Google Ads management: agency or in-house?
The question usually arrives after a bad experience with one or the other: an agency that reported clicks and never leads, or an in-house hire who left after eight months with the account in their head. Here is the honest comparison, including the costs people forget, and the spend level where the answer changes.
What in-house actually costs
A competent Google Ads specialist in an Australian capital city typically earns somewhere between $85,000 and $130,000 plus super, depending on experience; check current listings for your city before you budget. Add tools, training, recruitment and the four to six months it takes to hire and settle someone. Then add the risk that most people forget: one person is a single point of failure. When they leave, the account knowledge leaves with them, and the six weeks without management can cost more than a year of fees.
In-house works when the spend is large enough that a full-time person is busy every day, roughly $50,000 a month and above, and when the business can also give them a landing-page developer, a designer and an analyst, because Google Ads is never just Google Ads.
What an agency actually costs
A management fee, typically a fixed monthly amount or a percentage of spend. The number to check is what sits behind it: who does the work, how many accounts they carry, and whether the fee includes landing pages, tracking and creative or only bidding. Our Google Ads management fee is a named line, spend passes through at cost, and it is published on the pricing page.
The cost people forget with agencies is the opposite one: over-reliance. If the agency owns the account, the tracking and the landing pages, leaving is painful. Insist on owning the Google Ads account, the analytics property and the tag manager container from day one.
Where each one wins
Agency wins on
- Spend under about $50,000 a month, where a full-time hire is not busy.
- Breadth: the same team runs search, Shopping, YouTube, Meta and the tracking underneath, which no single hire covers.
- Pattern exposure: an agency specialist sees what works across thirty accounts. An in-house one sees one.
- Continuity: if a person leaves the agency, the account does not leave with them.
In-house wins on
- Spend well above $50,000 a month with daily change volume.
- Businesses where the ad account is the business, such as lead-gen marketplaces and large ecommerce.
- Proximity to product, pricing and stock decisions that change hourly.
The hybrid most businesses end up with
A senior in-house owner of marketing, who is not a Google Ads specialist, working with an agency that runs the account and reports to them monthly against leads and revenue rather than clicks. The in-house person owns strategy, budget and the relationship with sales; the agency owns execution, tracking and the platform expertise. This is the model most of our Growth and Scale retainers operate in.
Questions to ask either option
- Show me cost per booked lead, not cost per click, for the last three months.
- What conversion actions is the account bidding on, and are they real outcomes or form loads?
- Who owns the Google Ads account, the analytics and the tag container?
- What happens in the first thirty days if you take over: audit, or rebuild?
- How do you handle a month where the numbers are bad?
The last one matters most. The right answer, from an agency or an employee, is a specific diagnosis and a plan, not a new dashboard.
Want to know what your current account is actually buying? The free Google Ads audit shows where the spend goes and what we would change.
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