Agency vs In-House vs Freelancer: Who Should Run Google Ads?

Weigh three things: your monthly ad spend, the size of your catalogue and how much control you want. Run the ads yourself while the catalogue is small and you have the time. A freelancer fits a modest budget and a simple account. An agency fits when you need feed, tracking and campaign skills at once without new hires. An in-house hire fits when ads are a large, steady cost. Software takes over the analysis; you keep the decisions. In every case, keep the account in your own name.

Five ways to run Google Ads for an online store

Most stores pick one of five set-ups, or a mix of two. They differ in who does the work, what you pay for and how much you see. A PPC agency is only one of them.

The “usually fits” column is our editorial reading, not a measurement.

What does running Google Ads for a store involve?

Whoever you pick, the job has the same parts. Christopher Krassnig, founder of the agency ZenoX Media, puts it this way: “Ecom PPC is three jobs: product feed engineering, conversion tracking, and media buying.” He adds that most job ads hire for only one of them (his article, August 2026; vendor content, since his agency sells this service).

For an online store, most of that work is about products. Performance Max, a Google Ads campaign type, runs in 141 of 146 stores in our data and takes a median 95.7% of their ad budget (GetProfit data, June 2025 – June 2026). In such an account, the main levers are the product feed, which products get money and how products are split into campaigns. That split is your campaign structure, and it decides which products compete for the same budget.

On top of that, every set-up works with the same two levers: how much you spend and how much revenue each unit of spend brings back. That second lever is your ROAS. Our guide to growing a store with Google Ads shows which one to pull first.

What can you hand over, and what stays with you?

You can hand over the advertising, while the decisions it depends on stay with you. In GetProfit’s working model, a store owner has nine jobs: purchasing, pricing, the range, demand, advertising, stock, money, people and analytics. The model comes from experience, not from a measurement. A contractor can take on the advertising; purchasing, pricing and stock remain yours.

Your margins, stock plans and returns sit in your store’s own systems, outside the ad account. Whoever runs the ads knows them only if you tell them. Put them in writing: the brief for your PPC agency lists what to include.

Strong stores put less of their budget on products that never sell

Ask any candidate: “How much of my budget goes to products that never sell?” The answer tells you more than how they set bids. In our study of 1.4 million products, stores spent a median 40.5% of their budget on products with not a single sale in 13 months.

That share is what separated strong stores from weak ones in the same study:

Read this as an observation across 130+ stores, not an experiment. It shows what goes together with a high ROAS, not what causes it. Our ROAS is based on revenue, not profit, because we don’t see product costs.

What this means for your choice: an agency, a freelancer and an in-house hire can all set bids. The one worth paying keeps moving budget towards products that sell and can name that share for your store. If nobody can name it, nobody is watching it.

How do you choose by budget, catalogue and control?

Answer three questions in this order.

1. How much do you spend a month, and what does a month with nobody watching cost? The higher the spend, the more a gap in attention costs, and the easier it is to justify a full-time person. Christopher Krassnig, founder of the agency ZenoX Media, draws the line at roughly €100,000 a month in spend. Below it, in his view, an agency usually works out cheaper than a hire; above it, it depends. That is one agency’s view, and most stores we see are far below that line. In our data, 104 of 114 stores brought in less than $30,000 in revenue from ads in a typical (median) month (GetProfit data, June 2025 – June 2026). Their ad spend is lower still, so for them the real choice is usually between doing it yourself, a freelancer and an agency.
2. How big is your catalogue, and how often does it change? You can check a few dozen steady products by hand once a week. With thousands of products and new arrivals every month, you can’t. Owners who call us say the same: once the catalogue runs into thousands of products, they can no longer go through it by hand. At that size, whoever runs the ads needs tools or a team.
3. How much control do you need? To see every change and approve the big ones, you need your own Admin access, a change log and a contractor who agrees to work that way. Some owners want the opposite: hand it over and look once a month. Both work, but only the first lets you catch a problem early.

