'll learn the real retainer ranges for Meta ads management, when percentage of spend is fair and when it is a red flag, what a media buyer should be doing to earn the fee, and what creative, email, SMS, landing pages, and CRO cost right now.
We discuss:
What 200+ agencies reported charging, and why 4 out of 5 quote a flat retainer or a retainer plus a percentage of spend
Why $2,500 to $5,000 a month has become the market rate for Meta ads management with no creative attached
When to keep an agency, bring it in-house, or pay up for one exceptional freelancer
Why percentage of spend only works with a hard cap and a CPA or ROAS target
At what monthly spend incrementality testing starts to matter
Why nobody should charge a percentage of spend on branded search
Why creative is the one agency worth paying the most for
What to pay content creators directly, with and without whitelisting
Email and SMS pricing, and the attribution model that gets brands fleeced
Landing page and CRO pricing per page and per month, plus five fixes that work on almost every store
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This episode of the Scalability School podcast is sponsored by NorthBeam and they just launched Northbeam Incrementality. Northbeam Incrementality gives you easy, automated, self-service incrementality tests, while protecting you from the major mistakes so many people make while running incrementality tests. Your MTA handles the daily tactics, your MMM guides the long-term planning, and Incrementality provides the causal truth. It’s a closed loop that allows you to scale what works and cut what doesn't. Right now when you head over to www.northbeam.io/incrementality, they’re offering Scalability School listeners 50% off unlimited tests for a year when you join. Just tell them we sent you!
To connect with Andrew Foxwell send an email Andrew@foxwelldigital.com
To connect with Brad Ploch send him a DM at https://x.com/brad_ploch
To connect with Zach Stuck send him a DM at https://x.com/zachmstuck
Learn more about the Foxwell Founders Community at https://foxwellfounders.comLearn more about the The Hive Haus Creators Community at http://HiveHausUGC.com
Scalability School is a weekly show from Andrew Foxwell, Brad Ploch, and Zach Stuck about what is actually working right now in DTC growth. No theory, no recycled LinkedIn takes, just the numbers and decisions behind real brands and real ad accounts.
Chapters
00:00 What you should pay a DTC agency in 2026
01:58 What 200+ agencies told us about how they price
02:45 Meta ads management pricing: the floor, the market rate, the ceiling
04:42 Should the fee be flat, or tied to performance?
05:13 Why $3K to $5K became the market rate for ad management
07:36 When to use an agency, go in-house, or hire a freelancer
10:20 Why percentage of spend works when you cap it
11:01 What a media buyer should actually do to earn the fee
16:52 The gap between pressing buttons and real media buying
19:17 At what monthly spend does incrementality actually matter?
22:42 Google Ads agency pricing and the branded search problem
28:45 Creative agency pricing and why it is worth paying the most for
31:45 What to pay content creators directly
35:58 Email and SMS agency pricing without getting fleeced
39:42 Onshore vs offshore teams and what actually changes
43:20 Landing page and CRO pricing, per page and per month
48:15 How fast a landing page should go from idea to live
50:03 Five CRO fixes that work on almost every store
Full Transcript
DTC agency pricing What You Should Pay a DTC Agency in 2026 Scalability School Podcast - YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DMQ0UUXWw1A
Transcript:
(00:00) I think you should pay five grand per landing page. And I think it should take you three months to get from your fancy. Yeah, because that's a standard, right? Or at least was in 2024. Just kidding. feel like that's what every said client that would go to somewhere else to hire a landing page that was supposedly like the best at landing pages would we just saw that story happen over and over I think it depends.
(00:20) It's like the most annoying phrase in DDC. depends on would pay a landing page agency a 20 grand for a page if I knew it was going to work. Right. Like or even more. Right. It's that's where the numbers game, I think is really important. And so I would rather pay, you a flat fee per page. Probably not percentage of spend, though I do understand that that could make sense if it was like incremental spend above.
(00:42) But that's really hard to especially on landing I'd probably pay a flat fee per page, the assumption that you're going have make a handful of them before you crack And now let's take a listen to the Scalability School podcast. Okay. Welcome to another episode of Scalability School. Really excited to talk today about pricing.
(01:07) We have so much pricing information from ad agencies, from creative shops and agencies, landing page agencies. And, you know, we should talk about any other type of agency that people have out there, like an AI agency and pricing, you've heard or whatever, to go through this. So this episode is all about covering what we have learned and what we know about pricing today and what it's what what the costs are that you can expect to pay big ranges.
(01:32) Let me tell you, it depends on where you are in the world, but huge ranges is the narrative. Brad, good to be with you, as always Yeah. Likewise. And if anybody sees, like, a haze coming across our cameras, the air quality in Wisconsin right now is 500. I'm pretty sure that's the upper limit. I don't think it can go any higher.
(01:49) So, yeah. Anyway, it's wild, but we're here and we're excited that you are as well. So as always. So look, you know, the reality of this prices are all over the place. All right. So we did a survey in the Fox founders community about how people are priced and what pricing looks And of that survey we had actually over 200 respondents that came in that survey.
(02:09) And then this is there's other data to that. We pulled from Fox founders knowledge. We have a Foxtel Founders MCP. can check it out at Fox Digital MCP. That has all of our knowledge without the community. it's pretty insane what we've seen. four out of five agencies quote either a flat rate retainer or retainer, plus percentage dispense.
(02:26) That's obviously very Nobody works on peer performance. It used to be a thing isn't necessarily a thing anymore. What they report earning per client is what you're paying. So mostly sit at 2500 to 10,000 a month all And freelancers and in-house price the same but work differently. So it's kind of interesting thinking about So let's talk about paid media management from a media standpoint.
(02:48) I'll walk you through what I have. And then Brad, you can tell me what you think. So straight media management I would say usually flat retainer I've seen floors at 1500. That's typically going to be for like an offshore. You know, someone if they're good then it's not necessarily probably going to be a good number.
