Who is each option actually for?
The honest version, before the comparison table:
- Do it yourself — small catalogue, modest spend, and you will genuinely do the weekly pass. This is more often the right answer than anyone selling you services will admit.
- Freelancer — you need someone else's hands and judgement, but not an organisation. Best value per hour, worst resilience.
- In-house — enough work to fill a role, and the account is core enough to your business that you want the knowledge to stay inside it.
- Agency — you want a process rather than a person, cover when someone is away, and a second opinion on strategy. You pay a premium for that.
What does each one really cost?
Compare fully loaded costs, not headline numbers, or the comparison is meaningless.
- In-house is not a salary. It is salary plus employer tax, tooling licences, recruitment, management attention, and a ramp period of months before they know your catalogue.
- Freelancer is close to a headline rate, but check what happens to it when spend or catalogue grows.
- Agency is a retainer or a percentage — and those two are not comparable until you convert both to a monthly figure at your real spend. Our guide to agency pricing covers how.
Whatever you choose, ad spend itself stays on your own card. Nobody should be routing your budget through their account.
What actually changes with each choice?
Cost is the easy axis. These matter more in month six:
- Resilience. One person is one point of failure. Ask any candidate what happens the week they are unavailable.
- Breadth. PPC, listings, catalogue hygiene and creative are different skills. One person rarely has all four.
- Accountability. With a person you get effort. With a process you get a change log, so when performance moves in week six you can tell which change did it.
- Knowledge retention. In-house keeps knowledge inside the business. Everything else means it walks out at the end of the engagement — unless you insist on documentation.
How do you tell a good option from a bad one, whichever you pick?
The same four questions work for all three:
- What number are you optimising? If the answer is ACOS rather than profit, they are optimising something that does not pay you.
- Do you know my break-even ACOS? If they cannot derive it from your margins, they are guessing. You can work it out yourself with our calculator.
- Show me a change log. Dates and reasons, client details removed. No log means no attribution, ever.
- What is explicitly out of scope? A confident answer here is a strong signal. Vagueness is where the disputes come from.
What this comparison cannot tell you
It cannot tell you which is right for your account, because the deciding variables are yours: how much time you will genuinely spend each week, how much of your revenue depends on this channel, and whether your margins can carry a fee at all.
If your margins cannot carry the fee, the answer is none of the above — fix the margin first. An agency cannot rescue a product whose economics do not work, and any agency that says otherwise is selling you something.
Where to go next
Questions people actually ask
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