First year of ads: learn to run them yourself or hire it out immediately

Question

A few deals in and I am hitting the ceiling on leads that come from people I already know. So the next question is who runs the paid side.

The case for doing it myself: the budgets are small enough that an agency retainer would be a large share of total spend, I would learn what the levers actually are, and I would never again be in the position of not knowing whether a report is telling me the truth. The case against is that I would be learning on my own money in an auction against people who have been doing it for years, and the first few months of tuition could easily be more than the retainer I was avoiding.

The case for hiring out immediately: they have run the campaign type before, so the obvious mistakes are already priced out of the setup, and my time goes to talking to sellers instead of reading search term reports. The case against is that I would be paying for something I cannot evaluate, which is how people end up a year in with no idea what worked.

Curious which way the room has gone and what it cost either way.

brandonlee36 · Accepted Answer

Do both in a sequence rather than picking one. Pay someone competent for a paid setup and a written handover, a few hundred to maybe fifteen hundred depending on the market, and get the account created under your own business manager so it is yours from day one. Then run it yourself for six months at a budget you can afford to lose entirely, with a standing weekly hour to read the search terms report and the location report. Those two reports are where almost all of the wasted money in a small campaign shows up, and reading them is a skill you can have in a month.

What this buys you is the ability to hire an agency later and know within two weeks whether they are working. That is worth more than the setup itself. The people who get stuck for a year with no idea what happened are the ones who never once looked at raw campaign data, so every conversation with the agency is a conversation about a dashboard the agency built.

The budget question decides the rest. If your total monthly spend is under about $2,000, a real agency retainer is a big fraction of it and the math rarely works. Above that, the retainer starts looking like a small percentage of the media and the argument flips. @thatch is right about the three numbers, and knowing them is exactly what six months of running your own small account teaches you cheaply.

monica_tran3 · Answer

After five years of running a service business, the thing I would tell you is that the skill you need is reading a report and knowing which three numbers matter. Campaign building is not the skill. You can get that in a few weeks without ever touching the account, and it is what makes an agency relationship work. Cost per qualified conversation, share of spend inside your target zips, and the share of leads that answer a call. If your agency cannot produce those three every week, the setup skill would not have saved you anyway.

derekj19 · Answer

The self run route has a cost people leave out, which is that the platforms change and you have to keep relearning. An agency spreads that across clients.

First year of ads: learn to run them yourself or hire it out immediately

3 replies