(03:07) I think anybody that's quality is going to be at least 2500 to 3004 is like 1500 to 3000 a month, I would say. And then big single accounts can run up to 20 grand a month in fees. The high percentages you hear are bundles, not media only. So there's 15% that were paid organic email creative together tapering to 11% of spend as as spend climbs.
(03:31) So it's kind of interesting. Like if you start bundling, things generally get cheaper. But here's some examples from a survey 50 K a month spend build at 10,000 or 10% $5,000 a month, right. Media buying only at 500 K a month spend. They're doing about 37.5 month K a month. And then the creative is build separately a 7.5%.
(03:53) There's a full service bundle, 15% up to 200 K, 13% to 300 K, 11% to 400 K. There's flat plus revenue share. So 15 K flat fee plus 2.8 of revenue locked a year. And then the hybrid is the most recommended. This is a base plus percent. So three K or 10% is spend whichever is greater. So these are kind of what we heard.
(04:22) Personally I still think that doing a flat rate plus paying on performance of of agreed upon metrics that matter to the business is a good idea, just because then the buyer is incentivized or the agency's incentivized to do better. But Brad, your take on all this data, when we looked at it, yeah, there's there's a ton of different ranges for what it means to do paid ad management for something like Meta or Google.
(04:54) And we'll talk about Google in a bit. And so there's like there's as you as you scale up your expectations for what your, your media buyer, whether that's an agency or freelancer or, you know, etc. whatever they do for you, it depends. The price is going to depend dramatically based on that, which obviously makes sense.
(05:12) And so back to your point. I think the floor, you know, 1500 bucks a month like definitely needs to be somebody offshore. I think you'd be hard pressed to find somebody that's going to be doing a very good job at that rate. But you might be able to find a freelancer to do that. But that's going to be that's, that's that's paid media management only.
(05:30) Right. Like they're not they're not making their probably not making creative. If they are it's probably not very good. Right. And so I think the expectations for like what they're actually doing is they're, they're launching ads or pressing buttons in the ad account. Maybe they're doing reports on a weekly basis.
(05:42) So that's that's kind of the baseline kind of that three to to five K range, I think is becoming like the market rate for just add management. Like no creative. Although I think that's starting. Those expectations are starting to change a little bit. Like I think the most common and we saw this in the pricing benchmarks, is like the most common price range, is that 2500 to $10,000 range and the 25 to to 5000 is is the single most popular.
(06:09) And I just think for paid media management, especially with people's expectations around AI and what cloud can do and what all of the AI tools can do, I think that's just getting compressed down, because I think people are feeling like, hey, meta in particular is starting to, you know, automate some of the media buying for you, etc..
(06:26) And so that that's that's kind of my expectation there. And then anything above that, like when you start to get into the five plus $1,000 range, unless the brand is spending like considerable amounts of money and what I, what I mean by considerable amounts of money, I'm talking hundreds of thousands of dollars per month.
(06:44) I think if you're not getting additional things on top of that, or like insane, insane depths of like involvement in your ad account, that's where I start to wonder is, is that worth it from from an agency agency perspective? Now, we've had Marin on the podcast as an example, and I know he charges percentages men like that's an example of somebody who cracked out in your ad account, like relentlessly checking things every single day and moving the needle forward with managing the account.
(07:11) But just as a just as a baseline. I think if we're talking strictly about managing the ad account, no creative, nothing like I'd be surprised if people were able to charge like substantially more than $5,000 consistently for the average brand. Totally agree. Yeah, I think a lot of folks, they start to wonder where the value is coming when it's, you know, when it gets higher than that, you know, hey, what's happening with just media Because straight media buying is so much different, obviously, than it used to Welcome to the show.
(07:39) Zuck, co-host and friend of ours. We're glad to have you. Thank you. We're talking paid meta ad agency pricing, I went through sort of all the examples in the outline, just absolutely all over the what's your opinion on the best and most effective way to price right now, if you're a meta ad agency or when you like, the context for you is like, you got all this in-house, right? do you have anything outsourced? It's not like an internal person that's like actually touching your ad count.
(08:05) Like maybe somebody uploading ads or something like that or not really. So we do now for hollow. So, yeah, we I mean, I have two I have a few schools of thought. I think, like the agency model makes a ton of sense for a lot of brands. Up to a certain point that I think your goal is to bring it in-house. And then I think once the business gets big enough, there's a world where you also then consider going back to finding, like the cracked, crazy, extremely talented individual that's usually just freelancing the David Hermans of the world,
(08:35) like Lucas's of the world, Kyle leeches of the world. Right. To then go and say, hey, I'm willing to pay above. Above. Like what? I'd be comfortable paying one individual freelancer because of just their extraordinary skill set, because now we're spending enough money that there's only so many of these people in the world that have spent that amount of money.
(08:52) So that's kind of how I think about So hollow is now at the state where we're spending enough just trying to find a media buyer in the house, or just find an agency that's going to work on it, you know, a media buyers probably managing a couple different accounts, like, wasn't enough attention. And I really wanted someone that spent real like big dollars.
(09:08) So that's why we went with like a contractor. So like Hollow Hollows running with Kyle Leach right now, which we've seen like wins in the first couple of weeks because, you know, he's he's running very, very large accounts and I think he's in ads manager all day every day. And that's all he does. He doesn't really have to worry about a bunch of new business and stuff like that.
(09:29) Like he only works on a couple accounts at a But like that individual, like we're willing to pay more than what I'd probably be willing to pay. Just like an agency, knowing that I've owned an agency and kind of how that model works. But I think, like brands that kind of in that initial phase, maybe like, I don't know, $50 a 59 a day, 50 K a month to like maybe 500 K a month or maybe even up to a million.
(09:51) I think an agency is like a really, really good solution most of the time. I think that then like anything above that, I would either try to build it in house or try to find like a really talented individual. And I think from a fee standpoint, that's where it gets tricky. Like I think if you're if you're a brand spending, you know, a grand a day, like it's hard to want to charge a brand, spending a grand a day more than, you know, 2 or 3 grand.
