In-house or external: when your own PPC hire pays off

The role is an investment, not a cheaper service provider

Whether an in-house PPC manager pays off is not decided by comparing salary with an agency fee, but by whether the role generates enough additional contribution margin. Setting salary against fee leaves out half the costs on one side and the purpose on the other. With your own hire, you pay for closeness to product, margin and stock, for faster decisions and for knowledge that stays in the business. If that closeness makes no measurable difference in the account, the role is more expensive than any external option, however the salary is negotiated.

A note up front: I sell external Google Ads management as a freelancer myself. So read the following calculation with the question of whether it holds up without my assessments. The figures are sourced or marked as assumptions, so you can replace them with your own.

What a PPC role really costs

The salary reports for SEA managers, as the role is usually called in Germany, are far apart. meingehalt.net gives a national median of €60,168 gross a year, with €44,772 in the lower and €75,564 in the upper quartile. GEHALT.de arrives at a median of €47,212 for 40 hours a week. I work with a range of €45,000 to €75,000 and take €60,000 as the worked example, because someone who is meant to run a shop account independently is more likely to sit in the upper half.

On top of the salary comes the employer's share of social security. According to the 2026 figures from BARMER, the contribution rates are 18.6% for pension, 2.6% for unemployment insurance, 14.6% plus the additional contribution for health insurance and 3.6% for long-term care with one child. A salary of €60,000 is below all 2026 contribution ceilings, so contributions are due on the full salary. The employer's half comes to around 19.7%; with half the additional contribution, statutory levies and employers' liability insurance it is more like 22 to 24%.

I do not put a figure on recruiting and the months in which the role is unfilled, because I have no reliable source for them. But they recur with every new hire, and during the vacancy the account runs either without management or with an external interim solution. Onboarding, on the other hand, is not an extra item: those weeks are already paid for in the annual salary. They cost you performance, not money a second time. Some comparisons add them on top anyway.

Depending on where the salary falls in that range, you end up with around €65,000 to €100,000 in ongoing full cost per year. For the rest of the calculation I use €85,000.

The calculation against contribution margin

The role does not have to recoup its entire cost, only the difference from what you would otherwise pay for external management. The formula:

Additional revenue needed per year = (full in-house cost minus external cost) / contribution margin rate after ad spend

The contribution margin rate is the share of each additional euro of revenue that is left after cost of goods, shipping, returns, payment fees and ad spend. Which costs belong in it is covered in which costs belong in the contribution margin.

A hypothetical worked example: a shop pays €3,500 a month for external management, so €42,000 a year. The role costs €85,000, so the extra cost is €43,000. At a contribution margin rate of 25%, the role has to bring in €172,000 a year in additional revenue that the external option would not have delivered. If the role is created in addition to external management, for example as an in-house point of contact, the hurdle rises to €340,000. At a 15% rate, it is €287,000 and €567,000 respectively.

That leads to a simple test question: can you name where this additional revenue is supposed to come from? Good answers are concrete: faster reactions to stock levels and price changes, margin data in bidding, coordination with purchasing and the shop that does not happen with an external provider. "More time for the account" is not an answer, because additional hours do not automatically mean additional contribution margin. What external management typically costs, so you can set the other side of the calculation realistically, is covered in what Google Ads management costs.

The ratio to media budget is a rough second check. At €20,000 of ad spend a month, a full cost of €85,000 equals around 35% of the annual budget; at €100,000 a month, around 7%. The smaller the budget, the more the person has to get out of every euro invested in advertising for the calculation to work.

What one person cannot cover alone

A single PPC manager is away for a good six and a half weeks a year. In Germany, the statutory minimum leave is 24 working days, which is 20 working days on a five-day week. The TK Health Report 2026 gives an average of 18.5 days of sickness for 2025 per employed person insured with TK, counted in calendar days, which converts to roughly 13 working days. Together that is a good 33 working days, without public holidays and without leave above the minimum. If one of these gaps falls in Black Week or during a tracking outage, nobody is looking after the account.

Then there are tasks that cannot rest with one person, because they need other departments:

• Tracking and consent: server-side tracking, Consent Mode and conversion reconciliation need someone with access to the shop, Tag Manager and server. A PPC manager can specify and check this, but development usually has to implement it. More on this in server-side tracking: when the effort pays off.
• Feed and Merchant Center: titles, attributes, prices and availability come from the shop system. Lasting corrections happen there, not in the ad account, and so with the shop's IT.
• Bidding and margin logic: deriving targets from contribution margin requires margin data per product. That comes from finance, not from the ad account.

On top of that, a single person has nobody reviewing their work. Wrong decisions on targets or account structure often only show up weeks later. In single-person roles, I consider this a bigger risk than the holiday gap, because it is not visible.

When in-house pays off and when it does not

In my assessment, a lot speaks for your own hire when three conditions come together: the calculation above gives an additional revenue figure that you can justify concretely. The account needs decisions almost every day that require knowledge of the range, stock and margin. And development and finance have the capacity to deliver tracking, feed and margin data.

It speaks against a hire if you mainly want to save costs, if the range is stable and the account has few big levers, or if nobody in the business can assess the work professionally. In the last case, you only shift the risk from a service provider you can terminate to a person you will find hard to assess and hard to replace. This assessment applies less if you already have a marketing team with experienced leadership who can assess the PPC work and stand in for it.

What the hybrid model looks like

The hybrid model I consider sensible for most growing shops splits the work by closeness rather than by channel. The in-house person owns the account, the data and the coordination with purchasing, IT and finance. Externally, you bring in an audit at the start, regular sparring on targets and structure, cover during holidays and peak periods, and specialist topics such as a tracking rebuild. It also works the other way round: the account stays external, and in-house there is a part-time person who supplies data and signs off decisions.

This is how I work myself: the starting point is an audit using read-only access and a written roadmap, I bill projects at €1,200 net per day, and ongoing management as a fixed monthly amount based on the account and the effort. I work on the account myself, for Google Ads and Microsoft Ads. Whether that is the right other side of the calculation for you depends on the figures above, not on my offer. How to compare external providers with each other is covered in agency or freelancer: an honest assessment, and what an audit should deliver in what a good Google Ads audit must contain.

Contribution rates and ceilings as of 2026. If the figures change, the employer's share shifts, but the logic of the calculation stays the same.