Should you run Google Ads yourself?

Yes, if you have the time and the catalogue is still small enough to review.

Three kinds of owners we talk to run their own ads. Some have done it for years, know their numbers and want only what they can’t get by hand. Some are just starting, often moving from a marketplace to their own store. Others have built their own product labelling with spreadsheets and custom labels.

Signs you have outgrown doing it yourself:

• The weekly check slips to “when I have time”.
• You can’t say which products spent money last month without selling.
• The catalogue has grown past what you can review in an evening.
• You make changes in a rush, several at once, and later can’t tell which one helped.

Before you hand the account to anyone, check it yourself. Our Google Ads audit for online stores lists what to check and in what order. Then you know what you are handing over and what to ask the person who takes it.

PPC freelancer vs agency: what differs?

A freelancer and an agency do the same work. They organise it differently.

The risk on each side is different. With a freelancer, everything rests on one person. With an agency, ask who will work on your account day to day, not only who sells you the service.

To find and test a specialist, freelance or staff, see hiring a Google Ads specialist. To check whether a candidate can run a product catalogue, use Google Ads interview questions for ecommerce. For agencies, see how to choose a PPC agency. It also helps to know what a Google Partner badge does and doesn’t tell you.

When does an in-house hire pay off?

When ads are a large, steady part of your costs and your product decisions change every week. A person on your staff sits next to purchasing and stock. They hear about a new supplier or a sold-out bestseller the same day, not at the next monthly call. What they learn about your store stays with you.

The cost is more than a salary. Count these too:

• employer costs on top of the salary;
• tools for the feed, tracking and reports;
• the months it takes to find and train the right person;
• cover for holidays and sick days;
• the gap when they leave, and the know-how that goes with them.

Salaries vary too much by country and seniority to quote here. Use a local salary survey and check its date.

A common middle path: one person on your staff owns the goals, margins and product decisions, and an agency or a tool covers the specialist parts. The decisions stay in your store, and you buy in the routine work.

How do agencies and freelancers charge?

A management fee is what you pay for running the ads, on top of what you pay Google for the ads themselves. It usually comes in one of four forms.

With a share of spend, the percentage can step down as spend grows. One agency publishes this scale: 10% on the first €10,000 of monthly spend, 9% from €10,000 to €30,000, 8% up to €80,000, 7% up to €150,000 and 6% above that (ZenoX Media, August 2026). At €30,000 a month, the fee comes to €2,800; at €100,000, it comes to €8,200. It is one agency’s price list, not a market average.

Pay for results sounds fair, but a single month’s figure moves a lot on its own. For the median store in our data, ROAS in a typical month sits 16% away from the store’s own median. Its best month brings 3.1× the ROAS of its worst (GetProfit data, 110 stores, June 2025 – June 2026). A fee tied to one month’s ROAS pays partly for luck, in both directions.

Whatever the model, compare offers on the total: ad spend plus the fee, as a share of the revenue the ads bring. For the fee models and their trade-offs, see what Google Ads management costs.

Who should own the Google Ads account?

You. Whoever runs the ads, the account should belong to your business, and at least one Admin user should be yours.

Google defines the main access levels in its API reference (AccessRole):

So the person with Admin access decides who else gets in. If that is only your contractor, then in practice the contractor decides.

Agencies often work through a manager account. According to Google’s developer documentation (Linking to Manager Accounts), a manager account is used for administration, not for serving ads, and is a single point of access to the accounts it manages. The manager account starts the link, and you accept it from your account. The link connects two separate accounts: theirs and yours.

To check Admin access, billing and manager links now, see Google Ads account ownership and access. If you are about to change contractors, the PPC agency handover checklist lists the steps that keep the account and its history intact.

How do you check that whoever runs your ads does a good job?

When owners tell us why they changed contractors, the same complaints come up. The campaigns were set up and then left alone, and nobody could say where the budget was going. A previous contractor broke campaigns that had been working. Some owners have been through several contractors and no longer trust any report.