(10:12) But I do still think that, I've talked about this a lot in the past, but like my threshold of like, can you spend more I think is actually valid, like I'm actually okay, paint a percentage of spend with a cap now because it's I think it's harder to, you know, the media buyer should be responsible for hitting your CPA goal, like they should be spending more if they're not hitting your CPA goals.
(10:32) As long as you're tracking your CPA or your Roas goal that they're responsible for, the more that they can spend that's actually on them to like, kind of go and accomplish. So I think my my thesis has changed over the years, where I used to think percentage of spend was kind of BS, and we never ran that at homestead.
(10:48) Now I'm actually like more inclined to say, hey, if you can spend more than like our average, like we were willing to pay you a percent with a cap always to do What's what's the expectation of like, what do you think is the expectation of somebody that's like, if we're just talking paid ad management, right. Like what is maybe you can use Kyle as a, you know, an anecdote for this, but just across the board.
(11:11) But like what should the expectation be. Is is he leaning into creative at all or is it like strictly in the account strictly looking for levers of pole? Is there any implication of helping you understand, like the financial implications or our targets given to him? Because like you could you could walk into any agency right now and you're going to get 17 different things for like what they offer.
(11:31) Like some are going to help you set up your your financial targets and forecasting. They're going to manage your ads. They're going to help you give creative and like they might you know, maybe they charge more or less. But yeah, I guess from like an expectation standpoint, like what do you expect from that So yeah, Kyle is just very clearly given an NC row as or a target that he has to like, withstand and he can spend into it from there because we kind of know as long as we're at a certain threshold and then we share like monthly
(11:57) financial targets. So he kind of knows where like top line and blended has to land. But what he's like, our expectations from him is basically bring new ideas to the ad account, which is like maybe new bidding methodologies or maybe new targeting strategies, and then also tell us, like pockets of areas that we're missing in when it comes to creative or landers.
(12:18) So I think those are really like the biggest things where he's, you know, he's probably like, you know, in motion assessing all the different creatives that are getting proper spend and then saying, oh, hey, like we're missing founder ads this month or we haven't had a new founder had in a long time, go shoot one of those.
(12:34) Or like, hey, we haven't done any, like side by side comparison videos or we haven't done this or hey, we've run a lot of listicles, I know, but can we try and advertorial like and could you know, he's usually sharing examples of other brands, two that he's seen. So it's like not necessarily up to him to like brief a creative or like come up with a whole thesis of a of a landing page.
(12:56) It's just like kind of finding like the holes that he's seeing that he doesn't have the tools like, and these are what the media buying. This is what a media buyer should be doing today if they're value adding in your agency, like it used to be, that they would just run the ads, and then the running of the ads was enough of a chore.
(13:13) And now it's like, since so much of that is on so much of the buying, you know, you can you can talk about structure, you can talk about bidding, which is important, but it's not worth $5,000 a month to a lot of folks. So it's like, you know, these are the these are the other things that they're doing. We're talking about gaps in creative.
(13:32) We're talking about assessing. We're talking about like the things that you just after mentioned. So I think that's a that's a big difference. But jumping to your to your question about or jumping to your point, like what is there like a purse, you know, and then spend percentage is good. But do you also think doing it on metrics is okay, like I talked about before, if they're agreed upon? Or do you feel like that gets really messy in agency I think it's fine.
(13:58) I think it's just like whatever is the simplest format to get you the business target, right? So like if you're willing to spend, if if you've already forecasted and know your numbers well enough to say, hey, you can scale up to here and like if their fee structure increases and our opex goes up, as long as they're hitting target, like, does the business balance out to still end at like the revenue and net profit target for the month? And I think if you know those things, like I think any any structure of if it's hitting a target,
(14:25) hitting a CPA at a certain threshold, if it's a percentage of spend, if it's there's a there's a bunch of different ways I think you can do it. I think it's obviously simplest to just go with like a one number. Right. So that's that's how I like it now more than not. So usually if we're going to go higher for this role, it's like here's your base retainer or percentage of spend with a cap.
(14:45) So it's like it might be five K base or 10-K base, 1% of spend, 2% of spend, 5% of spend, whatever it is capped at 15 K, 20 K-25, K. And to me, that gap in gain between paying the min retainer and the top is like, we can spend that much at our target. That means our business is growing dramatically. So I'm willing to do that.
(15:04) And what are things what this is a question for both of you, Brad. You can go first, which is what are things that a meta ads agency or a paid media agency. But yeah, the focus is on meta. What are the things that you've seen that have set certain organizations apart from others that are causing them to grow above others are, you know, more than others? Like, is it that they have better insights? Is it that they have great reporting? Is it that they have a really good strategist? Like, what are the pieces of it that you guys think
(15:37) have are of the places you've seen? Because inevitably, you know, Zach, you've seen a ton. Brad I know you've seen it on. What do you guys All right, friends, quick break. This episode is brought to you by North Beam, the marketing attribution platform that we love over here at Scalability School. If you're a marketer, I mean, you probably agree, right? Incremental testing is broken.
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(16:53) I think the if you have somebody who is like responsibilities, uploading ads into the ad account, like you should be paying a very small amount of money, like that's really not it's just it's just like not that valuable. Granted. Like there's a caveat to this, which is like, I still see accounts that are set up in the most insane ways.
(17:10) It's just like it's it's 2026 and I see the craziest shit and it's like, wow, there's still there's still bad media buying that happens. And so I get there's there's objectively bad media buying. But I think for the most part, like it's, it's it should progressively be getting better and better as meta makes it easier.
(17:28) So like I think like level one is like launching ads in the ad account and and clicking buttons for a budget up and down. The additional things that that can help you start to, I guess, like not be just like a commodity as a media buyer. Somebody uploading ads is like, I think reporting is a good one. And just like the insane depths of knowledge that somebody like a Kyle or a David Herman or, you know, like all the all the people that we've mentioned, they have, it's like they're not just looking at the performance of individual campaigns.
