In-house vs agency: who should actually run your PPC?

The instinct, once PPC starts to matter, is to bring it in-house. You want control, focus, someone who lives and breathes the account. All reasonable. But the maths and the skill gap catch a lot of businesses out, so it is worth being honest about both sides before you advertise a role.

The real cost of an in-house hire

A competent in-house PPC manager in the UK costs somewhere around £35,000 to £55,000 a year, more in London or for someone genuinely senior. That is before you add the rest:

• Tools and subscriptions. Reporting, feed management, bid tools, a Comparison Shopping Service. It runs to thousands a year.
• Recruitment and ramp-up. Hiring takes months and good people are hard to find. Then they need time to learn your account.
• Training and platform churn. Google changes constantly. Keeping one person current is your cost to carry now.
• Single point of failure. One person means one holiday, one illness, one resignation away from nobody at the wheel.

Add it up and an in-house setup rarely makes sense below a certain spend, simply because the person is not managing enough budget to earn their keep.

Where in-house genuinely wins

It is not all one way. There are real reasons businesses bring PPC in-house, and at the right size they are compelling. You get someone embedded in the business who knows the products, the margins and the seasonality cold. You get instant communication, no account managers playing telephone. And on a large, single-channel account, a dedicated person who does nothing but that account all day can go deep in a way a shared resource cannot.

Where an agency wins

The case for an agency or specialist is mostly about range and risk. One in-house hire is one person’s knowledge. A good agency brings people who have seen hundreds of accounts across different industries, so they have already made the mistakes on someone else’s budget.

• Breadth of experience. Search, Shopping, Performance Max, feeds, Microsoft Ads, tracking. One person rarely has all of it at a high level.
• Senior time without a senior salary. You get experienced hands on the account for less than the cost of employing them.
• No single point of failure. Holiday, illness and people leaving are the agency’s problem to absorb, not yours.
• It is somebody’s job to stay current. Keeping up with the platform is the service, not an overhead you carry.

The hybrid that often works best

For a lot of growing businesses the answer is not either or. You keep a marketing generalist or junior in-house to own the relationship, the brief and the day-to-day, and you bring in a specialist to run the actual paid search and set the strategy. The in-house person learns from someone who knows what they are doing, and you get senior expertise without the senior salary. It is the setup we run with plenty of clients.

How to actually decide

Strip it back to three questions. How much are you spending, because below roughly £20,000 a month an in-house hire is hard to justify on the maths alone. How complex is the account, because Shopping, feeds and multiple platforms reward breadth over a single pair of hands. And could you keep a good person both busy and learning, because a strong PPC manager will stagnate, then leave, if your account is not big enough to stretch them.

Get those three straight and the answer usually picks itself. If you are weighing it up and want a second opinion on what your account actually needs, the questions worth asking an agency are here, what good management should cost is here, and the Free Audit will tell you where you stand either way.