Should I Fire My Google Ads Agency?

You log in, or the report lands on the first of the month, and it's the same as last month: a dashboard full of metrics in your brand colors, leads sitting flat. You read it twice and still couldn't tell anyone what actually happened in the account. Somewhere around the third month of that, the thought shows up: are these people even doing anything?

If you've had that thought, you're not alone, and there's a reason you feel that way. Whether it means you should fire your agency is a different question, and it's the one I want to actually answer.

First, who's talking. I spent years inside agencies: VP at a mid-size shop, Paid Search Director, Director of Client Services. I've also consulted with agencies on their PPC operations and team development. These days I work directly with in-house marketing teams, training them to manage paid search themselves. So I could technically benefit whether you keep an agency, leave for another one, or bring it in-house and hire me to help. I'm telling you that up front because you should know what everyone giving you advice on this is selling, and most of them won't say it out loud. The Google rep calling wants you to adopt the features that agencies generally (and often rightly) won't implement. The agency telling you in-house is a disaster has a retainer to protect (but I've also seen in-house horror stories). I have my own incentives too. The difference is I'd rather you make the right call than the one that happens to pay me this quarter.

So here's the honest version.

What a good agency is genuinely worth

I'm going to start here, because the answer to "should I fire my agency" has to begin with a clear picture of what a good agency brings to the table.

The most valuable thing a strong agency brings is pattern recognition. In a decade working with agencies I've had a hand in over 1,000 accounts, and I still run into scenarios I've never seen before. So much can go sideways in an account that having a library of troubleshooting situations to draw from is insanely valuable, and a senior strategist who has lived through hundreds of accounts often knows what they're looking at before they finish opening the report. There's a subtler version of this too. When you see what works in one industry, you start translating it into others, and you end up with solutions a single-account manager would never think to try. A tactic that's routine in ecommerce home goods can be a breakthrough in B2B manufacturing, but only someone who's worked both would ever make the connection.

That depth shows up in the people, and I'll say this plainly even though I make my living training in-house teams: I've trained in-house ad managers who went on to get hired at agencies, and I've coached agency ad managers who left to go in-house, and the skill gap is night and day in favor of the agency-trained ones. That edge has nothing to do with raw talent. They came up surrounded by other practitioners, with someone reviewing their work and a hundred accounts to learn from. Hold onto that, because it explains something important later.

A good agency also gives you speed. There's no job posting, no three months of interviews, no six-month ramp while someone learns the platform on your budget. They're running on day one. If you're launching a product, defending a competitive window, or heading into your busy season, that head start matters.

There's breadth, too. One relationship can cover Google, Meta, SEO, and analytics under a single contract. Replicating that in-house means hiring several specialists or stretching one generalist until something snaps.

And there's continuity. When your in-house ad manager takes another job, everything they knew about why the account is built the way it is tends to leave with them. An agency doesn't quit on you. People inside it move on, but the lights stay on.

If you're spending under $15,000-$20,000 a month on ads, a good agency is almost certainly the right call, and the math is the reason. A fully loaded in-house hire (salary, benefits, software, the cost of recruiting them in the first place) runs $92,000-$200,000 a year. You can't justify that against a reasonable management fee until your spend is a lot higher. Keep all of that in mind, because the next part is where I stop being diplomatic.

The four things that actually go wrong

These aren't rare. They're not bad luck or one rotten agency. They're structural, which means they show up again and again no matter whose logo is on the report, and understanding why they happen tells you a lot about whether yours is the exception.

The bait and switch

The person who sold you, the sharp one who knew your industry and asked the questions that made you feel understood, usually isn't the person who'll run your account. That handoff happens on day one. In a smaller agency the closer is often the founder; in a bigger one it's a dedicated salesperson. They're great at presenting strategy, whether a strategist built it or they did, but they're almost always bad at handing it off: translating it into actual tasks, connecting it to the practical steps the team takes Monday morning, making sure the junior ad manager and the CSM who inherit you actually understand the plan. Often there's barely a handoff at all beyond a shared doc and a calendar invite. It isn't malice. It's arithmetic. A senior strategist costs an agency well over $100,000 a year. If your management fee is $2,000-$3,000 a month, that person was never going to live in your account. The fee doesn't pay for them.