(17:55) They're going in there breaking down every single possible, like, okay, where's the where's the delivery happening from a placement standpoint? Okay. We used to be spending more on reels and now that's going off well. What creative is coming out of that. They're making suggestions like that. The looking at the breakdown and spend across a million different things and saying like okay, we're missing something here.
(18:14) Unlocking a more spend can be by getting more native Instagram real looking content, because we used to spend like that's just one example of a million different things. So just like super cracked out in terms of like actually knowing what the heck is going on in the attic and like, that's a it's a big gap from uploading ads to that.
(18:29) And like that just takes reps and years of doing it. Other levers would be helping you understand like what your targets should be. So obviously, incremental has been this big topic of discussion over the last several years now. But just like I really do, you know, I think a lot of brands should be able to set their own targets.
(18:47) Like, I think it's just financial responsibility is understanding how your pal works and understanding what you should be setting for break even KAC or or customer acquisition costs or what your goals should be. But like a good, a good agency or media buyer should be able to help walk you through that. And they should definitely understand what the impact is of different levels of efficiency in your ad account.
(19:11) And so I think can I, can I interrupt and ask a question? This is like maybe going to derail this for a second. When do you think income mentality actually matters? Like if we were to put a scale threshold to it because I think it gets talked about a lot. And you know, we use house love house. Great. Is there is there like a size or amount of monthly spend that you would say anything below that you don't need to worry about incrementally? I think mentality starts to matter once you're spending like between, let's say 205 hundred
(19:41) K a month like before, then it's just the signals not strong enough. Brad, what do you think? I know you didn't ask me, but no, no, no I guess. Yeah. Sorry. It's good to know I was I was curious, I think I think the I kind of agree with that with a couple caveats. Like if you're spending on other channels or you have like if you, if you're an organic first brand or a TikTok shop first brand or something like this, and like you're starting to expand on other channels, I think it can start to matter faster.
(20:09) I have an ad account that's been 600 grand last month, and like, I know that it was entirely meta. Like, I don't I don't need incrementally to tell me that, like, I know because they're not doing anything else. Like I just, I just know. Right. And so there's, there's there's no doubt in my mind that it's just not it's not that useful.
(20:23) That said, like how I haven't had the chance to work with them really much, but like, I know it's a great tool. It's just like it's very cost prohibitive for a lot of people. And I know it's getting less cost prohibitive to do conversion live studies inside of meta and all these other tools. But I think if you have a ton of channels, that's when it starts to make sense.
(20:41) But otherwise I think you can get away with it for a long time, you know, especially if you're like, if you are if you are ripping $1 million a month on meta, you're probably still okay if you're only running meta like you, just keep going. Yeah, I agree, I mean, if if it's a straight econ play, I think that's true.
(20:56) I think your point of like if some of these things, you know, like I talked to a company that was selling, they're selling an office chair and the office chair, it's a new office chair. It's got a patent. It's 2100 a month or 1800 a month or whatever, or not a month like per purchase. And it's like they have to not just spend on meta, like they, you know, because the funnel is a lot longer and bigger.
(21:18) So obviously in that they're probably going to maybe spend in 150 K range. Like I think it wouldn't be a bad idea to understand, I don't know exactly what do you think? I mean, I'm kind of like the, the, the other case where I'd push that number up as high as I possibly mean. Like, I think if you're I think you spend a million a month, you don't need incrementally at all.
(21:34) Like I think even if that's like 85 meta, 15% Google you should be looking and able to look for most brands. For most brands, again, not the brands that the purchase windows 180 days. But like for most brands that it's even 30 or less, you should be able to look at an MTA and make decisions off of and I think that that is more than sufficient up to like seven figures a month, you know, a million a month and spend.
(21:55) I've been telling a lot of people that that have asked like, oh, should I be running house? And I'm like, how much are you spending? They're like ten k a day. And I'm like, doesn't matter. Like does not matter. Keep spending on meta. Do do better there. It's the same thing as always better creatives, better lenders, better offers, better crow.
(22:12) Get your email. And it's like the same thing. I was just curious. Like I think it's it's interesting to talk about, but even like us at Mars, who's spending a lot of money, like we're just starting to really dabble with incremental. And I think it I think you can really get a lot more scale for depending on the business type, of course, but for most brands, I think it matters less.
(22:32) let us not go without talking about the fact that one of our that our main sponsor, Northeim, does have incrementally built in as well. So you can test it there too, which I'm sure you guys have. So you're going to ask another question. Then we should talk about Google agencies, which I know you love. Talk big big, big, big Google guy.
(22:50) Did you give us your next venture? Right. That's the next thing you guys are doing at Easy Street Brands. You're launching a Google ad agency. Yeah, we they only manage branded search campaigns. Yeah. The only thing that was stricken from my non-compete when we sold the deal was let me start at Google Ads Agency.
(23:05) I had a really fight for that one. No. Yeah. Let's talk about Google. I mean, I think again, I'd love to hear what you guys have found and saw and. Yeah, okay, I was talking about it. So so Google in the survey we talked about the survey at the beginning. We have a ton of data on this. So actual examples from the Google, from Google agencies, from the survey, 10 to 20% of the people that we surveyed, their minimum is around 500 a month.
(23:31) So Google agencies get really cheap and they're very commoditized in my opinion. There's people that also do a flat retainer of 500 to 5000 mid-market 1500 to 5000. So there's so many of these Google ad agencies that are like, yeah, we'll take it on. And it's like easy for them to manage. I think they just price basically, you know, do very little I mean 500 a month in fee.
(23:53) They're not spending anything. But that's a lot of like small business stuff I think. Then there's base plus percent over a threshold like we talked about with meta. So some example I had $1,000 base plus 10% of spend over $5,000. A freelance consultants generally were like up to 3000 a month. And then they sometimes went higher.
(24:14) But you know, it's cheaper. Generally, I think we're talking about Google agencies. And then the contractor passed through a client at 10 to 15 K a month. Google spend price a contractor at $1,000 a month. So, you know, I think you guys have talked about before, Google should be a flat fee. Most skilled and spend is branded search.
