Agency, freelancer or in-house: who should run your paid search?

By Lee Moran, Founder of Veritas Digital

If you are spending £10K or more a month on Google Ads, who runs your account matters as much as how much you spend. A lot of cost can be laid out with the wrong setup, so it is critical to get the right partner at the beginning (together with plenty of quotes from different providers).

I spent years at agencies, from large network agencies to smaller independents and consultancies, have run paid media in-house, and now run my own consultancy. So, this is my personal take on four potential options – an agency, a senior-led consultancy, a freelancer or an in-house team – I’ll break down the costs, the pro’s and con’s, and hopefully help you find the right fit.

What are the four options for running your paid search?

• Agency: A company with a team of paid media staff, usually running Google Ads for lots of clients at once, often alongside other channels like paid social.
• Senior-led consultancy: A small to medium sized firm where the senior person who pitches to you is the one doing the work, backed by a team or bank of contractors.
• Freelancer: One self-employed specialist working directly on your account, usually for a handful of clients.
• In-house: People you employ directly, who only work on your business.

Most articles on this topic only compare the agency, freelancer and In-house. The senior-led consultancy has grown a lot in the last few years and sits between an agency and a freelancer. That is where Veritas sits, so bear that in mind as you read, but I will be fair to all four.

How do the four options compare?

	Agency	Senior-led consultancy	Freelancer	In-house
Typical cost	£2,000 to £6,000+ a month on £10K to £100K of spend	Similar to agency, with more of the fee going on senior time	Usually the lowest, around £350 a day at the median	£100K+ a year per hire once all costs are added
Who does the work	Often a junior or mid-level manager, with seniors in the pitch	The senior person you meet in the pitch and works on the account/s	The person you hire	Your own staff
Clients per person	Often 15 to 20	5-10 max	Usually a handful	Just you
Depth on your account	Surface level	Fairly deep	Good, if they have capacity	Very deep
Cover when someone is away	Yes	Yes, through a small team or contractors	Often none	Only if you hire two or more
Range of experience	Wide, across many accounts	Wide, at a senior level	Depends on the person	Narrow, one business
Best fit	Multi-channel or multi-market accounts needing many specialists	£10K to £100K a month	Under £10K a month	£100K+ a month

Not all of these options are the right fit for every business –  the right answer mostly comes down to you spend your budgets, how complex your account is and how much time someone can give it each week.

What does each option cost?

• Agency: Most UK agencies charge a flat retainer or a percentage of spend. On £10K to £100K a month, you would usually expect to pay somewhere between £2,000 and £6,000 a month, going up with complexity and time needed to service the accounts. I have broken this down band by band in what you could expect to pay for Google Ads management in the UK.
• Senior-led consultancy: Usually a flat retainer in a similar range to an agency. The difference is more time is spent on senior resource leading the account and knowing your business, with less overheads and expensive senior management teams to pay out for.
• Freelancer: Usually the cheapest option – the median day rate for PPC work in the UK is around £350 per day, and many freelancers working on monthly retainers come in below agency fees for the same spend.
• In-house: an in-house PPC manager starts at around £50,000 a year, with the upper end at £60,000 to £70,000. Add employer national insurance, pension, tools, recruitment costs and holiday cover, and one hire, especially if senior, can cost up to £100K.

On price alone, the freelancer wins. But the price is only half the story, as what matters most is the work that’s done in your account and the risk you take on with the type of partner you choose to have.

Why do agencies struggle to go deep on each account?

This is the part most people do not see unless they’ve worked in or with agencies. Even in the age of agentic AI, it is still seen as normal in agencies for a PPC manager to look after 15 to 20 clients at once. AI tools have made some tasks faster, but they have not changed the maths much – there are still only so many hours in a week and PPC managers have to supervise and monitor accounts whilst also juggling the requests of all their clients.

