What ads actually cost in Bulgaria. Both numbers, not just the one agencies quote.
Asking what Google Ads costs is really asking two questions, and almost nobody separates them. One number goes to the agency. The other goes to Google. Confusing them is why budgets get set wrong before anything launches.
Magnet Minds
26 August 2026
8 min read
"Колко струва реклама в Google" is one of the most searched commercial questions in Bulgaria, and it almost never gets a straight answer. Partly because the honest answer is "which cost do you mean", and partly because a vague answer keeps you on the phone.
The two numbers
There are always two, and they behave completely differently.
The media budget goes directly to Google or Meta. The agency never touches it. It buys the clicks, and if you stop paying it the ads stop the same day.
The management fee goes to whoever runs the account. It buys strategy, setup, creative, optimisation and reporting. It buys nobody any clicks at all.
What agencies actually charge in Bulgaria
Bulgarian agencies price ads management three ways, and the model matters as much as the number. A published Bulgarian breakdown gives the going rates: a fixed monthly retainer of 800-1,500 BGN, roughly 409-767 EUR; a percentage of ad spend, typically 10-25%; or a hybrid, for instance 600 BGN fixed plus 10% of budget.
One caution when comparing. Some quotes you will see, in the region of 100-300 EUR, are ads management bolted onto a social media package rather than a standalone service. That is a different product with a smaller scope, and comparing it to a full management retainer is not a like-for-like comparison.
Monthly, in euro. Our pricing sits inside the standard fixed-retainer band: 490 EUR for one platform, 750 EUR for both. The bottom row is the media budget, which is a separate cost and usually the larger one.
Fixed fee, percentage of spend, or performance
Three models exist and the difference matters more than the number attached to them.
- Fixed monthly fee. You know the cost. The agency earns the same whether you spend 1,000 or 10,000, so nobody is nudging the budget for their own benefit.
- Percentage of ad spend. Common internationally, typically 10-20%. The problem is structural rather than moral: the agency income rises when your spend rises, whether or not the extra spend earned anything. You are paying someone to advise you how much to spend, and paying them more when the advice is "spend more".
- Performance-based. Sounds ideal, rarely is. It requires agreeing attribution up front, and attribution is exactly what gets argued about when results disappoint.
We charge a fixed fee and say so plainly: never a percentage of spend, because we do not want to earn more when you spend more.
Send it over. We will tell you which pricing model it actually uses, what is missing, and whether the media budget it assumes is realistic for your market. No pitch. Most proposals are vague about exactly one of those three, and it is worth knowing which.
Get a second opinion Or email it to [email protected]What the media budget actually has to be
Below a certain spend, paid search stops being a channel and becomes an experiment that never finishes. Bidding algorithms need conversion volume to learn from. Too little data and the system never leaves its learning phase, which means paying full price for the worst version of the campaign indefinitely.
Published Bulgarian guidance puts the floor at roughly 1,000 BGN, about 500 EUR, per platform for e-commerce and lead generation. Our own recommendation is higher, around 1,000 EUR a month, because 500 gets the algorithm out of its learning phase while 1,000 is where the numbers become reliable enough to make decisions on. Both are defensible; the difference is between working and working well.
Below roughly 300 EUR a month, the honest advice is to spend it somewhere else. Any agency that takes that budget on is selling a management fee rather than a result.
What we charge, and the part most agencies would leave out
- Google Ads or Meta Ads - 490 EUR a month each.
- Both platforms - 750 EUR a month, which saves 230 against running them separately.
- One-time setup if the account needs building: +250 EUR for one platform, +390 for both. Already running ads on a working account? You skip this entirely.
Set against the market above, 490 EUR sits in the lower half of the standard 409-767 EUR retainer band, and 750 EUR for both platforms is less than two separate retainers would cost almost anywhere.
What the fee buys that the number alone does not show: the founders run the account weekly rather than a junior after a founder pitched you, the fee is fixed so nobody benefits from talking your budget up, and the click promise is attached. If you already advertise and we do not beat your 30-day average cost per click within 30 days, the next month is on us.
When to hire someone else: if your media budget is under about 300 EUR a month, any management fee is too large a share of your total outlay to make sense. Spend it on the ads until the budget can carry a retainer, whoever you eventually hire.
Comparing two agency offers
- Is the fee fixed or a percentage of spend? If percentage, ask what happens to their income when they recommend a budget increase.
- What media budget does the proposal assume? A fee quoted without a budget assumption is half a proposal.
- Whose account is it? If the ad account and pixel are in the agency name, your data leaves when you do.
- Who actually touches it weekly, and how often is it looked at?
- Is there a setup fee, and is it charged even when the account already exists?
- What does the report contain? If it is a deck of impressions and reach, it is not measuring what you are buying.
Our full ads pricing is on the ads page, and if you are also weighing a website, the same treatment for web pricing is here.
Questions
Two separate numbers. A fixed management retainer at Bulgarian agencies typically runs 800-1,500 BGN a month, roughly 409-767 EUR, or 10-25% of spend if they charge on a percentage. The media budget is separate, goes directly to Google, and published Bulgarian guidance puts the minimum around 1,000 BGN, about 500 EUR, per platform.
No, and any proposal implying otherwise is worth questioning. The media budget goes straight to Google or Meta. The agency fee buys the work around it. Budget for both.
Published Bulgarian guidance puts the floor at roughly 1,000 BGN, about 500 EUR, per platform. We recommend closer to 1,000 EUR because that is where the data becomes reliable enough to act on rather than merely sufficient to run. Below about 300 EUR a month, any management fee is too large a share of the total to justify.
We do not. At 490 EUR for one platform we sit in the lower half of the standard Bulgarian retainer band of 409-767 EUR, and 750 EUR for both platforms is less than two separate retainers. Quotes around 100-300 EUR are usually ads management attached to a social media package, which is a smaller scope than a standalone retainer.
Never. Fixed monthly fee, so our income does not rise when your budget does. Percentage pricing puts the agency interest and the client interest on opposite sides of the same decision.
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