Should you run Google Ads yourself or hire an agency?

The short answer: who can do it themselves, and who should hand it over?

A business with a small budget that promotes a single service or product group, and can spend a few hours a week on its ad account, can run Google Ads itself. For businesses that work with several campaigns, product groups or regions, need technical help with measurement setup and do not have time to watch the account every week, handing management to an agency or a specialist makes more sense.

One rule holds on both paths: the ad account is opened in the business's name, and admin access stays with the business. If you decide to hire an agency, you do not hand over the account; you only give access to it.

The decision depends less on the size of the ad budget than on the time and knowledge the work requires. The comparison below looks at these two through six criteria. The scope and setup steps of our own management service are on our Google Ads management page.

Running it yourself vs hiring an agency

When you manage the account yourself, the biggest cost is time. Setting up the campaign, connecting conversion tracking and watching search terms in the first weeks take a few days of learning for someone using Google Ads for the first time. When you hire an agency, the management fee takes the place of that time, but your part does not disappear entirely: judging the quality of incoming leads, the campaign recommendations and the report is still up to you.

The risk comes from a different place on each path. When you manage it yourself, the risk usually comes from gaps in knowledge, such as a broad match keyword spending on irrelevant searches, or a campaign that does not work staying on because a conversion is not measured. With an agency, the risk comes from a lack of transparency, such as the account staying in the agency's structure, spend not being fully visible or the report showing only summary metrics.

When does managing it yourself on a small budget make sense?

Managing it yourself fits this situation: you promote one service or a small number of products, the area you serve is defined, the ad has one kind of goal such as a phone call or a form, and someone can open the account and look at it at least once a week. Under these conditions you can start with a single Search campaign, a few ad groups and carefully chosen keywords.

On a small budget, the management fee can amount to a large share of the ad budget. In that case, running the first period yourself and seeing how the account works also helps you ask the right questions when you work with an agency later. Google's guide for advertisers also recommends that you know the basic concepts yourself when you work with a partner, so you can judge their recommendations.

When you plan the budget, you need to know how Google spends a daily budget. As of November 2026, according to the Google Ads Help Center, the amount you enter is an average daily budget; most campaigns can spend up to twice that amount in a single day, and monthly spend does not exceed 30.4 times the average daily budget. As long as you do not change the budget in the middle of the month, this limit makes the monthly amount predictable.

We have set out the first steps for managing it yourself, in order, in our guide to advertising on Google. Before you open the account, having the landing page ready and conversion tracking working matters more than the campaign settings.

Weekly tasks when you manage it yourself

The first task is the search terms report. According to the Google Ads Help Center, this report lists the searches your ad actually appeared for, with the impressions and clicks each one got. Searches unrelated to your business show up here and are added as negative keywords. For example, a business that only sells can exclude terms such as "rental" or "second hand" so the budget does not go to those searches.

Be measured when you add negative keywords. The Help Center notes that too many negative keywords can reduce the number of customers your ad can reach. Opening the report every week and removing only searches that are clearly irrelevant is a balanced approach.

The second task is checking conversions. Form submissions, taps on the phone number on your site and calls from the ad should be set up as separate conversions, and every week you should check whether these numbers match the real inquiries you receive. If the dashboard shows conversions but no inquiries reach you, the measurement may be wrong. The third task is reading spend, conversions and cost per conversion together; if clicks get cheaper while inquiries drop, the campaign may have drifted toward less qualified searches.

The last task is looking at the landing page and the ad copy. If the service mentioned in the ad is not answered on the first screen of the page, if the phone and WhatsApp buttons are hard to find on a phone, or if the page loads slowly, clicks will not turn into inquiries however good the campaign settings are. That is why, in your weekly check, opening the page behind your most clicked ad on your phone and trying it as a customer would reveals problems the dashboard does not show. Making changes in small steps and noting each change with its date lets you see later which setting affected the result.

When does it make sense to hire an agency or specialist?

If you use several campaign types at once, need a product feed and Shopping campaigns for an online store, run ads in several regions or for different services, and have no time left for weekly monitoring, handing over management saves time. When measurement setup involves technical work such as cookie consent, tag management and the Analytics link, getting help also reduces mistakes.

If an account you manage yourself has been spending for several months without bringing inquiries, asking for an account review before handing it over is another option. A review shows whether the problem is in the campaign settings, the measurement or the landing page. The questions to ask when you choose an agency are listed as 12 points in our article on choosing a Google Ads agency.

If you hire an agency, open the account in your business's name

Google's third-party policy requires agencies to use a separate Google Ads account for each advertiser they manage. Opening that account in the business's name, with the business's email address and payment method, means the campaigns, conversion settings and historical data stay with you when the work ends.

The agency is either added to the account as a user or linked to its own manager account. Google Ads has several access levels: admin, standard, read only, billing and email only. Standard access is enough to manage campaigns, while giving others access and changing access levels are admin permissions. At least one person in your business should keep admin access. According to the Google Ads Help Center, a user with admin access to the client account can remove the link to a manager account at any time.

How is the management fee set?

In the market, the management fee is usually set in one of three ways: a fixed monthly fee, a percentage of the ad budget, or a one-time setup fee for building the campaigns. Some quotes combine them; for example, a setup fee can be followed by a fixed monthly fee. What matters more than the method is that it is written down how the fee changes when the budget changes, and which tasks the fee includes.

Google's transparency rules place clear obligations on agencies here. If a management fee is charged on top of the cost of Google advertising, it has to be disclosed to a new client in writing before the first payment and shown on every invoice. If a monthly report is provided, it has to include account-level cost, clicks and impressions, with cost stated as the amount Google charged, without the agency fee added.

We work by quote for ad management; we set the fee together once the size of the account and the scope have been discussed. You pay the ad budget directly to Google.

Before you decide

First, write down the kind of inquiry you expect from the ads and what that inquiry is worth to your business. Then think about how many hours a week you can spend. If you have the time and are starting with a single service, managing it yourself is a good start. If time or technical knowledge is short, handing over management while you keep ownership of the account means less wasted spend.

The landing page is part of the decision too. Conversion tracking for forms, WhatsApp, phone calls and the Google Ads tag is part of the setup in our Business website Premium package. For a similar decision about Instagram and Facebook ads, see our article on Instagram ads.