Who should run your Google Ads?
There are four ways to do it. Let Google's automation run the account, hire someone in-house, hire an agency, or hire one independent consultant. I do the fourth one for a living, so read this knowing that. I have also sat on the other side of all four, and each of them is the right answer for somebody.
The question underneath
Whoever you pick, the account will do the same two things every week. It will spend your budget on whatever searches Google matches to your keywords, and its bidding will learn from whatever conversions it is told to count. Those two things decide the result. The strategy deck does not.
So the real question is not "agency or consultant". It is: who is going to be inside this account every week, reading what people searched for and checking what Google counted as a lead, and does that person have the experience to know what they are looking at? Each of the four options answers that differently.
Let Google run it
This is the default. Google Ads will build the campaign for you, pick the keywords, write the ads, set the bids and apply its own recommendations automatically if you let it. A Google rep may call to help. None of this costs anything beyond the media.
It is the right choice when the budget is small enough that any fee would be most of it, and when nobody in the business has time to learn the product. A local business spending a few hundred dollars a month is usually better off here than paying someone.
What goes wrong is not that the automation is bad. It is that the automation does exactly what it is told, and nobody experienced is checking what it was told. In the piece before this one I described an industrial equipment maker whose account counted every tap on the ad's phone button as a conversion worth $10,000. The bidding did what any bidding would do with that instruction and paid up to $146 for a single tap. Of the 109 calls that followed over nine months, 59 lasted under a minute. The report said the account was converting. Nobody was in it to say otherwise.
One caveat, and it is a big one. Letting Google run the account is not the same as letting Google set it up. The campaign structure and the conversion tracking are the foundation everything else sits on, and getting them wrong is the surest way I know to waste a budget. I have watched a lot of business owners follow the setup prompts themselves and spend a year counting the wrong thing as a lead. If you are going to run on automation, pay someone experienced to set it up once: the campaign structure and the conversion tracking, checked against what you actually want to count. Then let Google take it from there.
Google's AI is the same for everyone. Your competitor has the same bidding and the same recommendations panel. When you let it run alone, you are competing with the same tool and no advantage.
Hire in-house
One person on your payroll who owns paid search. Nobody else will ever know your business, your margins and your sales team as well as they can. They sit in the meeting where the offer changes. They hear which leads turned into customers without anyone sending a spreadsheet.
This is the right choice once the account is large enough to keep a skilled person busy, and when the business can hire and manage a specialist it cannot evaluate itself. If you are spending enough that one full-time salary is a small fraction of the media, build the team.
Where it breaks is below that line. A company spending $10,000 or $20,000 a month does not have a full-time job's worth of Google Ads work, so the role gets attached to a marketing generalist who also runs email, the website and the trade show. Google Ads becomes the thing they do on Friday afternoon. The second failure is depth: one person, however good, sees one account. The judgment that comes from having seen hundreds is not available to them. The third is that people leave, and the account's history leaves with them.
Hire an agency
A firm with a team. You get coverage, so if one person is out, another logs in, and you get more than one channel under one roof. You also get process: reporting templates and someone whose job is to manage the relationship.
Agencies are the right choice when you need many channels run by one vendor and you want a contract with an organization rather than a person. Large brands often need exactly that, and I worked alongside good agencies on big accounts for years.
What goes wrong is the model, not the people. An agency's economics work when a senior person sells the account and a junior person runs it, because a senior person's time is the most expensive thing the agency has. So the person in your pitch meeting and the person in your account are usually not the same person, and the one in the account is usually the one with the least experience, learning on your budget.
The second problem is attention. An account manager with a dozen clients is in each account about one working day a month, spread thin. Search terms get read "at launch" and negatives get added when someone complains. The report arrives on time and says the campaign is performing, because the report was designed to be reassuring.
If you have an agency and a nagging feeling, ask one question: who logged into my account last week, and what did they change? The answer tells you everything.
Hire one independent consultant
One experienced person, self-employed, who does the work themselves. The person on the first call is the person in the account for as long as you are a client. There is no account manager in the middle and nobody learning on your budget.
This is the right choice when Google Ads is a real part of how you get customers, you want senior judgment on it every week, and you do not have enough spend to justify a full-time senior hire. It is also the right choice when you already have a marketing team and want one specialist bolted onto it rather than a vendor around it.
It has real limits and you should hear them from me. One person has one person's capacity, so a good consultant keeps a short client list and says no, which means the one you want may not have room. There is no bench: if I am sick for a week, your account gets the automation I set up and nothing else. And a consultant does one thing. If you want email, social, a website and ads from one invoice, this is not it.
The trade is deliberate. You give up coverage and breadth, and in return the most experienced person you can find is the one actually reading your search terms.
Side by side
| Question | Let Google run it | In-house | Agency | Consultant |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Who is in the account every week? | Nobody | Your hire, if it is their whole job | Usually the most junior person on the team | The person you hired |
| Who knows which leads became customers? | Nobody tells Google | They hear it in the hallway | Only if you send a spreadsheet | Only if you tell them, and a good one asks every month |
| What happens when spend doubles? | Same automation, more of the same mix | Same person, more pressure | Same fee structure, often a bigger team | Same person, same attention |
| What happens when the person leaves? | No person to leave | Account history leaves with them | Someone new is assigned | You hire again, with the account intact |
| How do you check they did the work? | You cannot | Ask them | Ask for the change history, not the report | Ask for the change history, not the report |
How I would decide
Two things settle it: how much you spend, and whether anyone in the business already owns marketing.
- Under a few thousand dollars a month. Have someone experienced set it up once, then let Google run it, keep the settings simple, and read the search terms yourself once a month. Any fee is going to be a large share of the budget.
- From about $5,000 a month to the point where a full-time senior salary is small next to the media. This is the range where one experienced person makes the biggest difference and where an agency's junior-seat model costs you the most. Hire a consultant, or an agency if you truly need five channels from one vendor.
- Above that. Build the team in-house, and bring in outside judgment when you need it.
- At any budget, if you have a marketing leader who owns the number. They should pick the person, not the firm. Ask to meet whoever will be in the account and make that person's name part of the agreement.
Four questions to ask whoever you pick
These work on an agency, a consultant or a candidate for the in-house role. They are the same questions I would want a client to ask me.
- Who will be in my account each week, by name, and how many other accounts do they have? If the answer is a team rather than a person, you have your answer.
- What did Google count as a conversion in the last account you ran, and how did you know those were real? Anyone who has graded leads will have a story. Anyone who has not will talk about the dashboard.
- How often do you read search terms and add negatives? Weekly is the answer. Listen for how they say it.
- Can I see the change history from a current account? The change history is the one report nobody can dress up. It shows who logged in and what they touched.
Where I stand, and where the numbers came from
I spent 13 years at Google working with advertisers and their agencies, and I have run accounts myself since. I started Lighthouse because the accounts that worked were the ones an experienced person was actually in, every week, and that was rarely the agency's most junior hire or Google's automation left alone. So I built the thing I kept wishing existed. That is my bias, stated.
This piece is an argument rather than a count, so it has fewer numbers than the last one. The equipment maker's figures are the same ones published in the junk-leads piece, from the account's own Google Ads call reporting, January to September 2026. Everything else is what I have seen, and you should weigh it accordingly.
Find out what your Google Ads budget is really buying.
A free call, and you'll talk to me.