How much does it cost to hire a Facebook ads agency?

When you hire a Facebook ads agency, you pay two parties. Meta bills your card or billing profile for the ads. The agency invoices you for the work of running them. A quote that mixes the two is hard to compare with anything else, so ask for them split out on the first call.

The budget bands for the Meta side are in our guide to how much Facebook ads cost in NZ. This guide covers the other bill: the fee for having someone run the account. If you want the wider picture across all channels, see what a digital marketing agency costs in NZ.

NZ Facebook ads agencies price in one of three ways. Each one suits a different stage of account.

Take a worked example with round numbers. At 15% of spend, $2,000 of ads costs you $300 a month in fees. At $8,000 of ads the fee is $1,200. The work did not quadruple: it is still one account, a few audiences and a weekly creative refresh. A percentage fee rises with your spend, whether or not the hours do. That is why a flat retainer usually becomes the better deal as an account grows.

Performance deals deserve a hard read. Ask what counts as a result, who measures it, and whether the agency can see a lead through to a sale. A fee tied to leads rewards cheap leads, which are not the same thing as customers.

A management fee for a Facebook and Instagram ads account should cover five things. A quote that skips most of them is cheap for a reason.

• Creative. New ads written and designed or filmed on a regular rhythm. Ads wear out once the same people have seen them many times, so an account running the same two ads for months gets slower and dearer.
• Audience and structure. Setting up campaigns so Meta gets enough signal to learn, and not splitting a small budget into pieces too thin to work.
• Tracking. Conversion tracking set up so a lead can be followed to a booked job or a sale, not just a form fill.
• Weekly optimisation. Pulling weak ads before they drain the budget and moving spend to what is returning.
• Reporting on results. A monthly read of leads, cost per customer and return on ad spend, not a screenshot of reach and clicks.

Ask who makes the creative. Some fees cover the ads themselves, others charge for production on top. Both are fair. A surprise invoice for ad design in month two is not.

The number to compare between quotes is the total: ad spend plus fee plus any creative. Here is a worked example with round numbers, not a quote. Say you spend $1,500 a month on ads and an agency charges 15% plus $300 for creative. The fee is $225 ($1,500 × 15%), so the all-in cost is $2,025 ($1,500 + $225 + $300). Of that, $1,500 reaches Meta and $525 pays for the work.

Now take the same business with a flat $600 retainer and creative included. The all-in cost is $2,100 ($1,500 + $600). The second quote looks dearer on the fee line and lands within $75 of the first. Compare totals, and the question becomes what each one includes.

Then ask what the total has to return. If a customer is worth $2,000 to you, the first quote needs about one extra customer a month to pay for itself. If a customer is worth $200, it needs about ten. That gap tells you whether the model suits your business before you speak to anyone. The ad spend calculator runs the same arithmetic with your own numbers.

If you are weighing an agency against hiring one person or doing it yourself, we cover that in agency vs freelancer vs in-house.

Two terms cost owners more than the fee does. The first is account ownership. Your ad account, pixel and Business Manager should sit under your own business, with you as an administrator. If they sit inside the agency's Business Manager and you only have limited access, you are renting a seat. Leaving then means starting again with no audience or conversion history.

The second is the contract. Month to month lets you leave if the account is not performing. A long minimum term mostly protects the agency in the early weeks while the account is still being set up. Thirty days' notice is normal. Ninety is a flag.

Put your own payment details on the ad account from day one, even if someone else runs it. Cancelling an agency contract does not pause your ads. Meta keeps charging until the campaigns are switched off.

The fee is not the number that decides whether Facebook ads work. What the account returns does. Swift Air, an Auckland ducted heating installer, spent $3,014 of ads between April and October 2026. That produced 222 enquiries, 13 jobs won and $145,626 of work, a 48.3x return on ad spend.

An installer selling jobs of that size can carry a management fee easily. A business selling a $40 product on thin margins may not. Work out your own margin and close rate first, and what a fee plus the ad spend would need to return before you sign.

Skip the agency if your ad spend is under roughly $500 a month. At that level, a fee of even $300 can be as large as the ad budget, and there is too little data for anyone to optimise. Run one simple test yourself first, and read whether $500 a month is enough for Facebook ads.

It is also a poor time to hire if you cannot follow an enquiry through to a sale, or if nobody answers leads quickly. An agency can deliver enquiries. It cannot fix a business that lets them go cold.

If you already pay someone and cannot tell whether it is working, a free ads audit gives you a second opinion before you renew.

1. Is the fee separate from ad spend, and what happens to it if I double the budget?
2. Whose Business Manager and ad account will this run in?
3. Who makes the creative, and is it in the fee?
4. Can you track a lead through to a sale in my business?
5. What is the notice period, and is there a minimum term?

An agency that answers these plainly, in writing, is easier to work with than one with the lowest quote.