(24:33) It's not incremental. You get it anyway. So you know I don't know what you guys think about this. There's there's a lot we could tell you about Google ad agencies and how they go about this. But I think generally speaking, Zack, your opinion is that a lot of people are overpaying for this. Do you disagree with that assessment? I just don't think anyone should charge a percentage of spend for brand search like, first and foremost, it doesn't make any sense to me.
(24:56) Like zero sense. I think percentage of spend for YouTube spend I think is really interesting. And again, it has to be the whole nuance of presenting to spend or even any of these target. They have to have a target, right? Like you have to be able to have some type of either last click, which I know is like not the best, but like some type of target to look at to, to to hold them accountable for the spend, the increasing spend if they're doing that, I think non brand of YouTube is totally fine to run a percentage of spend.
(25:32) It's just so rare to see it done where anyone gets any proper scale out of it. Proper scale, I mean even like to 10-K a day, right. So, I'm in the I'm in the bulk, you know, I'm in the camp of saying percentage of spend is fine, but it just shouldn't be on brand. That's really it. That's like my biggest thing. And why like most Google spend is brand spend, especially if like you actually dig into it.
(25:56) A lot of agencies have done a bad job of actually filtering things out correctly where they're saying it's not saying it's non brand, but it actually still is brand. So that's that's my number one thing that I just like get frustrated about. Outside of that I don't really have any issues. I mean candidly like where to spot with both both Holland Mars that we have like a we've been using a contractor for a while.
(26:17) We haven't been able to scale Google a ton, Google YouTube a ton for for Mars yet. And so we're going to build the team in house. And so we're bringing in like basically someone to just own the channel and then someone to media by. So it's like a two person role or two, two people to kind of run it. I think for agencies like, again, I think it's just also really rare for my experience in D to see, to see many agencies that understand how to scale non brand correctly at efficient targets and scale you to effectively
(26:48) ad efficient targets. So again, to do that correctly, I would be willing to pay them just as much as I'd be willing to pay a meta freelancer agency. Yeah. Would you agree? Yeah, I largely agree. Yeah. I don't think I have a ton to add to to that point specifically. I think, I mean, this is probably true of most most people in the marketing space in general is like there's just people that are really not very good what they do.
(27:12) And sometimes evaluating that can be difficult. Agreed that like Google branded search should, should, should be relatively braindead in that you set it up, you don't spend on it. And like you don't need to stress too much about the income mentality of Google branded search. We had Colin Slattery on a couple months ago at this point.
(27:31) And you know, I've we've talked chatted with him a few times and you know, there's there's folks like that who are maybe able to scale non brand search. Actually back to the point of incremental, I think Google is actually interesting to maybe do it sooner because like let's say you sell but you know let's we can even use hollow as an example.
(27:50) I'll try to think of this on the fly. But if somebody types in 70 types in hollow socks, right, what's the value of that click. Like what should you be expecting from from an efficiency standpoint. Pretty fucking high Somebody types in alpaca compression socks okay. Well that's that's still that's still pretty pretty pretty narrow and pretty pretty narrowly defined.
(28:11) But if somebody types in compression socks or socks for whatever support, whatever ailments that people have than where compression socks for like there's, there's varying degrees of incremental within that. And I think there's a lot more nuance to some of that stuff. Whereas like I think meta, as long as you're excluding customers, you know, you're using clickbait attribution as a lot harder to to get fooled by the mentality of that platform.
(28:38) So I don't have anything to add on the pricing side. That all sounds like totally fair to me. I think YouTube is like a completely separate thing. Like is it's like not even worth lumping in because of the creative aspect of it is just so different compared to to Google. So what about creative agencies, you guys? Like what? How are these priced? Because, I mean, I've seen everything.
(28:57) I've seen $1,000 for a thousand statics, and I'm just kidding. But, like, close, you know. So, I mean, seriously, like, what of the great ones that are out there? What are they charging? Are they charging? Percentage of spend. If you spend on them. And then a base fee or what's the latest Zach you've got 17 creative agencies on retainer so you probably have the best insight.
(29:19) Yeah I mean we've candidly we've like rotated out of a lot of them too. I mean, so the way that we think about this is completely based off of spend. If your creative agency you want to work with Mars men are hollow and you want to come in at zero retainer and we'll pay you a percentage of spend or a flat retainer that's high and you think you can crank, like, feel free to hit me up.
(29:39) But basically I like percentage of spending or no or no minimum. I'm okay with the minimum, but I like that model because they're incentivized to make us bangers that get spend that, you know, and we have had so many that are like, hey, but like, you know, our ads have high Roas, who cares? Their bottom of funnel statics, it doesn't matter.
(30:02) So like I think it all depends on what the target is. And if I were to say like what makes it great creative agency, it's people that understand that their job is to make ads that go get net new visitors and get a lot of And so if you're able to do that, I think a creative agency, candidly, right now is probably the one agency that I would pay the most money to even versus like a media by an agency and email and SMS agency, Google agency like that is the agency that I'm willing to pay the real dollars for.
(30:29) Because one good ad, one good breakout ad can literally ad we've we've all seen it like 20, 30, 40, 50 k a and spend to a business if if it's set up correctly and like has the inventory and has everything like set yeah I like you know, I like a flat retainer or a even minimum retainer with percentages spent with a cap.
(30:51) Like those are my favorites. Kind of similar to to the above, but yeah, I think I think that's my my biggest kind of like stance on how the scope should be thought about is I also I like minimum scopes of like output. And then I like the ability that if an agency like wants to make more money with you, which should be their goal and should be to keep you around, is like, let them make as much as they possibly want.
(31:16) If they want to go make a bunch more ads for you, or if they just have random ideas, I'll give a shout out to like the agency x Roas. Like we've been using them for a long time for both of our brands. They've been and they consistently just like send us more creatives than what our scope entails, because they're they're on a model where, like, they want to keep us and they want to push up more spend to their creatives, which keeps us happy and keeps them around.
