DIY vs Agency: Who Should REALLY Run Your Google Ads?

Thinking about hiring an agency or running your Google Ads yourself? 

In this episode of The Google Ads Unleashed Podcast, host Jeremy breaks down the pros, cons, and trade-offs between DIY, freelancers, and full-service agencies — so you can make the right call for your budget, goals, and stage of growth.

Learn when it pays to do it yourself, when outsourcing saves you money, and how hybrid “done-with-you” options can fast-track your success.

Download the Google Ads Ultimate Q4 Checklist here: https://checklist.younganddigital.marketing/

Get your free 30 minute strategy session with Jeremy here: https://www.younganddigital.marketing/

Scale your store with 1:1 coaching: https://www.younganddigital.marketing/1-2-1-coaching

Transcript

If you've ever wondered if you should hire someone to run your Google ads or just do it yourself, this episode is for you. I'm going to break down the real pros, the cons, the risks, the trade offs. And I will look at it from both sides, both from an agency, our Freelancer perspective, and from an E commerce business owner perspective, because the answer isn't the same for everyone. Welcome back to Google ads and leash guys. Hope everyone is doing fabulously this fabulous Monday q4 was upon us only a couple of weeks ago to Black Friday and Christmas stress. Hopefully you're prepared. We certainly are, although we feel a little bit on edge with bit of a strange year behind us. If you still in need of help, well, this episode is a little bit for you, but I just wanted to shout out our E commerce checklist, which we have actually prepared for you. You can head to our website, young and digital, dot marketing, and head to the checklist, then actually download it. If you haven't got your ducks in a row yet, for your Google Ads account, you've only got a few weeks left. Make it count. All right, let's get back to the topic. So first of all, what does outsourcing actually mean? In the end, there's through only three kind of setups that sort of require a Google Ads specialists help. Okay? So first of all, the DIY or in house option, right? So you will actually have to hire someone, usually, that's for solo founders, if they want to get like someone who knows, you know, has a good all around sort of set. Or, of course, they will do it themselves. That is sort of the one option. Option number two is to hire freelancers, a single person who may be good with Lean teams. Or, for instance, for, let's say, smaller budgets, and then you've got the third option, and that is the agency who have multiple employees always on cover, know every setup under the sun have a lot of experience across different industries, and that is usually where you get sort of multi channel scaling, a lot of testing and various strategy. So I'm not now going to go into all of those three options, and I'm going to sort of tell you a little bit about when you should be outsourcing your Google ads. So let's start with the do it yourself approach, and I'm going to comprise two options. There people who should learn it themselves, and the higher end version. Let's start with a higher end so I think this is for very few people, to be honest, to hire someone in house. I would say you should only do this when you generally spend hundreds and hundreds of 1000s of pounds, dollars of euros per month in your Google ads, advertising, and it just doesn't even make sense to have an agency anymore. Maybe you've got an advanced marketing team already that specializes in other PPC disciplines. But for instance, meta ads, Taboola gone as what and you want to bring absolutely everything in house, I would say, from about a half a million spend per month. That is where it makes sense to get someone in whose dedicated job is just look after your Microsoft ads and Google Ads accounts. Maybe even got several brands going at the same time, right? Maybe like two or three sister brands, that is where you will have to hire, right? I think that is the that's the only logical choice, because at that point, the running costs of hiring a real pro just outweighs the agency costs that come with such a large scale spending account. But probably there's not going to be many of you who will be running into this issue. Very likely you're going to be at a stage where that's why you're listening to this podcast, where you need help, and you are probably a person who's running, let's say, at revenues of about 50k a month, if at all, maybe under or or maximum to 100k a month. You usually have relatively limited budget to spend monthly on your Google ads. Advertising usually under 3k but maybe up to 10k Um, typically, I would probably recommend anyone who spends less than 10k to have some sort of basic knowledge anyway, and to try to DIY it themselves to a certain degree and watch a lot of YouTube tutorials, or get themselves some coaching or get themselves a coaching program, because at that time, that is where sort of the unit economics just doesn't make sense, right? Because you will be hiring a freelancer between one and 2k a month, minimum, agencies, maybe even more. We charge four figures plus, right? And it just doesn't make sense to pay two 3k in advertising fees, plus a crazy fee on top of that, which is sometimes as much as the advertising spend itself, and you're just not getting the return on investment, which is why I always, always recommend to brands, please try and learn as much as you can yourself, especially if you adopt Google as a new channel, or, if you're, you know, in a in your early stage bootstrap phase, just try and minimize any expenses and try to maximize the your learnings as much as possible. Further down the line, you will want to delegate further down the line, you will want to learn alongside with your agency or freelancer, but you have to build up a knowledge base. There is no other way. I also recommend DIY solution to anyone who wants to test a new brand or wants to test a proof of concept, right? There's no point hiring an agency for brand new brand right, when there's no product market fit. That's why, in other episodes I've actually talked about this, I would always recommend establishing the product