Once you’ve decided to get outside help with your Google Ads, the next question is who to hire. Most stores weigh two options: a freelancer or an agency.
The agency pitch usually looks great. A sharp deck, a case study video, or maybe you’ve been charmed by the founder with a smart podcast. Then you sign, and your account goes to someone two months into the job who emails you a report once a month.
If you spend $10–50K a month on Google Ads, that’s the risk with a big-name agency. A freelancer avoids it, but has drawbacks of its own. This page helps you choose between them, and shows you how to test anyone before you sign.
I’ve worked on every side of this. I’ve subcontracted for bigger agencies, worked as a Google Ads freelancer for years, and today Store Growers is a small team of Google Ads experts.
Should you hire a Google Ads freelancer or an agency?
Hire a freelancer if you want one expert on your account and Google Ads is the only channel you need help with. Hire an agency if you need several channels covered, or more hands than one person has. At $10–50K a month, a good freelancer usually beats a big agency, and the agency choice gets stronger as your spend and scope grow.
Four things decide it:
- Who does the work. With a freelancer, the person you hire runs your account. With an agency, the person who sells to you is rarely the one in your account each week. Ask who that will be, and how senior they are.
- How much you spend. Agencies often charge 15–20% of ad spend with a minimum of roughly $3,000–10,000 a month. Below about $50,000 a month in spend, that minimum takes a large share of your budget. Freelancers are usually cheaper, and many work on a fixed monthly fee.
- How many channels you need. If you want Google, Meta, email and the website run by one team, an agency can do that and a freelancer can’t. Check who runs Google Ads, though, because full-service agencies often leave it running on autopilot while they focus on Meta.
- How much key-person risk you can take. A freelancer is one person. If they get sick, go on holiday, take on too many clients or stop altogether, your account waits, often without anyone noticing. When you spend thousands of dollars a day, you can’t afford for that one person to drop out. An agency has people to cover.
If you spend less than about $2,000 a month, you may not need either yet. A management fee takes too big a share of the budget at that level, and the first layer of campaigns is simple enough to run yourself.
There’s also a middle option: a small team of Google Ads specialists. The expert still does the work, like with a freelancer, but someone else knows your account if they drop out. More on that below.
When is a Google Ads freelancer the right choice?
A good freelancer is the right choice when you want one expert who knows your account inside out. You talk to the person doing the work. There’s no account manager in between, no junior, and decisions happen fast. Plenty of freelancers work on a monthly retainer too.
The limit is width. One freelancer runs a handful of accounts. That’s fine for keeping an account healthy. It’s thin for knowing whether a new Google feature works for ecommerce stores, or only works in Google’s announcement.
When you talk to a freelancer, ask three things: how you stack up against their average client, who does the work when they’re sick or busy, and how many stores your size they run right now.
Why do big agencies win pitches they then underdeliver on?
Big agencies win on polish, and the people who build the pitch rarely run the account. All that marketing says nothing about how well they run accounts.
After you sign, the senior strategist hands the account to a junior specialist. At your spend level, that’s how the agency model makes money. Juniors can do good work, but nobody with years of pattern recognition looks at your account each week.
The fee makes it worse. Big agencies usually charge 10–15% of ad spend with a minimum retainer of roughly $5,000–10,000 a month. On a $25,000 budget, that minimum is 20% of your spend or more. You pay a premium price, and a $25,000 account is small for an agency built around $200,000 accounts.
A high fee is fine when the agency performs. The issue is this spend band, where you get the price without the attention.
Why does it matter how many accounts your expert sees?
You only learn what a Google change really does by testing it across many accounts at once. In a single account, a result can be luck, seasonality or a stock problem. When the same result shows up in ten accounts, you can act on it.
AI Max is the current example. Google has pushed it for over a year as a way to match searches beyond the keywords you chose. We keep testing it in experiments across client accounts. So far it hasn’t worked for our clients, so we keep it off, while plenty of advertisers switch it on because Google recommends it.
The same thing happened before. When Performance Max launched about three years ago, Standard Shopping kept beating it across our accounts. Then over time, pMax performance started improving, as we learned how to run these campaigns in a better way.
Similarly, about two years ago, tiered Shopping (a strategy we ran HARD before) stopped working across accounts, so we had to find alternative ways to handle Shopping queries.
Big agencies claim this kind of learning too. In theory it is possible, they see tons of accounts and a lot of spend. But in practice things are often very siloed. Each team runs its own clients, everyone is busy, and that strange observation from one specialist rarely makes it across the desk of the person running your accounts. A solo freelancer simply doesn’t see enough accounts to spot the pattern, while a small team that reviews accounts together sees it within weeks.
