What is the minimum ad spend for a broker Google Ads campaign?

In practice about $1,000 a month. Below that a search account does not see enough searches for the search terms report to be worth cutting, so the negatives never fill in and every read of the account is a guess. A smaller budget can still buy clicks; it cannot buy the information that makes next month better than this one.

Does the ad spend go through the agency?

With WeCompound, no. Google bills your own card directly, the spend is never marked up, and the account is opened in your name so it goes with you if you leave. The management fee is the only money that comes to WeCompound.

Is there a lock-in contract for Google Ads management?

No. Month to month, thirty days notice, no minimum term. The one thing asked of you is to judge the account on settlements rather than clicks, and a settlement cycle takes a few months, so six weeks of clicks is not the verdict either way.

What counts as a conversion in a broker Google Ads account?

It depends entirely on what the account was told to count, which is why the number needs splitting before it means anything. A genuine conversion is a human doing the thing that means they want a broker: an enquiry form that reached your CRM, a completed fact find, a confirmed booking, a tracked call long enough to be a conversation. A soft one is a real but weaker signal, such as a calculator run to the end. Junk is a click recorded as a person: a directions tap, a contact page view, a booking widget opened. A click is never a lead.

Compound Notes

Google Ads

What Google Ads actually costs a mortgage broker

$595 a month plus 15% of spend, with the ad spend on your own card. What that buys, whether it is worth it in your book, and the question nobody itemises: what is it counting as a lead.

Rebecca TicknerMFAA member & finance broker · founder, WeCompound21 September 20269 min read

$595 a month plus 15% of whatever you spend with Google. That is the whole ongoing fee, ex GST, published so you do not have to sit through a call to find it out. The ad spend is a second bill, and it needs to be about $1,000 a month before the account can learn.

Whether it is worth it is not my number to give you. It is yours: what one settlement is worth in your book, against what an enquiry can cost before the upfront stops covering it. There is a calculator that does that arithmetic with your own figures, and no borrowed benchmark anywhere on this page. I'm a broker who runs these accounts for other brokers, so the rest is both halves of the bill, and the part most agencies leave out: what the account is actually counting when it says it converted.

Two bills, not one

The first bill is the ad spend. That is what Google charges you for the clicks, and it goes to Google directly, on a card in your name. It never passes through us and it is never marked up. If you stop, it stops. The account stays yours.

The second bill is the management fee, which is what you pay someone to run the account. Ours is a flat monthly fee plus a percentage of the spend, so it stays proportionate: a broker spending $1,000 a month is not paying the same fee as a brokerage spending $3,500.

Your ad spend goes to Google, never through me, and the report starts with settlements.

The management fee, at three spends

Every number below is the published one, worked at the three spend levels we use on the pricing page: the practical floor, a typical solo broker, and a brokerage with two or three writers. The setup fee of $795 is paid once and is not in the table.

Ad spend $1,000 a month, to Google

$150the 15%

Plus the $595 management fee: $745 to WeCompound in total

Ad spend $2,000 a month, to Google

$300the 15%

Plus the $595 management fee: $895 to WeCompound in total

Ad spend $3,500 a month, to Google

$525the 15%

Plus the $595 management fee: $1,120 to WeCompound in total

All ex GST, month to month, thirty days notice. There is no minimum term, and the full list of what the fee does and does not include is on the Google Ads pricing page.

What one settlement is worth to you

Whether the two bills are worth paying comes down to your own arithmetic, not mine. Put your loan size, your upfront and your trail in below and it works out what one settlement is worth, and how many enquiries you would need per settlement at a modelled rate. It is a model, not a measurement, and it prints no cost per click, because there is not a measured one to print.

One settlement, upfront commission

$3,900

on $600,000

Trail, first year

$900

Three year total, flat balance

$6,600

Enquiries for one settlement

5 to 10

Genuine enquiries, at the modelled settlement rate for refinance.

Break even, per enquiry

$390 to $780

What an enquiry can cost before the upfront alone stops covering it. Trail is on top of that, and it is the part that compounds.

What you mostly write

Average loan size

Upfront commission rate

Of the loan amount, as your agreement pays it.

Trail rate

A year, on the outstanding balance.

Monthly ad budget you have in mind

At $1,000 to $3,000 a month, the question is not what a click costs. It is whether the account can produce 5 to 10 genuine enquiries for each settlement you want, and whether the page they land on can convert them.

