Free tool
Who should actually run your Google Ads?
Do it yourself, hire someone, take an agency or a freelancer. There is no universal answer, only the one that fits what you care about most.
Every one of the four routes works for somebody. The question is never which one is best in general, it is which one is best given your budget, your time and how much the ads matter to your revenue. People usually decide this on a gut feeling and a price, then regret it a year later.
This tool makes the trade-off explicit. You say how much each of five worries weighs for you, and the four options get scored against them. It is the interactive version of the spreadsheet we used to hand out, with the scoring corrected and the scales made consistent.
What matters to you
Drag each slider to say how much that worry weighs for you. The scores for each option are ours, from years of running these accounts.
Best fit for you
On your weighting, Agency
- Agency A team that does this every day 45 points
- New employee Hire a specialist into the company 35 points
- Freelancer One external specialist, by the hour 35 points
- Do it yourself You or someone already on the team 31 points
The line doing most of the work: Not burning ad budget
How the points were earned
Each option scores 0 to 3 on every line. Your weight multiplies that score.
| What matters | Do it yourself | New employee | Agency | Freelancer |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Not burning ad budget x5 | 1 5 | 2 10 | 3 15 | 2 10 |
| Low setup cost x3 | 3 9 | 0 0 | 1 3 | 2 6 |
| Not spending your own time x4 | 1 4 | 3 12 | 3 12 | 2 8 |
| Building knowledge in house x3 | 3 9 | 3 9 | 1 3 | 1 3 |
| It keeps running x4 | 1 4 | 1 4 | 3 12 | 2 8 |
| points | 31 | 35 | 45 | 35 |
How to weight the five lines
- Be honest about the ad budget. If a bad month costs you more than the management fee, the first line deserves a 5 and most of the others do not matter.
- Separate setup cost from running cost. Getting started and keeping it running are different problems, and they point to different answers.
- Count your own hours at what they are worth. Doing it yourself is only cheap if the time you spend has no better use, which for most owners is not true.
- Ask how much knowledge you really need in house. If Google Ads is a side channel, owning the know-how matters far less than if it is the business.
- Think about the worst month, not the average one. Illness, holidays and someone leaving are the situations where continuity suddenly becomes the only line that counts.
What each option is good at
These scores are fixed. They are our judgement from years of taking over accounts from all four setups, and they are what the sliders multiply.
| What matters | DIY | Employee | Agency | Freelancer |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Not burning ad budget | 1 | 2 | 3 | 2 |
| Low setup cost | 3 | 0 | 1 | 2 |
| Not spending your own time | 1 | 3 | 3 | 2 |
| Building knowledge in house | 3 | 3 | 1 | 1 |
| It keeps running | 1 | 1 | 3 | 2 |
Read the rows, not the totals. The employee column scores a zero on setup cost because a salary starts before the first campaign does, and the agency column scores a 1 on in house knowledge because the learning happens on our side of the table. Both are honest weaknesses of those routes.
Where each route wins
Doing it yourself
This wins when the budget is small enough that a mistake is survivable and you actually want to learn the platform. The trap is treating it as free. A week of your own time plus a few months of a weak setup is usually more expensive than the fee you avoided.
A new employee
This wins when Google Ads is one part of a marketing role you need filled anyway, and when the channel is big enough to keep someone busy. Below a certain spend you are paying a full salary to manage a budget smaller than the salary.
An agency
This wins when the ads carry a large share of revenue and a bad quarter really hurts. You get a team instead of a person, so holidays and illness do not stop the account. What you give up is speed on the small things and knowledge that stays in house.
A freelancer
This wins in the middle: too much for you to handle, not enough to justify a hire. The risk is concentration. One person means one calendar, one holiday and one point of failure, which is exactly what the continuity line is measuring.
What this cannot decide for you
Still your judgement call
- Whether the person or agency in front of you is any good, which no matrix can score
- What you are willing to pay, since price sits outside the weighting on purpose
- How fast you need results, which usually favours whoever has done it before
- Whether the product and the margins can carry paid traffic at all
That last one comes first, not last. Before you decide who runs the campaigns, work out whether the campaigns can earn anything at your margin. The Google Ads profit calculator does exactly that, and it takes two minutes.
The mistake behind most of these decisions
If you want the longer version of this argument, with what the work actually involves at each step, read Google Ads yourself, an employee, an agency or a freelancer.