How much do marketing agencies charge in Dubai?

Our view is that below roughly AED 5,000 a month the sums stop working, and above that no average means much, because a fee follows scope and no two scopes match. What you can know before the first call is the shape of the fee, which decides what the agency is paid to care about. The wider digital marketing cost guide sets out bands by channel. This post covers how a fee is built, and the only agency prices printed here are ours.

How do Dubai agencies charge?

Agencies charge in five shapes, and each one pays the agency for something different. The shape tells you more about how the relationship will go than the number does.

For ongoing work, a flat monthly retainer with the scope written as deliverables is the fairest of the five, because it pays for the work whatever you decide to spend on ads. Magnetic Keys' monthly fees scale with the channels managed and the creative produced, and your ad budget goes straight to Google, Meta and the other platforms, never through our invoice.

Pay per lead is the shape to treat with most care. It can work when the lead is defined in writing, for example a booked viewing rather than a form fill, and the tracking sits in your own accounts. Without both, you're paying for volume.

Eight things move an agency's fee

Most of a retainer is specialist hours, so anything that changes the hours, or who works them, changes the fee.

• Who does the work. A named senior person with a short client list costs more per month than a junior sharing time across many accounts, and that gap explains most of the difference between two quotes.
• How many channels. Search, social, email and SEO each need their own set-up, creative and reporting, so the fee follows the channel count more closely than it follows your ad budget.
• How much gets made. Forty ad variants a month, four videos or twelve articles is production time, and production is where quotes pull furthest apart.
• Languages. Arabic written by native writers and approved separately is close to a second job. Magnetic Keys uses native Arabic writers and never machine-translates, which is a cost we choose to carry.
• Reporting. A weekly report with a call takes more senior time than a monthly PDF.
• Tools and tracking. Server-side tracking, CRM connections and dashboards are set-up work, and the software behind them may carry licence fees that a quote can include or leave out.
• Contract length. A long minimum term can lower the monthly figure, but it moves risk from the agency to you. A twelve-month term with no break clause is a reason to walk away.
• What's excluded. Ad spend, shoots, VAT and software are usually separate, and a quote that leaves them out looks cheaper than it is.

Where our own prices sit

Our prices are published, so you can check them before anyone calls you. All of them exclude VAT and ad spend, and the full list sits on the pricing page.

• Most monthly services, such as SEO, paid ads, social media and email, start from AED 12,000 a month and are priced on scope.
• Websites start from AED 35,000.
• Four fixed-scope packages: the Growth Audit Sprint (AED 18,000), Pipeline Install (AED 42,000), Conversion Site Build (from AED 48,000) and AI Content Engine (AED 65,000).
• For UAE real estate, the plug-in marketing department has three tiers: Core (AED 18,000 a month), Department (AED 30,000) and Dedicated (AED 45,000). An on-site coordinator adds AED 15,000 a month and onboarding is AED 15,000 once. The minimum is six months, then 60 days' notice.

UAE VAT is 5%, according to the Ministry of Finance, so budget for it on top of every price above. For what to check on agency invoices and platform bills, read VAT on Google and Meta ads.

Below roughly AED 5,000 a month the sums stop working

A competent marketer costs more than that to employ in the UAE, so a fee under it means offshore juniors with no senior oversight, or an agency running your account on autopilot.

Between that floor and our AED 12,000 starting price, you can buy one narrow job done by one person you direct yourself. That's the right purchase for a single channel with a clear brief, and the wrong one for anything that needs strategy, Arabic and reporting at the same time.

Compare quotes on cash, hours and exclusions

1. 01Ask both agencies for four things in writing: the named people on the account, the hours or deliverables per month, what's excluded and the notice period.
2. 02Add VAT and any production, software or tool costs to each, so you're comparing the cash that leaves your account and not the headline.
3. 03Divide each fee by its hours or deliverables to get a rate per unit. A quote with neither can't be divided, and that is the finding.
4. 04Check each fee shape against the table above. If it's a percentage of ad spend, ask what happens to the fee when you double the budget.
5. 05Ask each agency what would make it advise you to cut the budget. An agency paid on spend has a reason not to answer.

The questions to ask an agency and the proposal red flags go deeper on the contract side.

Two reasons to wait before you hire anyone

Wait if enquiries already reach you and nobody answers them within a working day, because an agency will send more of them to the same silence. Speed to lead is a staffing question, and no media budget fixes it.

Also wait if you haven't worked out what a customer is worth. The sum takes ten minutes: what one customer earns you after direct costs, times the share of it you'd spend to win them, gives the most you can pay to acquire one. Set customer acquisition cost that way and you know how many extra customers a month a fee must bring, which the budget formula walks through with two made-up examples. If that number looks impossible at AED 12,000 a month, the answer isn't a cheaper agency.