(31:38) So, that's my that's my take on kind of fees and creative agencies. Yeah. I think it's pretty common to be like if you're, if you're working with an agency and it's we're talking like content creator, anywhere from like 3 to $700 per video is kind of like the range I think you're landing in now. If you're starting to get like higher production than that, it's probably going to scale up pretty quickly, especially depending on like the actual scale of that production.
(32:03) Just had a sick new video that I'm sure was not in the 3 to $500 range for for the GNC launch, but like, that's an example of how that how that changes really quickly. What about what about like when you pay content creators directly because you guys have in-house teams and I can give some anecdotes. The range that I see is like and obviously depends on the complexity of the strip.
(32:25) But like we're talking content creators. I've seen, you know, low end 100 hours of video where it's like fully scripted, given to them. And we had somebody the other day who's like, it's $2,400 for like a video. And it was fully just fine because like, she makes bangers like, so when you guys work with creators directly, what's what's the range that you see? And I guess I'm interested how you contrast that with the agencies.
(32:49) Like are you taking learnings from agency concepts and you're just scaling it out with more creators because you've got it proven out or you guys are doing your own. Net new concepts or combination of it one of the brands. We've had a content creator that started at like, I don't know, it was like $1,000 for like two videos or something.
(33:04) She did a great job, like got decent spend money on the ads. And so we kept working with her and worked on like a slightly increased retainer. But what's been really interesting is we brought in a new creative agency who's like, absolutely knocked it out of the park. And now we have that creative agency writing scripts for this content creator, because this, like, content creator really resonates with our demo.
(33:24) So, I think it can be hybrid. I think, like ideally you're kind of finding the sweet spot of, I mean, really it comes down to the brief or the scripts more than anything, if you're hiring creators and then how good they are at being real. Right. Like, I think the whole idea of just like hiring one off UGC creators for $100, just like that shit doesn't work anymore, right? Just like consumers have seen through it.
(33:49) They know it's an ad right away if they like, you know, there's like the classic like they're showing the product right away and they're like, whatever. It's like, what was the phrase that everyone use? This is this is game changer. Yeah. It wasn't game changer. It was something like that that all the UTC creators would say, hey guys, think of it.
(34:06) Yeah, yeah. Today I'm going to talk to you about. Yeah. Anyway, so I'm never going to believe this. Yeah, that's not a bad hook. But I think it depends on, on that. So we, I mean, at Hollow Mars, we paid. You know, we only pay creators. Now if we get whitelisting. For what it's worth, we don't really pay any creators just for content alone.
(34:29) We pay agencies who will pay creators for content alone. Right? That we don't whitelist, but that. Yeah, can range. I mean, like, it could literally be $100 for a video plus whitelisting if they're very they're just getting started in their career to $5,000 a month for, you know, even only a couple of videos with whitelisting.
(34:47) But yeah, I think I think that at the end of the day, creative agencies job is to get you scale, like get you ads that can drive, scale and drive more net new visitors to your site. And I think that's the one agency that I think if, if your CFO or if you're in charge of the finance because you're just getting started as a brand, like that's the one agency I'd be willing to pay the most money to.
(35:09) Max, who's my CMO of holla. I basically tell him, like, here's your kind of like fun budget every month now, like spending on whatever you want. He usually spends it all on creatives or creative agencies. Like that's that's where he's putting it. So yeah, that's kind of how I think about Yeah. So we have we've talked about all these different agencies, talked about creators and by the way, creators stuff fear brand.
(35:32) You haven't heard. We have hive House as well, which is a creator community. You can come in. A lot of founder members get the automatic access hive House. UGC tons of people in there just worth checking out. We we vet all the creators that are in there. It's a really good set of people. We help the creators grow in their career like we do with founders and the agency founders of like we do in founders community for agency owners and brand owners and that kind of thing.
(35:55) So anyway, just wanted to toss that in there. So let's talk about a couple of other ones an email, SMS, agency pricing. Usually this is baked into full service. This is what everybody does now. And it's like really hard to know. I mean, I don't know anybody that's doing a standalone email agency now. It's like very rare to hear that.
(36:18) I've heard of one the other day that these guys that I'd never heard of before that are crushing it seem to be doing only retention and email stuff SMS is it? This seems to be, from what I've seen, priced similarly to the Facebook ads game in terms of, you know, look, it's it's based on a certain amount of emails going out and sometimes there's a percentage of revenue attached, sometimes there's not.
(36:43) What do you guys think about this? How is it how is this priced from what you've seen, if you're if you're paying for like per email, like more than hundreds of dollars per just like email and SMS output I think is probably pretty insane. I personally also hate the idea of percentage of percentage of email attributed anything, especially if you're using Clavijo defaults.
(37:06) Like you're just getting fleeced. For sure. It's the warmest traffic gets some of the easiest to to produce. Now, if we're talking about increase in efficiency or sorry, increase in attributed revenue, that's still tricky, because increase in attributed revenue doesn't necessarily mean increase in incremental contributed revenue.
(37:24) So there's some big caveats there. But I think if you're paying more than a couple hundred dollars per email design, if that's all you're expecting, you're expecting email design and outputs, that's probably too much. That's if you're just like giving them the brief yourself. Now, if they're helping you own and craft the marketing calendar, that's that's a big value add.
(37:42) If they're helping you own craft and hone retention. And like retention is a massive like retention could be post-purchase upsells on the website. It can be post-purchase. What happens in email, your flows. Maybe it starts to seep into like actually managing your subscription platform in a way, and coming up with ways to reduce reduce churn by suggesting one, you should change your gift.
(38:04) Like that's where I think you start. It starts to get much less commoditized, and it's you're paying for people who have the source and who have done it a million times over. But I think if you're straight up paying for just like paying for emails and paying for SMS, yeah, if you're paying more than a couple hundred bucks for each of those, you're probably getting fleeced.
