You've asked three people whether you need an agency, and all three had something to sell you.
The freelancer said freelancers are best. The in-house recruiter said hire in-house. The agency said, obviously, hire an agency. Here's the plain version.
In-house: full control, full cost.
A dedicated hire costs $50K–80K+ a year in salary alone, before tools or ad spend. That math only works once your ad spend is consistently $15K+/month. Below that, you're paying full-time wages for part-time work.
See what your ad spend actually supports →
Freelancer: cheaper, riskier.
Less than an agency, more attention than an agency spreads across dozens of accounts. The catch: quality swings wildly person to person, and if they vanish mid-campaign, you're stuck rebuilding from zero.
Agency: a team, not a person.
Someone on targeting, someone on creative, someone on reporting, for less than one in-house salary. You trade some exclusivity of attention for expertise one freelancer alone can't cover.
The real question isn't which is "best." It's which matches your stage right now.
- Testing an idea under $1K/month ad spend: freelancer or a flat-fee agency package
- Scaling a proven offer past $5K/month: agency, so you get a full team instead of one person's bandwidth
- Running $20K+/month with ads core to the business: in-house, so priorities never compete with other clients
Tell us your monthly spend. Get the honest answer for your stage →
Compare what you get, not just what you pay.
A salary is not the whole cost of an in-house hire. Add recruiting time, benefits, software, and the manager who has to supervise a role they may not know how to judge. Then add the risk of one person holding all the knowledge. If they leave, the account history leaves with them.
A freelancer flips the problem. The price is lower and you carry more of the risk. Ask how many accounts they run, what happens when they are sick or busy, and who covers the account when they take a week off.
With an agency, the question is who actually works on your account. Ask to meet that person before you sign. Some agencies sell with senior people and hand the work to someone junior.
Whoever you pick, own your own assets.
Your ad account, Business Manager, Pixel, and domain should be in your name, with the person running ads added as a partner or admin. If you part ways, you keep the data and the history. If the account is theirs, you start from zero.
Ask this before any money moves: who owns the ad account and the Pixel? Any answer other than "you" is a reason to slow down.
A hybrid works more often than people expect.
Many businesses keep strategy and creative with a specialist and hand small day-to-day jobs, like replying to comments or pulling a weekly report, to someone on their own team. You get the expertise without paying a full salary for a role that is not full-time yet.
What to check in the first 30 days, whichever you choose:
- Week one: tracking is installed and tested, and you can see every event in Events Manager.
- Week two: a written testing plan, with several different ads live.
- Week four: a report showing spend, cost per lead, and what changes next.
If you cannot see these things, ask for them in writing. A good operator will be glad you asked.
Five questions to ask any of the three:
- Who owns the ad account?
- Who will actually work on it day to day?
- How many new ads do you test each month?
- What do you report, and how often?
- What happens if the first 30 days miss the target?
Signs you have outgrown a freelancer:
- One person cannot keep up with creative, reporting, and tracking at the same time.
- Reports arrive late, or only when you ask.
- The account stalls whenever they are busy or away.
Signs an agency is not working:
- You cannot reach the person doing the work.
- The ads look the same month after month.
- You cannot say what was tested last month.
How to switch without losing momentum.
Do not turn everything off on day one. Get admin access to the ad account, export the data and the creatives, and let the new person study the history for a week before changing anything. Campaigns that took months to learn are worth keeping while you test replacements.
When in-house is the right call.
When your ad spend is steady enough that one person has full-time work, you want creative made close to the product, and you can manage and keep a specialist. Before that, you are paying for capacity you cannot use yet.
"Agencies just want my spend to go up so they make more money."
Fair concern. It's exactly why flat-fee agencies exist. A flat fee removes that incentive entirely; a percentage-of-spend fee doesn't. Ask how they're paid before you sign anything.
We're flat-fee, not percentage-of-spend.
Our incentive is your result, not your budget climbing. One of our clients spent PKR 51,454.54 total and got 630 conversations at PKR 81.67 each.