Most agencies end up looking at white label PPC for the same reason: a client asks for paid search or paid social, and building an in-house team to run it properly is not worth it for the volume you have. This article covers what the arrangement actually involves, how the pricing and margins work, what a proper report should look like, and the account ownership question that causes the most damage when it gets missed.
What is white label PPC?
White label PPC is pay-per-click management carried out by a specialist agency or freelancer, delivered under your agency’s brand rather than theirs. The provider does the technical work: campaign structure, keyword and audience research, bid strategy, ad copy testing and ongoing optimisation. You do the client-facing work: the relationship, the strategy conversation, the invoice, and usually the reporting narrative on top of whatever the provider sends you.
The client should never need to know a third party is involved. That is the entire point of the arrangement, and it is also where most of the risk sits if it is not set up carefully.
It typically covers one or more of:
- Google Ads (search, Shopping, Display, Performance Max)
- Microsoft Advertising
- Paid social (Meta, LinkedIn, TikTok)
- YouTube and video campaigns
Some providers specialise in one channel, others run the full mix. If a client needs Google Ads and LinkedIn ads managed together, check whether that is genuinely one team’s expertise or two separate hand-offs stitched together, because that affects both quality and how quickly issues get caught.
How white label PPC works in practice
The mechanics are fairly consistent across providers, even where the pricing differs:
- You brief the provider. Budget, goals, target audience, brand voice, any exclusions (competitor terms, certain ad formats, review requirements before anything goes live).
- Campaigns are built inside the client’s ad account, or occasionally the provider’s own account, which is the detail covered in the ownership section below.
- The provider optimises on an agreed cadence, usually weekly for active accounts, with bid adjustments, budget shifts, new ad variations and negative keyword additions.
- You receive a branded report on a schedule you set, typically monthly with a lighter weekly summary.
- You review, add your own commentary, and send it to the client as your agency’s output. The provider’s name does not appear anywhere in that document.
- Escalations route through you first. A good provider gives you a direct line for anything urgent, but the client should always hear from your agency, not theirs.
The parts most likely to go wrong are steps 3 and 6: optimisation cadence that quietly slips once an account has been running a while, and escalation paths that are slower than they were promised to be. Ask a prospective provider what their actual response time is for a paused or rejected ad, not just their advertised SLA.
What a white label PPC service typically includes
Scope varies between providers, so it is worth checking exactly what is covered before you compare two quotes side by side. A reasonably complete service usually includes:
- Account structure and campaign builds, including ad groups, audience segmentation and conversion tracking setup
- Keyword and audience research, refreshed periodically rather than done once at launch
- Ad copy and creative testing, with a clear cadence for rotating in new variations
- Negative keyword management, which is unglamorous but is where a lot of wasted spend gets caught
- Bid and budget management, adjusted against performance rather than left on automatic bidding and ignored
- Landing page recommendations, even if the provider is not building the page themselves
- Monthly (or more frequent) branded reporting, covering spend, results against goals, and next steps
What is less consistently included: conversion tracking audits, competitor ad monitoring, and proactive strategy input beyond the account itself. If those matter to you, ask directly rather than assuming they are bundled in.
What white label PPC actually saves you
The case for outsourcing rather than hiring is usually one of these three:
- You don’t have the volume to justify a specialist hire. A single PPC manager costs a full salary whether they are managing two accounts or fifteen.
- You don’t have the certifications or platform depth in-house, and building that up takes months, not weeks.
- You want to say yes to a client’s request without a multi-month hiring detour. White label partners can usually onboard a new account within days.
What it does not save you is the account management relationship. You still need someone on your side who understands paid media well enough to sanity-check what the provider sends you and translate it for the client. Outsourcing the execution is not the same as outsourcing the judgement.
Margins: what you are actually charging for
This is where agencies most often confuse themselves. If a client pays you £3,000 a month and £2,400 of that is ad spend passed straight through to Google, your real revenue on that account is £600, not £3,000. Your margin needs to be calculated against the £600 management fee, not the headline number.
Providers generally price one of three ways:
- Flat fee per account, regardless of spend. Simple to plan around, but can be poor value on very large accounts and generous on very small ones.
- Percentage of managed ad spend, commonly somewhere in the 10 to 20 percent range depending on the provider and the platform mix. This scales naturally with account size but means your provider costs rise as a client’s budget grows, so check your own client pricing scales with it too.
- A hybrid, usually a percentage with a minimum monthly fee, which protects the provider on small accounts and you on large ones.
