The picks
- Keepers Digital — Best overall: Google and Meta, founder in the account, from $1,250 a month
- ZATO PPC Marketing — Best if Google Ads is your whole program
- JXT Group — Best for budgets over $10K/month on Google and Meta
- Group Twenty Seven — Best for B2B lead gen
- SavvyRevenue — Best for ecommerce brands that want published pricing
#1 Pick
Keepers Digital
- 8 people, Vancouver and Toronto, founded 2020
- Google Ads, Meta, Microsoft. Landing pages and CRM tracking in-house.
- Management from $1,250/month, no long-term contract
Keepers Digital is the pick we most commonly refer our clients to. The founder Sean Grabowski has a strong track record running large accounts at GroupM, and runs a lean team of 8 where he still gets hands-on with every account. Their fee starts at $1,250 a month with no long-term contracts.
Why I picked this
Here’s a quick tip for vetting agencies; read their reviews (on more than one platform) and count how many name the founder. You want to see clients describing Loom account walkthroughs, same-day responses, and advising in their interest. Keepers nails this, and I’ve hired them in the past on that basis. Results were good.
The second reason is that Keepers builds the parts of the funnel most PPC agencies hand back to you. Landing pages, conversion tracking wired into your CRM, and ad creative are all done in-house. When a campaign underperforms, the agency can fix the page instead of sending you a report that says the page is the problem.
The risk with smaller agencies is that they might oversell their experience in your category. Keepers has strong case studies on their site with clear numbers and video testimonials from the clients. Google made them a Premier Partner in 2025, which puts them in the top 3% of partner agencies by spend under management and optimization score.
The tradeoff is scale. Eight people is a hard ceiling on how many accounts the founder can stay close to, and calls lean on Pacific time.
Skip this if…
- You spend under $3K a month on ads. The management fee would be a large share of your total budget.
- You need Amazon, TikTok, or LinkedIn run as a primary channel
- You want a 20-person pod and a quarterly business review deck
#2 Pick
ZATO PPC Marketing
- 6 people, Billings, Montana
- Google Search, Shopping, PMax, Microsoft, YouTube. No Meta.
- Flat monthly fee, 30-day contracts
ZATO does Google Ads for ecommerce brands and nothing else. Kirk Williams has written three books on PPC, keynoted Hero Conf in 2026, and has been on the industry’s most-influential list every year since 2016. He has kept the agency at six people on purpose.
Why I picked this
Kirk writes about what he is doing in client accounts, including what stopped working. If you want to know whether an agency understands Performance Max, read his posts first and then ask your candidates the same questions. Most will not have answers.
Pricing is a flat monthly fee rather than a percentage of spend, so nobody at ZATO benefits from your budget going up. Every contract is 30 days. The full service is built for brands spending $25K to $1M a month, and there is a lighter “Essentials” tier for brands under $15K.
Kirk is the strategy layer, not the person logging in every morning. ZATO puts three people on each account: a senior account manager with around ten years of experience, a data and conversion tracking specialist, and Kirk or his director of PPC for strategy. For a brand with real spend, that is a good shape.
Skip this if…
- You need Meta or TikTok managed by the same team. ZATO does not do paid social.
- You are a lead gen business. Their depth is ecommerce and industrial B2B.
- You want the founder in your account every day. You get him on strategy.
#3 Pick
JXT Group
- 7 people, Ocean, New Jersey, founded 2009
- Google Search, Shopping, PMax, YouTube, Meta
- Minimum engagement around $10K
JXT Group runs Google and Meta together for ecommerce and lead gen clients. Menachem Ani started it in 2009 and still speaks at SMX and BrightonSEO about what he is doing with automation in client accounts.
Why I picked this
The team is five strategists, one designer, and Menachem. One of those strategists is Susan Wenograd, who ran paid social at agencies ten times this size before joining. Every person on the team would be a senior hire somewhere else.
The client list covers both ends of what most readers need. Morgan & Morgan, the largest personal injury firm in the country, is a lead gen account. Modular Closets and Casely are ecommerce. JXT is a Google Premier Partner.
They do not publish pricing, but I can report they have larger starting projects starting at $10k/month.
Skip this if…
- You spend under $10K a month in total
- You want SEO, web design, or email bundled in. This is a paid media shop.
- You need Amazon Ads
Honorable mentions
#4
Group Twenty Seven
- 6 people, Arlington, Massachusetts, since 2010
- Google, Microsoft, LinkedIn, Meta
- Pricing on request. Paid 5-hour audit with the founder available.
Pauline Jakober has run Group Twenty Seven for about 16 years with a team of six, and the shop only takes lead gen and B2B ecommerce clients. The client list is life sciences, medical devices, clinical trial recruitment, and industrial: Verathon, Cognex, Emulate. If your buyer takes six months and three people to say yes, this is the agency on the list that has done it most.
Choose this if: You are B2B, a lead has to be qualified before it counts, and you want Google and LinkedIn run by the same people. The paid 5-hour audit, which Pauline does herself, is a cheap way to find out whether your current agency is any good before you switch.
