Google Ads agency or freelancer: an honest assessment

The conflict of interest first, then the argument

I sell Google Ads management as a freelancer myself, so you are reading the assessment of someone who earns money from one of the two answers. That is why this piece also says when I would not recommend myself. My argument: "agency or freelancer" is usually the wrong question. The more useful one is what a week without anyone touching the account costs you in your highest-revenue week, and who gets into the account at that point. Once you have done that calculation, it quickly becomes clear which model fits your shop. Personality, response times in chat and pitch slides tell you little about it.

Many comparison pages come from freelancers who are selling themselves. One of them states openly that with a freelancer, the work waits during holidays, illness or full capacity. This piece does the maths that is usually left out.

How much time is a single person away each year?

As a rough estimate, a freelancer is unavailable for six to seven weeks a year. Self-employed people have no statutory leave, but the figures for employees serve as a reference: the German Federal Leave Act provides for at least 24 working days, which is four weeks on a six-day working week. Then there is illness: according to Destatis, sickness absence in 2025 averaged 14.6 working days per employee, not counting sick notes of up to three days. That adds almost three more weeks.

Holidays can be planned and scheduled around your peak season. Illness cannot. The real risk therefore lies in the roughly three weeks that fall at random. Black Week is at least as likely to be hit as any other week.

What can the account spend during that time?

An account left unattended does not spend more than planned, but it can spend the money on the wrong things. According to Google, a campaign can spend up to twice its average daily budget on a single day, while over the month it stays at 30.4 times that figure. So the budget is capped. What it is spent on is not: if a feed runs with wrong prices, bestsellers are disapproved because availability is missing, or a campaign suddenly attracts weak search terms after a change to the shop, the full budget still goes out.

For retailers, this means the downtime risk is not a cost risk but a revenue and contribution margin risk. And that depends almost entirely on how unevenly your revenue is spread across the year.

The calculation: normal week against strongest week

A worked example with round, invented figures. Suppose a shop makes €2 million a year in revenue through Google Ads. A feed error halves Shopping revenue for three days because nobody notices it.

The formula behind it: weekly revenue × share of affected days × loss of performance. With even trading, your account manager being away is annoying but manageable. If a large part of the year falls into a few weeks, the same absence costs many times as much, and usually margin as well, because promotional prices and stock levels change daily at exactly that time.

Put in your own figures and weight the loss by the chance that an unplanned absence hits exactly that week, roughly 3 in 52. In the example that comes to just under €3,000 a year. Compare that expected value with the extra cost of cover. If you could not absorb the full loss in a bad year, that is a further argument for a team or for agreed cover.

When I would advise you to use an agency

In these cases I consider an agency the better choice, even though it rules out my own offer:

• Highly seasonal revenue. If Black Week, Christmas or a season brings in a large share of annual revenue and errors have to be fixed the same day, you need several people who know the account. A single person can fall ill, and you carry that risk. How to prepare for the peaks is covered in preparing Google Ads for Black Week.
• Many channels from one source. I do not cover every channel. If you constantly need capacity for creative, social, feed maintenance and ads together, a team with specialists under one roof is simply better placed.
• Very large ranges with daily movement. If prices, availability and feed rules change every day, that is work for more than one person.
• You want one point of contact for everything. If you have no in-house head of marketing to coordinate several service providers, an agency often makes for a calmer setup.

When a freelancer is the better choice

A freelancer fits if Google Ads is your main channel, revenue runs fairly evenly and you want someone who knows the account and works on it personally. The advantage lies less in the price than in continuity: the person who sells, plans and implements is the same, and there is no handover between consulting and execution. There is still a limit: if the freelancer is fully booked, things get tight even without illness.

Who actually works in the account?

With an agency, this is the most important question in the meeting; with a freelancer it is usually settled. Ask for the name of the person who changes campaigns and how many accounts they look after in parallel. Ask who covers for them, too, and whether that cover has seen your account before. Cover that opens your account for the first time when something is on fire is cover only on paper.

Whichever model you choose, Google's policy applies: third parties must use a separate account for each advertiser and give you the customer ID on request. If your advertising runs in a pooled account belonging to the provider, that is a warning sign, whether it is an agency or an individual. More on this in who owns the Google Ads account.

What happens if they are unavailable, and how do you protect yourself?

You can absorb much of a freelancer's downtime risk yourself if you remain an admin. In Google Ads, only the Admin access level can give other people access, change access levels and accept or remove links with manager accounts. In Merchant Center, too, only admins can add or remove people, and standard users cannot link Merchant Center with Google Ads.

That gives you a simple check you can run today:

1. Are you an admin in Google Ads and in Merchant Center yourself, with a company email address?
2. Is there a named stand-in you can invite to both accounts in an emergency, and do they know the account?
3. Is there a written agreement for your strongest weeks on who is reachable and which interventions are allowed without checking back?

If you can answer yes to all three questions, you have the downtime risk of a single person largely under control. How to grant access properly is covered in granting Google Ads access to external partners safely.

How I would make the decision

Start with your strongest week, not with the provider. Work out what three days at half revenue cost you there. If you could absorb that amount in an emergency, decide on hands-on account expertise and on whether the person who sells also does the work. If you could not, you need either a team or cover that knows the account, and you should check that before the contract starts. Which criteria matter after that is covered in choosing Google Ads management for your shop, and the cost side in what Google Ads management costs.

I start with an audit using read-only access and a written roadmap. That has a side effect that helps with this question: you see how someone works before you give them write access, and you can still go to an agency afterwards.