When I was agency side, I saw what that volume does to good people. It is nearly impossible to remember the fine details of 15 or 20 different businesses – their profit margins, their best sellers, which service is short-staffed this or next month. So, the work stays at the surface level only, with deadlines slipping, documents forgotten to be sent, and the reporting, even if it’s comprehensive, becomes the main piece of work rather than the account management work itself.

To be fair to agencies, it usually isn’t about skill or effort levels where they fall short. There are some brilliant people working in agency – where problems arise, it due to the agency model, which is built for volume, not depth. At the right level of spend, an agency brings real strengths – lots of specialists, proprietary inhouse tech, cover when someone is off, and experience across lots of accounts. But as your account grows in volume and complexity, it ends up becoming too much of a drain on resource to manage and that’s where real problems can then arise.

What this looked like for one client

One client came to us after working with a major PPC agency – on first look, everything looked impressive. The planning was detailed and built on a grand scale, and the strategy documents were long. But when I opened up the Google Ads account, the work done inside was minimal, had been left on automation to run (including the use of scripts) and even after just a few hours of auditing, major errors were found that tech or AI didn’t find.

Cleaning those accounts up took some time and require real work on pulling apart the account and focusing on rebuilding the foundations. There is no quick fix for a titanic structure that nobody has really been looking after for a long time. But taking control and doing the work in the account itself, week in and week out, is what turned performance around. Cost per acquisition came down by around 40% and to be frank, the only reason this was the case was because time was set aside to go deep into the accounts.

The lesson I personally took from this was simple – a great plan is only worth something if someone does the work the actual work within Google Ads – it is also why I would always look at the account before the strategy deck, which is exactly what a PPC audit usually finds when you look under the surface.

What does a senior-led consultancy do differently?

The simplest way to put it is that you get the senior person from the agency pitch, but they stay on your account and do the work. Each person looks after fewer clients on purpose, so they can remember the details of your business and spend their time in Google Ads rather than on status or reporting updates only.

Compared to a freelancer, the differences are cover, contracts and insurance. A good consultancy has a small team or a bench of contractors behind it, so your account does not stop when someone is ill or on holiday, and there is a second pair of eyes on the work. They also have comprehensive contracts and insurance, like an agency, which protects your business and your data, whilst also migrating risk.

However, it is not the right fit for everyone. A consultancy is usually smaller than an agency, so if you need large volumes of specialists across 10+ services, then an agency will be a better fit. A good consultancy will also only take on so many clients as well, so there may also be a wait to join them.

I’m personally a solo founder myself, so I will be very honest about how this works at Veritas. We run with a bank of vetted contractors, contracted and insured, so there is cover behind the account rather than just me. If a client is too large and complex (£100K+ per month or 10+ markets) we may have to divert the client to a more suitable provider with large teams who can undertake the work in a more suitable fashion.

What does in-house do better, and where does it fall short?

I’ve also run paid media in-house, and it is a very different job indeed. You know the business inside out which is great, you have one set of targets, and no other clients are competing for your time which is also useful.

The drawbacks are that if it’s only one person, who has one only set of experiences, who manages everything, then everything falls onto one set of shoulders. I personally done this with 7 figure annual budgets, and no one to bounce ideas off who has deep PPC expertise. It makes it harder to spot errors as you have no one else to lean on, only one set of accounts to draw recent experience from and you’re scrambling to work out what’s happening when things go wrong. And if that person leaves, which I did, they take all their knowledge with them.

That is why I personally think in-house only really starts to make sense at around £100K a month or more, where you can justify two or three people being hired rather than just one. At that level, the best setup I see is often a hybrid model, where there’s an inhouse lead overseeing everything, a manager or two helping with execution and an agency or consultancy who can be leant on for external support or ideas with growing the account further.

That kind of setup though can become very expensive quickly, but it is the most effective – some brands or businesses only make that transition at the £200K-£300K spend per month mark, due to the level of cost and commitment required to build an in-house team.

Is a freelancer a safer bet than an agency?

A good freelancer is often excellent value. You get senior attention, you speak directly to the person doing the work, and there is no account manager in the middle. Plenty of freelancers are stronger than the agency teams that they replace.