Skip it if: You sell physical products to consumers, or you want a Meta-first shop. Pauline’s role today is senior advisor on accounts rather than daily operator. A paid media director who has been there since 2017 does the running.
#5
SavvyRevenue
- About 10 people, Copenhagen, founded 2017
- Google Ads for ecommerce, plus paid social
- Flat fee from about $2,450/month, or % of spend with a $1,500 minimum
SavvyRevenue is the only agency on this list that publishes its pricing with worked examples. A DTC brand spending $14K to $28K a month pays a flat $2,450. Bigger accounts can choose a percentage of spend, but only once ROAS targets are hit, with a $1,500 floor. Andrew Lolk started it in 2017, works only with ecommerce, and caps each specialist at two to five clients.
Choose this if: You are an ecommerce brand spending $10K a month or more, you want Google Shopping run by people who do nothing else, and you want to see the fee before you book a call.
Skip it if: You need same-timezone coverage. They are in Copenhagen, and while they run US and UK brands, your weekly call is going to be your morning. Also skip if you are lead gen, which they do not take.
Why I prefer founder-led shops
I’ve hired freelancers, small shops, and big agencies for paid media over the years, and the small founder-run shop is the one I keep going back to. Here’s the reasoning.
Freelancers
A good freelancer is cheap senior talent, and I still use them for one-off audits. For ongoing management the problems are practical ones:
- You’re the manager. Nobody else is checking their work, and if you could audit a Google Ads account yourself you probably wouldn’t be hiring.
- They’re hard to vet. Upwork reviews are thin and easy to game, and there’s no second person at the company to call.
- It’s one person deep. A vacation or a bigger client and your account sits for three weeks with the budget still running.
- Access gets messy. A lot of freelancers run your ads out of their own manager account, and when it ends you find out how much of the history you own.
Big agencies
The 100-person agency has the opposite problems. Easy to vet, plenty of coverage, and the person in your account day to day is two years out of school.
- The founder or a VP sells you, then you get an account manager with 14 other accounts and a strategist who checks in monthly.
- If you spend $20K a month and their average client spends $200K, you’re the account they train people on.
- Complexity justifies the retainer. Forty ad groups and a 30-slide monthly deck prove the fee, and nobody asks whether a simpler account would have made you more money.
- Once a shop sells to a holding group or takes PE money, the founder is usually working toward an earn-out. Senior people leave, and the account manager you signed with may be gone within a year. Tuff was a good small agency until Goodway Group bought it in 2022, and the site now redirects to Goodway’s. That doesn’t make a PE-owned agency bad. It’s a flag I personally avoid, because in my experience pricing after a sale tends to be higher and more optimized for the owner than for the client.
Why the small shop usually wins
Every agency on this page has six to ten people, the founder still works in the accounts, and nobody else owns them. You get someone who has run a few hundred accounts, with enough of a team that the work doesn’t stop when they take a week off. A founder running your account also can’t hide behind complexity, since they’d be the one maintaining it.
The catch is capacity. These shops take a limited number of clients and most have a minimum spend. If you’re under it, use a freelancer. If you need 24-hour coverage across six markets, you’ve outgrown them.
How to choose
Choose Keepers Digital if you want the founder in your account, you run Google and Meta, and you’d like landing pages and tracking handled by the same team. That’s most people reading this.
Choose ZATO if Google Shopping and Performance Max are most of your spend and you want a flat fee with a 30-day out.
Choose JXT Group if you spend $10K a month or more and want Google and Meta run by the same small team.
Choose Group Twenty Seven if you’re B2B with a long sales cycle and LinkedIn is part of the mix.
Choose SavvyRevenue if you’re ecommerce, want to see the fee before the first call, and can live with a Copenhagen team.
If you spend under $3K a month, none of these will take you, and I wouldn’t push it. Run it yourself with the platform’s free onboarding help or hire a freelancer on a short contract, and come back when the spend justifies a senior person’s time.
Questions I’d ask any PPC agency before signing
- Who, by name, is going to be in my account every week? If you get a role instead of a name, keep looking.
- How many accounts does that person manage? Over ten and you’re getting about an hour a week.
- Do I own the ad account, the pixel, and the landing pages? The answer should be yes, in your own accounts, with the agency added as a user.
- What’s the notice period? Thirty days is normal. A twelve-month lock-in with 90 days’ notice is a yellow flag at this size.
- What would you cut from my account? A good operator can tell you what to turn off on the first call. One who only adds things is building a retainer.
How I chose
I only looked at agencies under about 50 people where the founder still works on client accounts, PPC is the main service, and the shop is independently owned. No private equity, no holding group. A sale doesn’t mean the service got bad, but it’s the point where I’ve seen pricing drift up and get more optimized, so it takes an agency off my list. I checked team pages, Clutch profiles, and published pricing, and dropped anyone where I couldn’t confirm the founder is hands-on.
Nobody paid to be here and we don’t take affiliate commissions or referral fees. I know Sean at Keepers personally and have hired him, which is part of how I know he’s still in the accounts. If a listing is ever paid, it’ll say so on the card.