Whichever model you use, price your client-facing fee on your management fee plus a margin that reflects the value you add on top, not on the total media spend moving through the account. An agency that looks like it is billing £600,000 a year but is passing most of that straight to ad platforms is a very different business from one billing £600,000 in actual fee revenue, even though the top line looks identical on paper.
Worked another way: if a provider charges you 15 percent of managed spend on a client running £5,000 a month through Google Ads, your provider cost is £750. If you charge the client a £1,500 monthly management fee on top of their ad spend, your margin on that account is £750, before your own time reviewing and presenting the report is accounted for. Running that math before you quote a client, rather than after, is what keeps a growing account count from quietly eroding your margin as spend levels rise.
Questions to ask before you sign
Beyond price, a short list of direct questions tends to separate a genuine partner from a reseller you will outgrow quickly:
- Who holds admin access to the ad account, and can we get it in writing?
- What does your optimisation schedule actually look like week to week?
- Can we see an anonymised sample of the monthly report before we commit?
- What is your response time for a paused ad, a disapproved campaign, or a sudden performance drop?
- Is there a minimum contract term, and what happens to the account if we leave?
- Do you work with any of our direct competitors in the same location or niche?
A provider that answers these clearly and quickly is telling you something about how they will behave once you are a client, not just how they sell.
Reporting and branding
A white label report is only white label if the client cannot tell it came from anywhere but your agency. That means:
- Your logo, your colour scheme, your agency’s domain if reports are hosted online
- No mention of the fulfilment partner in the document, the file metadata, or the sender’s email address
- A reporting cadence you control, not one dictated by the provider’s default schedule
- Room for you to add your own commentary and recommendations before it goes to the client
Ask to see an anonymised sample report before signing anything. If a provider cannot produce one without hesitation, that is worth noting.
Client ownership: the question that matters most
This is the detail in the title of this article for a reason, because it is the one agencies skip when everything is going well and regret when it is not.
The question is simple: who has admin access to the client’s Google Ads account?
There are three common setups:
- The client owns the account, and your agency is granted admin access at the Manager Account (MCC) level. This is the safest arrangement for everyone. If your relationship with the white label provider ends, nothing about the client’s account changes.
- Your agency owns the account and grants the provider access to work in it. Also safe from the client’s perspective, and keeps you in control if you switch providers.
- The provider owns the account, and your agency (and sometimes even the client) only has limited or no direct access. This is the arrangement to avoid. If the provider disappears, raises prices unreasonably, or the relationship sours, you can lose the account history, the audience and remarketing lists built up over months, and potentially the client itself.
Before you sign with any white label PPC partner, confirm in writing which of these three applies, and insist on the first or second. A provider that resists giving you or the client direct account access is treating the relationship as leverage, not a service.
Red flags to watch for
A handful of signals tend to show up together when a white label PPC arrangement is heading for trouble:
- Reluctance to share a sample report or explain their optimisation process before you commit
- Account access held only by the provider, with no clear path for you or the client to get it
- Pricing that only becomes fully clear after you have agreed to a minimum contract term
- No defined escalation process for paused ads, policy issues or sudden performance drops
- Generic, templated reporting that reads the same for every client regardless of their goals
None of these are automatically disqualifying on their own, but two or more together are worth a direct conversation before you bring a client’s budget into the arrangement.
Where this fits into a broader white label stack
Paid media is one piece of what agencies now hand off. Content, social posting, lead generation and link building are the other parts most agencies either outsource or wish they could automate, and that is specifically what 3rive builds AI agents for. We are not a PPC provider, and this article has deliberately stayed neutral on that side of the business. Where we do fit is the rest of the stack: AI-written, competitor-researched content, automated prospecting and outreach, social content creation and scheduling, and link building outreach, all built to slot into an agency’s existing client delivery without adding headcount.
One agency using our platform put it this way:
“We manage a portfolio of over 500 clients who pay us on a low-cost retainer. We keep these low cost by keeping our team as small as possible. As a result we’ve always felt an element of pressure meeting deliverables and deadlines. Since discovering you guys we now have AI Agents that cover about 75% of our workload, we finally can all breathe again.”
Alex Farrow, Senior Team Executive
That is the same margin problem PPC resellers face, just applied to content and outreach instead of ad accounts: the work has to get done at a cost that leaves room for a healthy fee, without the quality dropping as volume grows.
If you are already white labelling PPC and want to see what the rest of your delivery stack could look like running on AI, book a call and we will map out where it fits.