market fit with a push channel anyway, such as meta ads to see if it works, and then to add Google ads on top. Okay? And even then, Google doesn't always work. So I would highly recommend trying the DIY solution. If you are running a brand new account or a new product or a new brand, it's also good the DIY solution if you enjoy learning. A lot of people that I've mentored over the past years are just keen DIYs. They want to understand how it works. They want to run it themselves. They want to retain control. There's that's a very specific type of person. They don't necessarily want to scale hugely or keep the they want to keep the team as lean as possible for them, it's best to just learn it themselves and to enjoy the process and to figure things out bit by bit. I also think that DIY solution is pretty good for anyone who sells very few things, right, where there's very little going on, so not any large scales, you know, hundreds of 1000s of orders per month, or something like that. That's that's probably not good. The risks of all of this, though, is, of course, that you could be doing a lot of stuff wrong, right. So and doing stuff wrong costs money. And the fallacy that a lot of people run into here is that they don't want to hire a freelancer, or they don't want to hire a an agency, because they have this irrational fear of wasting money or irrational fear of giving away trust to someone. Now, of course, you can make a lot of mistakes choosing the wrong agency, but or the wrong freelancer, right? I've seen and heard plenty of horror stories, but this is something that you can't really weigh up, and that is opportunity costs, right? The costs of not getting an expert in who knows what they're doing to get the right setup in and to minimize ad wastage as much as possible will potentially cost more than the actual spend. You put it in generating shit results or no results whatsoever because you got the wrong settings on, and as a result, you're just burning through cash. Little example for this, I very often actually audit sort of DIY accounts, and then I see that all the keywords on broad match, right? Because Google, of course, as a default, will always try and push you towards broad match. Sometimes it works right off the bat. I have seen ad accounts run where just broad match runs. But this is sort of a classic, classic thing, where, through lack of knowledge, you do certain things which, in theory, kind of look correct, but the nuance makes the difference, and over time, has absolutely hemorrhaged cash, right? And you'd spend all this money into an expert per month, even over a period of six months. You would have saved yourself a lot of money and actually potentially even made more sales, right? So that's kind of a massive risk when you DIY, it also you over, sometimes they over rely massively on automation, right? So a lot of sort of setups that I see are then just 1p max or something like that, usually not even a brand, and non branded splitted, split out. And then they want to scale budgets, and then realize somehow, every time when I scale budgets, something is not working in p max here. And then, for some reason, the Ross was super like 10x because it was brand branded in there, and then suddenly it doesn't work anymore. They also don't know the growth levers, right? So very that's often sort of a hidden risk. So they don't understand is the conversion tracking? Am I tracking the right stuff, right? Am I even considering consent mode? So I have, you know, do I need powers tracking, etc, etc. They don't do any feed optimization. There's no first party data. They do all the basics, not correctly. So that's what I see very often with the DIY setups, generally speaking, though, as a rule of thumb, which is why this podcast exists, and I want to get people into this wonderful channel, is you should absorb as much information as possible when you start in this, even when you start a new job in PVC, and try and do as much yourself as possible, but with everything that you do, verify and double and triple check, even maybe alongside a mentor to understand that what you're doing is correct and not burning unnecessary cash, because that's just the biggest risk. Now let's go to the flip side. What does a good freelance or an agency bring you? So first of all, there's quite a few advantages that you will get straight away, which is kind of the opposite of what we just found is that from the start, they should be able to nail the fundamentals which stop you wasting money. So that is conversion tracking. They should be understanding that you know what to track and what is important for the customer journey. Also, if they extremely good, they should be, usually very good marketers as well. So they'd be able to help you with, you know, what's going on on the PDP out to design a good offer. What is a good budget split between other channels, right? Which is what we do all the time, working with other agencies or our clients, to understand what is the best sort of budget split between different channels and optimize that over time, they should be understanding how incremental channels are, right? Etc, etc. So this kind of strategy and funnel design and AB testing and everything that comes with it, and also the experience to set up ad accounts in such a fashion that they minimize ad wastage from the start, that is something that you get with an agency or good Freelancer that you do not get when you actually get try and DIY it yourself, unless you hire someone who obviously knows all of this stuff. You also don't get advanced feed optimization techniques. So of course, for instance, we work with product hero. We work with data feed watch. We have an idea of what a good feed looks like. You may not even have the time to do all of this sort of stuff, which a freelancer, of course, does nothing else, or every single day, or an agency, right? You're also, I think, sort of the last thing that comes with that as well, which I guess is a massive bonus, is that usually a freelancer or an agency has insight into the entire industry, right or across different industries. So they've got a much, much better idea, because they're well connected with many founders