How can you tell a good Google Ads expert from a good pitch?
Ask them to look at your account live, before you sign. A pre-built deck shows you what someone wants to sell. A live review shows you how they think.
A good reviewer goes straight to things you haven’t mentioned, because they’ve seen the pattern in other accounts. They also tell you what’s already working and should be left alone, which takes more experience than listing problems.
This matters because owners often point at the wrong problem. In our 2026 audit report, the advertiser told us up front what they thought was wrong in 79 audits. In 50 of those, the real cause sat somewhere else: conversion tracking, brand searches hidden inside other campaigns, or a ROAS target unrelated to the margins.
That’s what our free account review is. You tell us what you think is wrong, give us read-only access, and we show you what we find.
How should AI change what you pay for Google Ads management?
AI is the elephant in the room in every hiring conversation right now. For anyone managing Google Ads, it’s a huge lever. Reporting and client updates that used to take hours a month can now be prepared, or fully automated, by the right AI agent.
That raises an awkward question about the fee. If AI does part of the work, what is your retainer still paying for?
It comes down to one question: are you paying for time spent, or for results?
With our clients, we’ve always priced for results, in fixed tiers rather than hours. Some work still takes fixed time, like joining your team’s weekly meeting, and that’s part of the fee. Reports and routine updates are different, because better processes and AI take most of that work off our hands.
Our workload is about the same as before, but the work itself has changed. We now run a large set of automated checks, some fully automated, some semi-automated and some by hand. Every finding still has to be checked, put in context and weighed against what we know about that specific account. AI can’t do that part yet.
So ask every candidate how they use AI, which parts of the work it does, and what a person still does in your account each week. Committing to a team now is often a multi-year decision, and the answer tells you whether the fee pays for judgment or for tools.
Should your Google Ads expert only look at Google Ads?
We don’t think so. As Google Ads managers, we treat your store and your budget as if they were our own. That means looking past the account: the website, the products, conversion tracking, your creative and how you split budget across channels. Some problems can only be caught by someone who sees the business, not just the campaigns.
A garden supply store we worked with offers a great example of this. They were spending about $20,000 a month, and costs and CPCs kept rising year after year, up until the point where the owner was starting to doubt Google Ads.
The fix sat mostly outside the account. The products are hard to choose between, so we sent shoppers to a quiz that helps them pick, instead of to category pages. Ad spend went from $20,000 to $4,000 a month, and revenue from the new campaigns rose 42%.
An agency paid a percentage of your spend earns less every time it gives that kind of advice. A fixed fee removes that conflict. We’ve also told clients to switch off Display and YouTube campaigns that weren’t paying their way, for the same reason.
For pricing models, contracts and what stays yours when you hand over the account, see what it costs to hire a pro.
Store Growers reviews and manages Google Ads for ecommerce stores spending roughly $10–50K a month. The first step is a free account review. Tell us what you think is wrong and give us read-only access, and we’ll show you where the account loses money. We’re not a fit for stores just getting started or for non-ecommerce businesses.
Freelancer, small team or big agency: which should you pick?
Pick a freelancer if you want one expert on your account, your account is stable, and you don’t need someone testing every new Google feature.
Pick a big agency if you spend well above $50,000 a month, or want Google, Meta and creative under one roof, and you’ve confirmed who runs your Google Ads day to day.
Pick a small expert team if you spend $10–50K a month, want the expert doing the work, and want someone who knows what’s working across many stores right now.
Whoever you talk to, ask the same questions:
- Who will run my account each week, and how senior are they?
- How does my account compare to your average client, in ad spend and in the fee I’d pay?
- How many stores like mine do you run right now?
- Can you look at my account before I sign?
- What does AI do in my account, and what does a person still do each week?
- How do you charge, and does your fee rise when my budget does?
The second question matters more than it looks. If your fee is well below their average, your account will sit low on the list when time gets tight, with a freelancer and an agency alike. If you’re close to their average or above it, you’re one of the accounts they can’t afford to lose.
I don’t have a crystal ball on how AI will change agency pricing a few years from now. What I do expect is that AI keeps getting better at making decisions and setting priorities. That raises the bar for what a senior person needs to review.
Those senior people will be in more demand, which will push their rates up, while each account needs less of their time. A retainer a few years from now may buy fewer hours from someone more senior. So whoever you hire, ask who that senior person is, and how often they actually look at your account.