You can check without being a PPC expert. Go through these in order:

1. Are the conversions real purchases with real order values? If not, every report and every decision built on them is wrong.
2. What was changed, when and by whom? Ask for the change log, or look it up yourself with read access. Judge a change against the weeks before it, not against your hopes. The portal waits 14 days before it says whether a change helped or hurt, and after the first week it shows only a preliminary conclusion.
3. Are changes made in small, spaced-out steps? Target ROAS is the return you ask Google to aim for. The portal’s working rule is to change it by up to 15% per step, no more than once every one to two weeks. For the budget, the step is up to 20%. With large, frequent jumps, nobody can tell which change did what.
4. Are you comparing like with like? One month says little: in our data, a store’s ROAS typically swings 16% around its own median. Compare a full season with the same season, or several months with several months.
5. Where does the budget go? Ask for the share of budget on products with no sales over the last year, and how it has moved since they took over.

For the full version of this check, see whether your PPC agency is doing a good job. If an agency offers you a free audit first, what a free Google Ads audit should contain shows how to tell a real one from a sales pitch.

Can you mix a contractor with your own tools?

Yes. One split we see on calls: the agency keeps Search, YouTube and Demand Gen, and the product campaigns are handled separately. Owners who set it up this way first ask for a clear line between who does what, so nobody undoes the other’s work. To draw that line, see working with a PPC agency and your own tools.

Where does software fit in?

Software works alongside any of the other four set-ups as a source of data and checks. It shows what a person would otherwise export and reconcile by hand. The decisions and the responsibility stay with you and whoever runs your ads.

The GetProfit portal is software of this kind. It reads the account and changes nothing in it without your consent. Its store score appears on screen as the account score. It rates the account out of 100 across four areas: the data Google receives, products, campaign structure and the history of changes.

The score passes no verdict on your contractor: it names the area that drags the account down, so you and your contractor discuss the same numbers. Agencies can connect all their client accounts at once through a manager account, on request. The platform page explains how the account score is built.

What to do this week

1. Check your access. Look at the list of users in your Google Ads account and make sure at least one Admin belongs to your business.
2. Write down the total cost. Ad spend plus the fee, as a share of the revenue the ads brought last quarter.
3. Ask one question. What share of the budget went to products with no sales over the last year, and what is your contractor doing about it?
4. Agree a change rhythm. Which changes need your approval, how they get logged and when to judge them.
5. Send a short brief. Margins, stock plans, returns and the goal you care about, in writing.
6. Re-check the fit. Compare your set-up with your budget, catalogue and need for control today, and decide whether to keep it or change it.

What state your ad account is in. One score instead of a dozen tabs of figures — plus a breakdown of exactly where the money leaks. The portal changes nothing without your consent.

Get your account score →

Sources

• AccessRole | Google Ads API — what the Admin, Standard and Read only access levels can do. Checked 2 October 2026.
• Linking to Manager Accounts | Google Ads API — what a manager account is; a link is started from the manager account and accepted from the client account. Checked 2 October 2026.
• In-House vs Agency for Ecommerce PPC: The Honest Math on Both Sides — Christopher Krassnig, ZenoX Media, 8 August 2026; vendor content: the “three jobs” view, the €100,000 spend threshold, the agency’s tiered fee scale. Checked 2 October 2026.
• GetProfit data: 146 stores, June 2025 – June 2026 — share of budget in Performance Max.
• GetProfit data: 110 stores, June 2025 – June 2026 — month-to-month ROAS volatility; 114 stores, same window — stores by revenue from ads in their median month, converted to US dollars at fixed rates.
• GetProfit study of 1,404,808 products across 130+ stores over 13 months — share of budget on products with no sales, by ROAS quarter.
• GetProfit portal methodology — store score areas, step sizes for target ROAS and budget, the 14-day window for judging a change.
• GetProfit sales and client calls — the problems owners describe with contractors and the ways they split work with an agency; qualitative, no shares quoted.