How to choose between in-house PPC, a freelancer, or an agency: the real cost of each, the failure modes, and the spend levels where each one wins.
The choice between in-house, freelance and agency PPC management comes down to three things: how much you spend on media, how many channels you run, and whether anyone in your business can tell good work from busy work. Below roughly £5,000 a month in media, a freelancer usually wins on economics. Between £5,000 and £50,000, an agency usually wins on breadth. Above that, the question becomes hybrid rather than either.
Those thresholds are rough and the reasoning behind them matters more than the numbers, so here is the full version, including where each model quietly fails.
What each model actually costs
In-house
A capable paid search manager in the UK is a salary plus employment costs plus tooling plus management time. The number people quote is the salary. The number they pay is considerably higher, and it buys one person's skill set.
The real cost is not financial though. It is single-point risk and narrow exposure. Your in-house manager sees one account, yours, and learns at the rate that account generates lessons. An agency specialist sees a dozen and imports patterns. That gap widens over time, which is why in-house teams that work usually pair a strong internal owner with external specialists rather than trying to cover everything alone.
Freelancer
The most efficient option at small scale by a distance. You buy senior attention without agency overhead, and good freelancers are genuinely good, often ex-agency people who preferred the work to the management.
The failure modes are specific. Capacity, because a freelancer at their limit either turns you down or quietly under-serves you. Continuity, because holidays, illness and better-paying clients are real. Breadth, because a paid search freelancer is rarely also a feed specialist, an analytics engineer and a creative strategist. And accountability, because there is nobody to escalate to.
Agency
You pay overhead for a reason: bench depth, multiple specialisms, cover when someone is away, and someone to hold to account. The market for that in the UK sits between roughly £1,500 and £6,000 a month for management, or 10 to 20 per cent of media spend, which we cover properly in what a PPC agency costs in the UK.
The failure mode of the agency model is seniority drift. You are sold the expert and handed the coordinator. It is common enough that the single most useful question in any agency conversation is who does the work day to day, and what else are they on.
The question that actually decides it
Not cost. Whether anyone in your business can tell whether the work is good.
Paid search is unusually easy to look busy in. Reports can show activity, impressions, clicks and platform conversions while the commercial number does nothing. If nobody internally can read past that, all three models fail, and they fail in the same way.
So before choosing, decide who owns this internally. Not who receives the report. Who can look at an account and ask an uncomfortable question. If that person exists, a freelancer works well and an agency works better. If they do not, you need a partner who will volunteer the uncomfortable questions themselves, and you should test for that in the selection process rather than hope for it afterwards.
Rough thresholds, and what breaks them
Under £5,000 a month in media, agency fees are a large proportion of total spend. A good freelancer, or a light advisory arrangement with someone senior, is usually the better economics. Growing the media budget often returns more than professionalising its management at that level.
Between £5,000 and £50,000, the work outgrows one person. You are usually running search plus shopping plus some paid social, the measurement needs maintaining, and the creative needs refreshing. This is where agencies earn their overhead.
Above £50,000, most businesses end up hybrid: an internal owner who sets strategy and holds the budget, with external specialists for channel execution, measurement and creative. The internal person is the difference between an agency that performs and one that drifts.
What breaks these thresholds: complexity, international markets, a large catalogue, and how fast you are changing. A £4,000 monthly budget across three markets and 12,000 products is a harder job than £20,000 in one market on twenty landing pages.
What good looks like in each model
In-house works when the person has a route to external expertise, a tooling budget, and a manager who understands the channel well enough to protect them from bad targets.
Freelance works when the scope is written down, the relationship is direct with the person doing the work, and you have accepted the continuity risk consciously rather than discovered it in August.
Agency works when you know the names of the people on your account, the reporting connects to revenue rather than platform conversions, and the scope is specific enough that both sides can tell when something falls outside it.
Across all three, the same two things predict success: you own your accounts and data outright, and performance is judged on commercial outcomes. Our view on the second is set out in marketing analytics and commercial impact.
Questions we get asked
Is it cheaper to bring PPC in-house?
At high spend, often yes on paper. The saving is real and usually smaller than expected once you include tooling, recruitment, management time and the cost of the learning curve. At low and mid spend it is rarely cheaper, because you are buying a full salary for a part-time job.
What should I look for in a PPC freelancer?
Current hands-on experience rather than past agency titles, a clear answer on capacity, references from clients who have been with them more than a year, and a willingness to tell you when something is outside their skill set. Ask what they would not take on.
Can I use an agency and an in-house person together?
That is the arrangement that works best above a certain scale, and it needs the split written down. The usual division is that the internal owner sets commercial priorities, holds the budget and challenges the plan, while the agency runs execution, measurement and specialist work. Ambiguity between the two is what makes hybrids fail.
How do I hand over from an agency without losing performance?
Own the accounts from the start, insist on documentation of campaign structure and naming conventions, get the measurement configuration written down, and overlap by a month if you can. Most transition damage comes from undocumented conventions rather than from the change itself.
Does AI change this calculation?
It shifts it towards fewer, more senior people in every model. Automated bidding, asset generation and reporting have removed a large share of the executional hours that used to justify a junior. What has not been automated is judgement about what the account should be trying to do, which is the part worth paying for. That argument, at greater length, is in why AI will expose marketing teams.
What if my spend is seasonal?
Seasonality argues for a model with elastic capacity, which usually means an agency or a retained freelancer with an agreed peak arrangement. Hiring for peak and carrying the cost through the trough is the expensive answer.
How we would frame the decision
Write down what you spend on media, how many channels you genuinely need, and who internally will own the relationship. Those three answers narrow it to one sensible option most of the time, and the exercise takes an afternoon.
Then price the shortlist on who does the work rather than on the monthly figure, because that is the variable that decides the outcome in every model.
Our search advertising service and paid media practice set out how we work, including the hybrid arrangements. If you want a straight view on whether you should be using an agency at all at your spend level, get in touch. We have told people not to, and expect to again.