So when you're vetting an agency, don't ask whether a senior person will be "involved." Ask the questions that actually reveal how your account will be run. How much experience will the ad manager on my account have? How many accounts do they manage? (More than 30 and you're a rounding error; fewer than 5 can mean they're new or the agency is thin.) What's the average ad spend they handle? Do you have other clients in my industry? And what's your process for making sure the strategy actually gets implemented, not just presented? The answers, and how readily they come, tell you most of what you need to know.

The autopilot report

Most agency reports aren't a story about your account, they're a dashboard. A wall of impressions, clicks, CTR, maybe a cost per conversion, dressed up in your brand colors. The trouble is you can already see all of that by logging in. A dashboard you could have pulled yourself in 30 seconds isn't worth a management fee. What actually earns the fee is the story behind the numbers: what moved, why it moved, what they did about it, and how it ties to the KPIs you actually answer for. You don't need more clicks. You need MQLs that don't slam into a brick wall the moment they reach sales. And when you do pull the change history yourself, it's usually thin: a handful of budget changes, a few bid tweaks, and almost no negative keyword work, which is the unglamorous, every-week habit that actually protects your spend. One analysis I came across found that 72% of companies hadn't had their campaigns meaningfully reviewed in over a month, and most had no idea, because the reports kept arriving on schedule looking exactly like work.

Who owns the account

This is the one that costs the most, and almost nobody asks about it until they're trying to leave. The setup you want is simple: the agency's MCC has access to manage your account, but the account is yours, with you as an admin (an owner, ideally), and just as important, with you as the admin on the billing profile. That billing access is what protects you from shady invoicing. When an agency instead builds the account under their own MCC with themselves as owner, everything in it, the conversion history and every signal the bidding algorithm spent months or years learning, belongs to them. Leave, and you start from zero, handing your next manager a blank account and a learning period you already paid for once. Google's own policy frowns on this. Plenty of agencies do it anyway. Before you sign, confirm in writing that you'll be an admin or owner on both the account and the billing profile. If they drag their feet on that, you've learned everything you need to know.

The fee model can work against you

I'll be straight with you here, because I bill on a percentage of ad spend myself, so I'm not about to tell you the model is evil. The problem isn't percentage-based pricing. It's two specific versions of it. The first is a flat percentage that never comes down: 15% whether you're spending $5,000 a month or $50,000, even though managing the bigger budget rarely takes proportionally more work. (My own scale sunsets, the rate drops as spend climbs, precisely because it should.) The second, and the bigger one, is the agency that reaches for a budget increase as the answer to everything, whether performance justifies it or not. Remember what's usually sitting at the top of the change history when you finally look? Budget changes. Sometimes raising the budget is exactly right. But a flat-percentage agency makes more money every single time it happens, so you can't fully separate "you should spend more" from "we'd like to bill more," and you should know which one you're hearing.

Why in-house fails (and it isn't the reason you've been told)

In-house management has a rough reputation in parts of this industry, and the agencies are happy to keep it that way. The failures are real. The story everyone tells about them is wrong.

The story is that in-house people just aren't good enough. The truth is it's almost the same problem agencies have, the same problem you find everywhere. A company hires someone because they said they could run ads, but nobody there actually knows how to vet that claim. And even when they do hire well, they never train the new person in how they want things done or spell out what's expected, so the hire is set up to fail from day one. Then they're left to learn by trial and error on live budget, and over a couple of years they harden into their own habits with nobody around to catch the blind spots.

I once saw an account where the ad manager had left Search Partners on, draining $10,000 a month. The internal policy was to switch Search Partners off by default, but that was never communicated to them, and their boss never had the time to open the account and notice. It was a 30-second fix that had already burned through hundreds of thousands of dollars by the time anyone caught it. If that ad manager had known what was expected of them, or had a routine audit cadence to follow, they'd have cut the waste months earlier.

