It depends on three things: how much time you honestly have, how complicated your campaigns need to be, and how much you spend each month. A simple campaign on a small budget can be run yourself. Once the spend or the complexity grows, paying for management usually costs less than the mistakes.
Google will happily let you do it yourself. The account is free, the setup wizard is friendly, and automated bidding will spend your money from day one. The question is not whether you can. It is whether the hours and the learning curve are a better use of you than the management fee.
Google Ads looks simple because the defaults are simple. Behind them sits a working system that needs regular attention: checking which search terms triggered your ads, excluding the irrelevant ones as negative keywords, adjusting bids and budgets, writing and testing ad copy, and watching whether any of it produced an enquiry rather than just a click.
Google Ads coach Jyll Saskin Gales puts the DIY workload into three parts: the initial training to get competent, the ongoing management, and keeping up with constant changes to the platform. 1 All three are real. Budget at least a couple of focused hours a week, every week, plus the upfront learning. If that time simply does not exist in your week, the honest answer is that the account will drift, and drifting accounts waste money quietly.
There is also a trap in the friendly setup. Google’s default options, broad keyword matching, showing ads on partner sites and the display network, automated recommendations that nudge budgets upward, are designed to spend your budget, not to protect it. None of them is wrong in principle. All of them cost a beginner money before they understand why.
When the campaign is simple and the stakes are small. A single search campaign for one service in one area, on a budget you could afford to lose while learning, is a reasonable DIY project. Google’s own Smart mode exists for exactly this situation: it is built for small businesses and automates keyword targeting and bidding decisions. 2
DIY also makes sense as education. Running a small campaign teaches you what search terms your customers actually use, what a click costs in your trade, and what a sensible agency proposal should contain. Even if you later hand it over, you will be a much better buyer.
The honest middle option is paying for setup and occasional reviews while running the basics yourself. A well-built account, with conversion tracking that actually counts enquiries, checked professionally a few times a year, beats both a neglected DIY account and a management fee you cannot yet justify.
The maths is the first test. Gales’ rule of thumb is that professional management starts at around $1,000 a month in the US, Canada, UK and Australia, and only earns its keep once monthly ad spend is roughly three times that. 1 Below that ratio, the fee eats too much of the budget. Above it, better performance should more than cover the cost. UK agencies and freelancers vary, and some charge far less for a small local account (to be open about it, our own management at Bamsh starts at £345 a month plus VAT), but the principle holds: compare the fee against what better decisions are likely to save or earn, not against zero.
Complexity is the second test. Lead generation with offline conversion tracking, multiple services and areas, shopping or video campaigns, and anything where a wrong setting costs hundreds a week, all justify expert attention. The more there is to get wrong, the more management is insurance.
The third test is consequences. If your ads generate a serious share of your enquiries, the account is business infrastructure. Having someone whose job is to watch it, catch problems early and improve it steadily is worth a fee in the same way an accountant is.
Ask what the fee includes each month: how often the account is touched, what reporting you get, and who owns the account. It must be your account, in your name, with your card, and full access for you. An agency that runs ads from its own account and reports its own numbers can leave you with nothing when you leave.
Ask how they will measure enquiries, not clicks, and how they think about the landing page: the page your ad sends people to has to turn the click into an enquiry, and a good manager will say so. If the conversation is about impressions and click-through rates rather than phone calls and form fills, the incentives point the wrong way. Our guide to ads getting clicks but no enquiries shows what to look for when the numbers do not add up.
And be wary of guarantees. Nobody honest can promise a cost per enquiry or a cost per lead before the account has run in your market. What they can promise is attention, transparency and a clear explanation of what the money did. If you are weighing ads against organic visibility first, our guide to choosing between SEO and Google Ads is the right starting point.
Yes, provided the campaign is simple and the budget is one you can afford to learn with. Use Smart mode or a single search campaign for one service in one area, set a firm daily budget, turn on conversion tracking, and review the search terms report weekly. The expensive DIY mistakes come from accepting every default and never checking what the money bought.
A common benchmark is management from around $1,000 a month, making sense once ad spend is roughly three times the fee, according to Google Ads coach Jyll Saskin Gales. UK prices vary widely, and small local accounts can cost less. Judge any fee against the value of better decisions and the hours you get back, and ask exactly what it includes.
On a healthy account: review search terms and add negatives, adjust bids and budgets, test ad copy, check tracking is still counting real enquiries, watch for wasted spend, and report what the money produced. If none of that is happening, you are paying for autopilot you could have had free.
For a simple local campaign it can be a sensible start, since Google automates the bidding and targeting. Its limits are control and transparency: you see less of what triggered your ads and why. It is a reasonable way to learn, but check the search terms and the enquiries it produces before scaling the budget.
When you cannot give it two or more honest hours a week, when the monthly spend has grown large enough that mistakes cost more than a fee, when you need tracking or campaign types beyond your confidence, or when the account produces clicks you cannot explain. Any one of those is the handover point.
[1] Jyll Saskin Gales (Google Ads coach), “Should You Manage Your Google Ads In-House Or Hire An Agency?” (22 November 2024). https://learn.jyll.ca/blog/should-you-manage-your-google-ads-in-house-or-hire-an-agency
[2] Google Ads Help, “How Smart campaigns work” (undated, checked 19 October 2026). https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/7652860?hl=en