A model, not a measurement. Indicative figures from a working broker's book; your commission agreement and conversion rates will differ.

How this is calculated

Upfront is the loan size times your upfront rate. Trail is the loan size times your trail rate, and the three year total adds three years of that trail on a flat balance, which no real loan has. Nothing is discounted, no clawback is modelled and no offset balance is assumed.

The enquiry range comes from a modelled settlement rate for the loan type you picked: of every hundred genuine enquiries, some settle and most do not. Invert that and you get how many enquiries one settlement takes. Break even per enquiry is the upfront divided across that many enquiries, shown at both ends of the range, because the rate behind it is modelled rather than measured.

What is deliberately absent: no cost per click, no projected number of settlements, and no return figure. WeCompound has no measured Google Ads results for brokers yet. When there are some, they will be published with a date and a method, the way the website study was.

Get the complimentary Google Ads audit →Read only access, a written read, no commitment.

The minimum ad spend

Below about $1,000 a month in ad spend, a search account does not see enough searches to learn from. The search terms report stays too thin to cut, the negatives never fill in, and every read of the account is a guess dressed as a finding. It is not that a smaller budget cannot buy clicks. It is that it cannot buy the information that makes the next month better than this one.

Said plainly

If about $1,000 a month is not where you are right now, I would rather say so than take the setup fee. A management fee on an account that cannot learn is a fee for watching it not learn.

What counts as a conversion

This is the part of the cost nobody itemises, and it decides whether the other two numbers mean anything. A Google Ads account reports a cost per conversion. It does not, by itself, tell you what it decided a conversion was. On most broker accounts I read, the answer is a mix of three different things.

What your account is counting.

One report, three very different things called a conversion

Genuine

A human did the thing that means they want a broker. An enquiry form that reached your CRM. A fact find completed. A booking confirmed, not a booking page opened. A tracked call that ran long enough to be a conversation.

Counts as a lead?Yes. This is the only class that belongs under a cost per enquiry.

Soft

A real signal, but a weaker one. A calculator run to the end. A borrowing power quiz finished. A page read for a while.

Counts as a lead?As engagement, on its own line. Never as the denominator.

Junk

A click recorded as if it were a person. A directions tap. A call button pressed and hung up in seconds. A contact page viewed. A booking widget opened.

Counts as a lead?No. A click is never a lead.

The three classes are the ones the WeCompound audit uses. An account that reports a cost per conversion without saying which class it is counting has told you nothing yet.

A cost per conversion that blends all three is a cost per something. Split the classes and the same account can go from looking healthy to looking expensive, or the other way, without a single click changing. That split is most of what the audit does.

From the lunch

The audit tells you what your account is counting as a conversion, and most of the time it is not a phone call.

What I will not tell you

You will not find a cost per lead on this page, or a number of enquiries a month, or a time to first settlement. Not because they do not matter. Because I do not have measured broker numbers of my own yet, and printing someone else's would be exactly the borrowed benchmark this whole note is warning you about.

So the honest shape of the answer is this: the fee is published, the spend is yours and visible, the floor is real, and the only number that settles the question is your own settlements, which take a settlement cycle to arrive. Six weeks of clicks is not the verdict.

The complimentary Google Ads audit

Before you spend a dollar with me, the audit is complimentary at every spend level. You give one Google account read only access, which means I can see the account and cannot change a thing in it, and you get a written read of what it is counting, where the money went, and what I would change first. If you have never run ads, the same conversation works from a blank page.

Read only: no pausing, no edits, nothing switched on or off, and no access to your card
Written: a document you can check line by line against your own account
Honest either way: if the account is fine, or the budget is not there yet, the audit says so

Start at the complimentary Google Ads audit, or read the full pricing first. Either order works.

General information only, current as at September 2026. Prices ex GST and read from the published price list at the time of writing. Settlement figures in the calculator are a model built on figures you enter, not a measurement or a projection. Not credit, legal or compliance advice.

Common questions

Two bills. The ad spend goes to Google on your own card and a search account needs about $1,000 a month of it to learn anything. The management fee is separate: with WeCompound it is $795 to set up, then $595 a month plus 15% of the ad spend, all ex GST, month to month with no minimum term.