Every small business running Google Ads eventually asks the same question: should I keep doing this myself, or pay someone who does it for a living? Ask three owners and you'll get three answers, because the right one depends on your numbers.
This bonus chapter is written for the owner making that call in their own business. It covers what a fee has to earn back, what doing it yourself really costs, the point where outside help starts to pay, and the rules that protect you whichever way you go.
A Management Fee Comes Out of the Same Pocket as the Clicks. On $500 a Month, a $695 Fee Rarely Pays for Itself.
A management fee and an ad budget come out of the same marketing money. So the first question isn't whether a specialist is good. It's whether the fee can come back.
David Smania, BrandRocket's founder, said it plainly to a small business owner in a 2021 account review: "it probably doesn't make sense to spend 6 95 with somebody if you're only spending 500 on the ads." At that size, the fee is bigger than the budget it's managing.
What do specialists charge? Independent data is thin. Most of what's published comes from agencies and software vendors themselves, so treat it as a rough guide. In one survey of 350 advertisers run by an agency, WebFX, and reported by ppc.io, the most common monthly fee band for both agencies and freelancers was $1,001 to $3,000. Agencies that publish small-account prices quote roughly $400 to $1,250 a month, often around $500 to $750.
Here's the math that decides whether a fee pays. Take the fee and divide it by your profit on one new customer: what that customer is worth to you (Chapter 3 worked out customer value), minus what it costs you to serve them. The answer is how many extra customers a month the help has to bring in, beyond what you'd get on your own, just to break even.
- A $750 fee for a business that makes $300 profit per new customer needs 2.5 extra customers a month.
- The same fee for a business that makes $150 per customer needs 5.
- For a business making $600 per customer, it needs about 1.3.
Run the same math on the other side. Doing it yourself costs hours, and an hour has a value too. If a week of setup and a few hours a month would otherwise go to paying work, count that. An owner who bills $100 an hour and spends six hours a month on the account is spending $600 of time, which is close to the price of some management fees. An owner whose evenings are free is spending much less.
Those are extra customers, not total ones. If your account already brings in eight customers a month by itself, a specialist has to get it to ten or eleven to pay for a $750 fee at $300 per customer. That's possible, often. It isn't automatic.
Running Google Ads Yourself Trades the Fee for Your Time, and Building the Keyword List Takes the Longest.
Doing it yourself isn't free. It costs hours instead of dollars. But it's realistic for most of what this guide covers.
David is clear that an owner can build a sound account on their own if they're willing to put the time in. In one of his guide videos, David puts the keyword research alone at a week or two for an owner doing it from scratch. The slowest part, in his words, is the keywords: they're "by far" the hardest part when you start from scratch. Chapter 5 walked through that work.
Chapters 1 through 9 are all within an owner's reach: tracking, a budget built from your numbers, landing pages, keyword research, exact match, bids set by hand, ad copy from your reviews and the launch settings. None of it needs special software.
Even if you never run the account yourself, David believes you should understand it the way you understand your car. "I think that you should know just as a car owner," he told one owner, "you should kind of know like something about your car." When performance drops, he checks things in a set order, and it's a good order for an owner too:
- Conversion tracking. "If your ads stop working, the first thing I would check is conversion tracking." A broken form or a lost call setting looks exactly like ads that stopped working.
- Competition. Open the auction insights report from Chapter 7 and see whether someone new is outbidding you.
- Budget. Clicks can get pricier until, in David's words, "you exhaust your budget by 10 a.m.," and the ads go dark for the rest of the day.
- The ads themselves. If the ad copy changed and "it's no longer resonating," clicks can quietly fall off.
A Specialist Starts Earning the Fee When Your Account Outgrows a Short Keyword List and Bids Set by Hand.
The early steps in this guide are deliberately simple: a short list of exact keywords, bids you set yourself, one or two campaigns. A capable owner can run that.
The later steps are where experience pays for itself. Our view, from running accounts at every stage:
- Importing what happens after the lead. Sending booked jobs or signed clients back to Google so it bids on real customers, not just form fills, is something Chapter 1 shows you how to start, and it gets easy to get wrong as the volume grows.
- Broad match on a target. Chapter 7's Exploration campaign needs daily search-term reading and steady judgment about what to add and what to block.
- Performance Max, YouTube and AI Max tests. Chapters 10, 11 and 13 each set up a fenced-off test with a budget, a target and an exit date, and someone reading the results without wishful thinking.
There's also a quieter advantage that's hard to get on your own: comparison. In our experience, someone who manages many accounts in your kind of business knows what a normal cost per lead looks like, which searches tend to waste money and which settings Google changed last month. An owner running one account sees only their own numbers, so it's harder to tell whether a bad month is the market or the account.
By the time an account is doing those things, its budget is usually large enough that a fee is a small share of it, and a few points of improvement cover the cost. That's the stage where hiring tends to make sense.
Whoever Runs Your Ads, the Google Ads Account Should Be in Your Name and the Bill on Your Card.
If you hire anyone, one rule comes before all the others. David says it directly in one of his guide videos: "You should have your own ad account." His reason is practical. If you part ways with whoever built it and they own the account, they keep everything they made, and you start over. If the account belongs to whoever you hired, so does its history.
So create the account yourself, put the billing on your own card, and give the person you hire access to it. If they leave, you remove their access and keep everything.
The same caution applies to the free help Google offers. Google's own reps and the recommendations inside the account are part of how Google sells advertising. David reminds owners that Google, "being a publicly traded company," has to "hit their quarterly numbers," and changes how things work along the way. Listen, but decide with your own numbers.
Before you hire anyone, ask them these questions:
- Will the account be in my name, with billing on my card?
- Who exactly will do the work, and can I talk to that person?
- What will count as a conversion, and how will I know it's a real lead?
- What did you change in a client's account last month, and why?
- How will we decide in three months whether this is working?
A One-Time Audit of Your Own Account Teaches You to Run It, Without a Monthly Fee.
There's a middle path between doing everything yourself and paying every month. When an owner who had run their own account for years asked David how he could help, his suggestion was something smaller than a monthly retainer: "I would start with just an audit." A specialist reviews your own account once, records what they find, and tells you what to fix. In David's words, "it's actually an educational experience because you're gonna learn more," and "then you have that video to reference forever."
For a small business, that's often the best value of all.
It also tells you something no sales call can: what this person actually notices in an account, and whether they explain it in a way you understand. If the audit is useful, you'll know whether to hire them for more. If it isn't, you've spent once instead of signing up for months. You keep the account, you keep the budget, and you learn what an experienced eye would change. Then you decide whether to make those changes yourself or hand them off, with a clear list of what needs doing either way.
Next: Miss Google's Advertiser Verification Deadline and Your Ads Stop.
Whoever runs the account, one deadline belongs to you. Chapter 16 covers Google's advertiser verification, billing and the account suspensions that catch new small advertisers by surprise.
Every chapter so far is on the guide's home page.
When an owner asks us about Google Ads management, the first thing we check is whether the budget can carry the fee, and sometimes the honest answer is an audit instead. Doing it yourself? Work out your break-even tonight: your monthly fee quote divided by your profit per customer. That's the number of extra customers the help has to find.