and maybe many other media buyers. They understand what is new, right? They're keeping up to date all the time, which you may miss because you don't have time. They understand me. They got their finger on the pulse, and how is E commerce or your industry going at the moment? Right? They may have a bit of a better understanding of how to embed your current performance into the overall economy, climate, etc. They also understand what works in other accounts, and can actually apply those learnings across different accounts, which you don't usually have the sort of advantage to do. They got access to things such as batters through Google, reps, etc, etc. So there's a lot of sort of macro scale marketing skills that you may not have, and also connections that you buy with an agency or freelancer that you not have, plus a little. Onus is the mental relief that you don't have to worry about doing anything wrong. Usually, those are experts. They know what they're doing, and with that you actually are, you know, in safe hands. So let's have a quick thought then again, and summarize what I kind of talked about just now. So should you DIY it? In my opinion, you should DIY it. If you're spending, let's say, let's put 5k as a good mark a month, or, let's say less than 10k you should probably start with DIY ing, at least. It does make sense to still have a freelance on agency, but you must have a good understanding of how the channel works and its basics, because, of course, you need to delegate right, and sometimes the fee structure is still all right. When you spend a 10k a month, you can still spend 1k on an agency or freelancer who sort of dedicates a certain amount of time to to your project, that's absolutely fine, right? You should ask yourself, Do I have the money for that? Like, do I have money to test for one to two months if you are one man band, if you're relying on the money, if the margins are tight, probably you should try and learn it yourself. Then can I also, do I actually have the marketing skills to understand what success look like? If you can't answer that, or have no idea of how to sort of even arrive at that conclusion, then probably you should outsource or not, not DIY it. You should also ask yourself, Do I understand conversion track and attribution? To understand funnels? If you answered no to that as well, then very likely you will need help. So to sum it up, if you spend an under 10k so am I spending under 10k Yes, then you should be trying to learn it yourself. Is my margin or sort of my current business structure tight and I can't afford learning testing and and mistake fixes? Yes, I should probably learn it by myself. Do I? Do I know what success looks looks like. And do I know how to arrive at that? You know, like, how to calculate the proper mer, CPA, etc. If the answer to that is no, then you then you should probably not DIY it. So rather, let's put it the other way. Okay, that's right. And then the last one, do I understand, conversion, tracking, attribution of funnel structure? If you answer that with no as well, then you probably should seek help. But there's not always. That's not always the only solution right to just get a freelancer and outsource it or an agency. There are some hybrids, right, and there's some very good ones on LinkedIn. So you can always message me and and I can connect them with you. So there's certain freelancers who do audits, right, audits only. So you can just message them and they can, for instance, review monthly what's going on in your in your ad account for a certain fee, for one time fee, and after a while, you can just keep going and fix what they and so they help you set this up and then review it once a month or once every other month, in order to keep you on track. There's also agencies like ours, which do training like we have. We have the option of one to one coaching, where we teach you or your team member to run it, and we do it with you, so it's done with you. There are certain freelancers who do like one time bills. I wouldn't really recommend that, because that's kind of almost the worst thing the build is the most labor intensive part, but how to understand and manage and interpret the data is a skill that you can only learn with time, and to need mentorship with that. And of course, just consult an ongoing consultant, right? So to not done with you approach, but rather you got the setup, and you just get ongoing feedback, maybe in weekly sessions. So that's kind of the sort of hybrid approach that I would recommend to you if you still want to learn, but accelerate your learnings. And that's pretty it. So that's that's my verdict. So to sum it all up. I think if you're in the beginning of your journey and don't have a product market fit, and if you're spending quite little, then you probably should learn how to do the channel yourself, right? Because there's no shame in trial and error. There's lots of free resources. You can always drop me a message as well to ask. Just simple questions. I'm always happy to help. But if you're starting to get into serious territory, you've got a good product market fit, like with meta, you already scaled 100k a month, and have no idea how Google Ads work, so you don't have the time or your want to invest some serious budgets and afraid to make a mistake, to understand how the conversion tracking works, etc. Then it's probably time to look for an expert. And there you can always choose a freelance or an agency. I've got also a podcast episode about whether you should be choosing a freelance or an agency. Go and listen to that one. And yeah, that was it. Thank you very much for listening. Before you go, please go to the website again. If you need help with this q4 head to the section where you can download the q4 checklist. It's completely free, just a free resource that helps you be on the right track for this q4 and if you need any other help, of course, you can always reach out to Jeremy and Google ads. Or you on LinkedIn, you can find they're very easy, or you can simply drop me an email at Jeremy, at young and digital dot marketing. This has been Jeremy young, your personal Google Ads expert, and I wish you a happy and productive week ahead.