Running Ads Yourself or Paying Somebody

The arithmetic first

Agency management is typically charged as a percentage of spend or a monthly fee, and frequently a minimum applies.

Which produces a straightforward threshold. At low spend the fee is a large proportion of the total, and the improvement management can deliver rarely exceeds it. At higher spend the same fee is a small proportion and modest improvements cover it easily.

The number where that flips differs by market and by how competitive the auction is, and the calculation itself is the same everywhere: what would the fee be, and could better management plausibly recover more than that.

A business spending a small monthly amount is generally better served managing it or not advertising at all.

What the fee is actually buying

Worth being specific, since the value is not obvious from outside.

• Structure, meaning campaigns organised so that relevance is high and waste is low.
• Negative keywords, which is where most self-managed accounts leak money.
• Ongoing attention, since accounts drift and platforms change settings.
• Judgement about the platform's recommendations, many of which increase spend rather than results.
• Conversion tracking that works, which is where most self-managed accounts are broken.
• Landing page advice, since the page frequently matters more than the campaign.

The last two are where the largest gains usually sit, and both are outside the advertising account itself.

When self-managing works

Genuinely, and for more businesses than agencies suggest.

A simple campaign, a small number of services, one geographic area, and an owner willing to spend an hour a month reading the search terms report can run a perfectly reasonable account.

What that requires: correctly configured conversion tracking, a tight keyword set, an active negative keyword list, and the discipline to ignore most platform prompts.

The failure mode is not incompetence. It is neglect. An account set up carefully and then not looked at for six months drifts, accumulates irrelevant matches, and quietly wastes money.

When it does not

Complexity, competition, and value at stake are the three factors.

Multiple services with different economics, several regions, a store with many products, or a market where the cost per click is high enough that mistakes are expensive.

Also worth honest assessment: whether you will actually do it. An account nobody manages performs worse than one managed adequately by somebody paid to.

The problem underneath both routes

Whether you can tell whether it is working.

A business that cannot evaluate its own advertising cannot manage it well and cannot supervise an agency either. Both routes fail the same way.

What evaluation requires: knowing what an enquiry is worth, recording what enquiries became, and comparing cost per booked job rather than cost per click.

Without that, a self-managed account is guessing and an agency relationship is trust, and neither is a position to be in.

What a good arrangement looks like

Since this is the practical question for a business that decides to pay somebody.

You own the account. Set up under your own billing, with the agency granted access. An account owned by an agency is one you cannot take with you, and that arrangement has cost businesses their entire advertising history.

The fee is transparent and separate from the spend, so you can see what goes to the platform and what goes to management.

Reporting is about outcomes, meaning enquiries and cost per enquiry, rather than impressions and clicks.

No long lock-in at the start, since the first months are when you find out whether it works.

Somebody explains the reasoning, rather than sending a dashboard.

Questions worth asking

1. Will the account be in my name?
2. What is the fee, separately from the spend?
3. How will we measure success?
4. What happens to the account if we stop working together?
5. Who actually works on it, and how often.
6. What would you change on the landing pages?

The first and fourth are the ones that matter most and are asked least. The sixth is diagnostic: somebody who only wants to talk about the account, and not about where the traffic lands, is managing half the problem.

The middle option

Under-used and frequently the right answer for a small business.

Paying somebody to set it up properly, configure tracking, build the structure, and write the initial campaigns, then managing it yourself with an occasional review.

That buys the part where expertise matters most, which is the setup, without an ongoing fee on a modest spend. It also leaves you with an account you understand.

Either way, the account is only half of it, since the page the click lands on decides whether the spend produces anything, which is covered in writing an advertisement that gets clicked.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.