Talaria vs. a Traditional Marketing Agency
The traditional agency model was built around human account managers doing manual work. That’s where the percentage-of-spend pricing, the multi-day turnaround, and the annual contract all come from. Talaria automates the manual part and passes the difference back to you.
| Talaria | Traditional agency | |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing model | Flat monthly fee ($299–$899). Ad spend billed at cost, never marked up. | Often a percentage of ad spend (typically 10–20%) on top of a retainer. |
| Time to make a change | Seconds. Describe the change in plain English and it's applied to the live campaign. | Days, typically. Requires an email, a call, or waiting for your account manager's availability. |
| Contract | Month to month. Cancel anytime from your billing portal. | Often a 6–12 month minimum commitment. |
| Time to launch | Live in 48 hours from finishing onboarding. | Commonly 2–4 weeks for strategy, account setup, and creative approval. |
| Account ownership | You own the Google/Meta accounts. Full data and creative access at all times. | Varies by agency — some manage from agency-owned accounts, complicating a future switch. |
| Budget visibility | Live dashboard: spend, remaining budget, and every change applied, plus a weekly email. | Usually a monthly PDF report, often days or weeks after the period it covers. |
| Human strategist | Included on the Scale plan for multi-location accounts; available as a fallback for ambiguous requests on any plan. | Always available — the traditional model's real advantage for complex, judgment-heavy strategy. |
Where a traditional agency still wins
A good agency’s real advantage is a human thinking about your account strategically — catching a market shift, negotiating a partnership, or planning a multi-quarter campaign. Talaria doesn’t pretend automation replaces that kind of judgment: requests that are ambiguous or fall outside a defined guardrail route to a human strategist instead of being auto-applied. The difference is that routine changes — budget shifts, pausing a campaign, adjusting targeting — don’t need to wait for that human at all.
See what your account would look like on Talaria
Start your first campaignWeighing it against running ads yourself instead? See Talaria vs. DIY Google Ads →