(38:20) So yeah, I think, yeah, it's 3 to 5 grand a month if they're doing like a pretty basic job, if they're doing strategy, I'd imagine 5 to 10. And then if you're a larger brand that has more velocity and a bunch of like flows and stuff, it's probably like ten to maybe even up to even 50, up to 20, probably like the 10 to 15 K a month range.
(38:42) I would not be surprised if there is a strategist on your account, a copywriter on your account, a designer and implementer. Like if you have like a full, robust team working on your stuff, I think that that's more reasonable. I think the biggest thing now is this is my take is that copy is actually, you know, it got really easy with AI, but then it got too easy.
(39:04) And so I think a lot of email and SMS, you know, agencies just kind of chalk it up. And that's where the brands like feel really falls apart very quickly. It's very easy to catch an email and be like, oh yeah, like AI wrote that besides just seeing a bunch of em dashes, right? So I think that's where I think the copyright is.
(39:23) Honestly, the most important thing I think design is, is isn't as hard to do as what it used to be. I think, like, you can design really beautiful things easier now. I also think like the way that people think about agencies and if team like we haven't really talked about this, but like I would love to kind of wrap some things about like the team that you're working with, if you care if they're like stateside or onshore versus offshore.
(39:48) I think that for a lot of e-commerce brands, like for them to want to pay the fees that they want to pay for. I think a lot of agencies do have to offshore roles to, like, make it work for everybody, right? If the agency is not able to be profitable in any way, like the brands can't be, you know, the agencies won't exist.
(40:04) So the brands can't get fees for a certain certain degree. So, yeah, I mean, I think I think it comes down to what Brad said, which is like if they're adding strategy that's improving returning customer rate or increasing like the or tightening the window from like first purchase, a second purchase. And they're like sharing data on that.
(40:25) The things they're doing to like improve that, increase LTV, reduce retention of churn. If they're doing those things and reporting on those things in your scene like improvement, those are the agencies I'd be willing to pay 15, 20 grand a month to because that's like substantial compounding effects. But yeah, if you're just getting email and SMS and no real strategy is just implemented like a couple grand a month, makes sense. Yeah.
(40:48) I mean, I think so much of it is, you know, talking about your your question about onshore, offshore, and I think even just a thread through any of this is like, how much is that agency, a strategic partner of yours. And really like what does strategy mean. Right. Like that. That means different things to different people.
(41:06) To me, it means that they are proactively taking action on your account to be testing new things, be trying new things, to be preemptively bringing up issues they might see, and to be innovating essentially on new, new things that can bring you new net new revenue. Right? That that is what you're paying them for.
(41:30) I think that there are agencies that are great at execution, and where they lose clients is they turn into an execution execution agency, and they just do. And there's not a focus on the strategy and the partnership. And so that's one I would say that as it relates to the offshore stuff, you know, offshore isn't bad if you have a good way to that, the people that you're working with.
(42:00) But I think we're offshore I've seen works better for agencies is if there is a partner that they're working with that knows how to and keeps the offshore employees accountable and educated with the best practices, then. And that's not necessarily as much on you that that is where I've seen that be a little bit better, because then it's that you managing someone in wherever this person is, as much as it's like you're working with an intermediary that's saying, hey, these people need to be on top of their shit.
(42:33) They need to know the best practices. We're educating them, and you're paying a little bit more of a premium, but you're still paying offshore pricing, and that can really help a lot. And those are those types of firms like, you know, go have varying levels of quality, I would say. Right. But like in in the community.
(42:53) I don't know. Leandro at Propellers has landed like 85 offshore employees for eight people in the founders community. And it's because there's an intermediary there that does that. I don't know what you guys think about that, but I think you have to have somebody that's kind of watching over that crew, because otherwise it becomes a whole other thing for you to manage.
(43:14) Yeah, yeah. I've I've got nothing useful to add. Thank you said that. Very well I know, yes. I don't know if you have anything, but I think last on our one of the last things on our list is landing pages in CRL, which is like the last 17 episodes we've done, have been all about landing pages. But so we can we can bring it home with that.
(43:34) We should just start a company called congruency. Yeah. Look, congruency, that's probably expensive. It's also a really hard word to spell and say, maybe that's just me. It's available. It's available. We can call the number number on the screen right now if you want to buy it. It is available. So just throw it out there okay.
(43:54) Yeah. Oh yeah. Nice big guy. The nobody's gonna mean I think landing pages. Yeah, I think I think you should pay five grand per landing page. And I think it should take you three months to get from your fancy. Yeah, because that's a standard, right? Or at least was in 2024. Just kidding. But I feel like that's what every said client that would go to somewhere else to hire a landing page that was supposedly like the best at landing pages would do.
(44:24) And we just saw that story happen over and over again on. But yeah, I mean, I think it depends on it depends. It's like the most annoying phrase in DDC. It depends on like, candidly how I would pay a landing page agency a 20 grand for a page if I knew it was going to work. Right. Like or even more. Right. It's just that's where the numbers game, I think is really important.
(44:50) And so I would rather pay, you know, a flat fee per page. Probably not percentage of spend, though I do understand that that could make sense if it was like incremental spend above. But that's really hard to track, especially on landing pages. I'd probably pay a flat fee per page, with the assumption that you're going to have to make a handful of them before you crack it.
(45:14) So yeah, I don't know. I don't know of any like just straight up, I don't know many straight up landing page agencies, but I'd say like flat fee makes the most sense. Yeah, I think you can. You could find somebody who can build the page. They're not going to be able to, like, copyright an idiot. And that's like hundreds of dollars.
(45:33) But if you need somebody to, like, come up with the ideas, copyright idea design dev is, you know, the dev continues to get easier and easier. Yeah. I think you're in the, the 1000 to $2000 range. And that's that's somewhat reasonable, especially for people that are like just getting started and trying to test things out.
(45:52) But I think there's, there's there's definitely people like like Ryan Downey and Kanika who are both in Foxhole Founders Group. Like they are just they are a tier CRO individuals who just like they they can command higher numbers because their actual process is just like super dialed. And they just look at things that other people don't look at.