Remember the skill gap I mentioned, the one that runs night and day in favor of agency-trained managers? This is where it comes from. It was never about who had more talent. It was about who had support, review, and a hundred accounts to learn from, and who got dropped into a seat alone. Drop that same agency ad manager into a company with no peers and no oversight, and the edge erodes too.

Then there's the opposite problem. Your best in-house hire gets good, and because they're good, you give them more to do. Email, the website, the new TikTok thing the CEO read about. Google Ads slides from being their job to being one of nine, and the account doesn't blow up so much as slowly go dim, until one day the numbers are soft enough that someone asks a question.

So the real comparison was never "agency versus in-house." It's "agency versus in-house with nobody backing them up," and that's a different question with a much easier answer.

The math, with real numbers

Vague money talk is useless, so here are the figures, and I'll tell you exactly when they stop applying to you.

An agency runs 10-20% of spend, with monthly minimums usually between $1,500 and $5,000. One number worth tattooing somewhere: if your management fee is more than about 25-30% of your total spend, the deal is upside down, and you'd see better returns pushing that money into the ads themselves. At a $3,000-$5,000 monthly fee, you're paying $36,000-$60,000 a year for management alone, before a dollar reaches Google.

In-house, fully loaded, is more than a salary. An experienced specialist earns $60,000-$95,000, and once you add benefits, software at $500-$2,000 a month, and $15,000-$30,000 to recruit them, year one lands somewhere between $92,000 and $200,000, with the first several months at partial speed while they learn your account. The point where that beats an agency on cost alone tends to land somewhere around $75,000-$100,000 a month in spend, where a percentage fee starts to rival a full salary. If you run lead gen, you can often justify it sooner, because the value of someone who actually knows what a good lead looks like shows up long before the math forces your hand.

If you're not spending that much yet, here are some other numbers worth considering, because this is the comparison that fits most of the people I work with, and almost nobody runs it.

If you already have an employee who touches the Google Ads account, you're paying that salary no matter what you decide. So the real question isn't "agency or in-house hire." It's "train the person I already employ, or pay an agency to sit on top of them." And that math isn't close. A serious training program, the kind that uses your actual account instead of generic screenshots, runs $2,000-$4,000, once. Add coaching at $250-$500 a call, frequent at first and tapering as confidence builds, and your first year usually lands well under $12,000. Year two and beyond, a few thousand. Set that against $36,000-$60,000 a year, every year, for an agency.

There's a compounding benefit most people miss, too: you keep the recordings. If that employee leaves, or you later hire a dedicated ad manager to sit under them, the training already exists. And because a good program teaches principles and concepts over button-by-button how-tos, those assets keep paying off for years, no matter how much Google changes the interface. The knowledge stays in your building instead of walking out the day you change vendors.

Two situations break this in the agency's favor, and I'll name them so you don't talk yourself into something. If you don't have a marketer at all, add the cost of hiring one and the comparison shifts hard. And if you're under $5,000-$10,000 a month in spend, even a modest training investment may not pay back fast enough, and a good freelancer or small agency is still your best move.

The option most people never put on the table

Almost everyone frames this as a coin flip: full-service agency, or go it alone in-house. There's a third option that I've watched outperform both for companies spending somewhere between $15,000 and $150,000 a month, and it's the one I now build with most of the teams I work with.

A trained in-house person runs the account day to day. They know your sales cycle, your margins, which products are worth chasing and which ones just look busy, the stuff a rotating account manager juggling 20 clients will never have time to learn. And an outside expert stays on call for the parts that genuinely need experience: the quarterly strategy review, the morning the conversions fall off a cliff for no obvious reason, the high-stakes decision where a second set of eyes is worth more than the call costs. It runs cheaper than full service, it keeps the institutional knowledge with you, and it doesn't ask one employee to be a self-sufficient expert on an island.

How to actually decide

Ask yourself three questions.

Do you already have an employee managing your account?