The major risks are that there’s only one of them and no contractors or staff members to support them – contracts with them are usually basic and won’t cover all areas of account management that a contract should cover and insurances they provide are usually minimal or not taken out at all.

A senior led consultancy with cover, mature contracts and multiple insurances behind them is one way to mitigate that risk.

Which option fits your level of spend?

Here is my personal rule of thumb. It is only a starting point rather than a hard rule, and complexity can move you up or down a band.

• Under £5K a month: A good freelancer is usually the best bet. A full agency or consultancy fee can eat too much of the budget but do get plenty of quotes just to check.
• £5K to £10K a month: A freelancer or a senior-led consultancy, depending on how complex the account is.
• £10K to £100K a month: A senior-led consultancy, where the person you meet is the person doing the work. An agency can make more sense here if you need lots of channels and specialists under one roof working across multiple markets.
• £100K to £300K a month: A hybrid, with an in-house team plus outside support.
• Over £300K a month: A full in-house team, with outside support for specific skills or regular external auditing.

To be clear on my side, at the very small or very large spend, Veritas may not be quite the right fit, and I would rather tell you that up front than take on an account we cannot serve properly.

Questions to ask before you hire anyone

• Who will be in my account each week? Get names, not just job titles.
• How many other clients do they look after? If the answer is 15 or more, ask how much time your account will really get each week.
• How many hours a month will be spent inside the account? Not on calls and reports – in Google Ads itself doing the work.
• Who covers when they are away? There should be a named person, not a vague promise.
• Will I own the Google Ads account? You should have admin access and keep all your accounts if you leave.
• What is in the fee, and what is extra? Get the scope in writing before you sign.
• What would you change in the first 30 days? A good answer will be specific to your account, not just a generic plan (e.g. restructure).

If you are not sure how your current setup looks, an independent review of your account is often the quickest way to find out. You can see how we approach this on our Audits & Strategy page.

The bottom line

There are four potentially options which you could consider. Under £5K a month, a good freelancer is usually the best bet. Over £100K a month, in-house or a hybrid starts to make more sense. Between £10K and £100K, a senior-led consultancy gives you more senior time and cover, while an agency suits accounts that need lots of channels, specialists and a multi-market approach under one roof. Whichever you pick, what matters most is how much real time a senior person spends inside your account doing the work.

In my personal opinion, whoever you choose, judge them on the work done in the account, not on how good the deck looks.

Frequently asked questions

Is a PPC freelancer cheaper than an agency?

Usually, yes, a UK freelancer often charges around £350 a day, and their monthly fees tend to sit below agency retainers for the same spend. The trade-off is less cover, a smaller range of skills and more risk if they were to make a mistake or not spend your budgets well.

How many clients does an agency PPC manager usually handle?

It is still common nowadays, even with agentic AI, for an agency PPC manager to handle 15 to 20 clients at once. That makes it hard to go deep on any single account, even with AI, as PPC managers can be too stretched to remember key details, supervise accounts and AI and spot errors when they occur.

When should I bring Google Ads in-house?

In my personal view, at around £100K a month or more in spend, where you can justify two or three people rather than one. Above £300K a month, a full in-house team usually makes much more sense.

What is the difference between a PPC consultancy and an agency?

A consultancy is usually smaller and senior-led, so the person who pitches to you is the person doing the work. An agency usually has a bigger team, with more junior staff doing most of the day-to-day delivery.

Can I switch provider without losing my account history?

Yes, as long as you own your Google Ads account/s and have admin access. If the account sits inside your provider’s manager account with no admin rights for you, sort that out before you decide to make a move.

References

• Glassdoor, PPC Manager Salary, United Kingdom
• Indeed, Paid Search Manager Salary in United Kingdom
• GOV.UK, Rates and thresholds for employers 2026 to 2027
• IT Jobs Watch, Pay per click (PPC) contract rates, UK
• Google Ads Help, About access levels in your Google Ads account
• Google, Advertiser guide: Working with third parties