(46:14) And so, you know, I don't actually know what those, those people individually charge. But, you know, that's when you start to get into the $5,000 plus per month range for, for proper, you know, CRO and landing pages. But I think like how do you what about you just doing like small on site things. It's like not that in small.
(46:35) It's not like totally fair because like, you know, a 2% increase in something for Mars men is is a massive, massive win. But at the same time, like the the efforts to to impact like a different. Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah like I've seen. Well if it's a Crow agency that's a different story. I've seen, I've seen guns that are, that are great, that are going to do like tweaks that you're telling them and they're going in and coding it and everything, which is obviously like a different story now with Claude and everything.
(47:08) But I've seen that at like as low as like 3000 a month, you know, because they're just going in and they're just executing on what you're telling them to do. Now, if we're talking about CRO agency, CRO agencies, every crow starts at a pitch with no one's there's very few CRO agencies. They are always like, there's so few of us that are great and like and then and it's it's true relatively.
(47:32) But like I've heard the pitch many times and then it like keeps going and in terms of the pricing and then like now I feel like a Crow agency that's great is like 7000 men, you know, 7500 like big. And then a lot of brands just bring it in house or start to code their own stuff, which gets messy. And I think this is why so few brands do a lot with landing pages, because it the cost of the agencies is too high and they think they can execute it on themselves.
(48:02) And they do, and then they don't necessarily know how to track and set up systems the right way. And so it just gets lost in the mess. And they just keep launching Facebook ads or meta ads. I don't know how you guys feel about that, but I've seen that pattern happen a few times. What exactly. Like what's your expectation from.
(48:19) And you guys are pretty far along in your in your landing page journey. But like what's your expectation from idea to life with your team? Is it like 48 hours that needs to be live or is it okay. No, it's going to take a bunch of time and a bunch of additional research, and it should take a week or two because like to your point, when you kick it off, it's like, I mean, I've seen I've seen landing page projects literally take weeks.
(48:40) And I'm talking like just to get the first round, not not the back and forth because like that stuff's required. But yeah. What's your expectation there? I think a week is realistic. We've turned pages around in a day. You know what I mean? It's not like it's not. It's it should not be possible to do it in a day.
(48:56) But I think realistically it should be like a week. Right. Because it's, it's usually idea. So like what is the thesis of this page going to be. What is like the what are we going to talk about on this page. It's going to be different. That's going to increase conversion. That's maybe a day or a conversation in a meeting. Then it's okay.
(49:12) We got to go write the copy at a day. Got to go design it out a day. Review out a day like deploy it, get it ready, whatever. Make sure everything's good at a day. I mean, you're at like a full workweek. So I'd say like a week, a business, you know, a full, full workweek, I think is like realistic. Mars were turning around, I think right now, like 2 to 5 pages a week.
(49:36) It's kind of like the ruff, ruff ballpark number that we're that we're at right now. And I'd say hollows around around probably like the lower end of that, maybe like two a week. And also it depends on like the amount of spend. Right. Because it's like if it's a brand new page, like got to drive enough spend to, to validate if it's working or not.
(49:53) So there's a certain threshold of how many actually landing pages that you can launch based on your spend. So, but yeah, I think that that's realistic is a week. Yeah, yeah. Cool. The only my only call out on Crow agencies that I will say is there's a handful of things that just work. Right. There's just a handful of things that you should just do.
(50:14) They just work like everyone should. Just like, these are like five things that you should go do right now one, your draw cart should probably show the subtotal, the cost of shipping, and then the total and or the amount of discount that's happening in the ecosystem. And if it doesn't, it should show those things.
(50:32) Because the more clear that your price can be on that page before they have to go, make one more decision on the checkout is really, really great, especially if there's like automated coupon codes being applied. Anything there that if you're running like coupon strategy or anything like that, you can do all of that in the draw cart.
(50:47) Huge lifting conversion rate. Show that that you're getting free shipping. Make it abundantly clear that you're getting free shipping or not, or what that free shipping threshold is in the draw cart. That's like kind of CRL 1.0 from my perspective. Then there's things like your carousel images. We've talked about this a lot.
(51:02) Just have plain carousel images. You should optimize your carousel images. The thought of the carousel images should be any bit of information below. The carousel images should be able to be summarized by just flipping through the carousel images on your PDBs. So like go do that. Go look at hollows. Go look at Mars.
(51:15) Means you can very clearly just like see how we think about that huge lift in conversion rate. Talking about when like the customer can expect the shipment. Another obvious one big lifting conversion rate showing like this product ships tomorrow and it ships from a US facility can usually see a lift. The other one is showing like credit card or payment options on the PDP can be kind of ugly, but like lifting conversion rate like these are just like a few things that it kind of sucks if pay an agency to go do some of those things.
(51:48) But like a good agency should already have an arsenal of about like 20 tests that they can run over the course of like a couple of weeks to just like go and test for your site. What's a bummer is like, I wish the agencies are just be like, oh, 30 grand, just give me all the test right away. And I could just, like launch them all in one shot and should just see a big lift overall.
(52:04) That is like my only flack with Crow agencies is like, they usually have the arsenal, but they like, keep them in their back pocket because they want to continue to like, roll them out over time to keep your, you know, keep you around. So there's a handful of those things I think are just, like fairly obvious.
(52:20) That should should help. So if you're not doing the things I mentioned, like go test all those immediately, because we've run them across both of our brands and a bunch of clients at homestead and like Salt Lift. Yeah, I put ships from us by tomorrow, but then the key is to no ship, and then there's a lot more margin to be made when you just don't send the product.
(52:39) So that's always a hacker. Yeah. We'll, we'll hack for for the homies out there. Well thank you everybody for listening guys. Thanks for being here. And until until next time, keep on scaling. The only way that we grow this podcast is by you sharing it with your friends. Honestly, like reviews kind of don't really mean anything too much anymore.
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