If yes, training almost always beats bolting on an agency once you're past the smallest spend levels. If no, put the full cost of a hire on the table before you compare anything.

What are you spending a month?

Under $15,000-$20,000, a good agency is a fair deal, and building specialized skill from scratch is hard to justify. Above that, the numbers start to move, and somewhere around $75,000-$100,000 a month, the cost math has usually flipped on its own.

How much does your business context matter?

If you sell straightforward ecommerce with clean product categories, an agency can run it well without knowing you deeply. If your offer is complex, your sales cycle is long, or your market has real nuance, the person who lives inside your business will beat the outside specialist over time, and not because they're the sharper technician. They just understand things an account manager juggling 20 other clients never gets the room to learn.

Here's where I land. Agencies aren't the villain. They solve real problems, especially when you're small or moving fast and can't afford to wait. But the shift toward in-house is happening for a reason, and it's bigger than any one company. Part of it is what we've covered: someone who actually knows the business gets more out of the channel than an outsider juggling 20 other accounts. The other part is that the agency world itself is in chaos right now. New shops pop up every week, run by people who took a course and decided it was easy money. The established agencies are bleeding their best talent to in-house teams and splinter agencies, and a wave of newer practitioners lean on AI to do their thinking for them, which spreads bad information faster than it has ever spread before. Finding good help has gotten genuinely hard, and it takes solid systems and a clear picture of what real talent looks like to pull it off. The channel was rarely the thing holding companies back. Whether their person was ever set up to win was.

Find out where you actually stand

Before you decide anything, it helps to get a clear, outside read on whether your current agency is earning its fee or coasting on it. That's exactly what an account audit gives you: a full picture of where the account is leaking and what it would take to fix, whether you stay, switch, or bring it in-house. If you'd rather just talk it through first, book a free call below and we'll work out which path actually fits your situation.

And if this is hitting close to home because you're the one who inherited an account with no real training, that's the exact problem my training and coaching are built to solve. You don't need to become a full-time PPC specialist. You need to understand the account well enough to know it's healthy and explain why.

Frequently asked questions

Should I fire my Google Ads agency?

It comes down to three things: whether you already employ someone who could manage the account, how much you spend per month, and how much your campaigns depend on knowing your business. Under roughly $15,000-$20,000 a month, a good agency is usually the right call. Above that, the math tilts toward in-house, and if you already have a marketer on staff, training them is often cheaper and keeps the knowledge in your company. Fire the agency only after you've confirmed it's genuinely underperforming, not just sending reports you can't read.

Is a Google Ads agency worth it for a small business?

For most small businesses spending under $15,000-$20,000 a month, yes. A fully loaded in-house hire runs $92,000-$200,000 a year, which is hard to justify against a reasonable management fee at lower spend. The exception is when you already employ a marketer who touches the account, in which case training them is usually the better investment.

Is it cheaper to hire an agency or manage Google Ads in-house?

Agencies typically charge 10-20% of ad spend with minimums of $1,500-$5,000 a month. In-house, fully loaded, costs $92,000-$200,000 a year. On cost alone, in-house tends to win once you're spending somewhere around $75,000-$100,000 a month. Below that, the agency is usually cheaper, unless you already employ someone who can be trained to run the account.

How do I know if my Google Ads agency is doing a good job?

Look past the dashboard. A good report explains what changed, why it changed, what they did about it, and how it ties to the KPIs you answer for. Confirm you own the account and the billing profile, ask how much experience your account manager has and how many accounts they carry, and check that they review your search terms and add negative keywords regularly. For a deeper walkthrough, see how the search terms report exposes wasted spend.

Can I train my marketing manager to run Google Ads instead of hiring an agency?

Often, yes, and it's usually the best-value option if you already employ a capable marketer. A structured training program runs $2,000-$4,000 once, with coaching at $250-$500 a call. That's a fraction of the $36,000-$60,000 a year a typical agency charges, and the knowledge stays in your company. The catch is that the person has to want to develop the skill, and they need real training and clear expectations, not just platform access.