Run it yourself while the account is small, simple, and tracked properly. Hire help when the account needs more attention than you can give it, or when you can't tell whether it's working. The deciding cost usually isn't the agency fee. It's your hours, and what you'd be doing with them otherwise.
That's the short answer. The longer one depends on what running ads well actually involves, because most owners picture the part that takes an afternoon — setting up a campaign — and miss the part that never ends.
What the job actually takes
Launching a campaign is the easy bit. The work that decides results happens afterward, every week.
- Reading the search terms report (the list of what people actually typed before they clicked) and blocking the ones that waste money
- Adjusting budgets as one service or location outperforms another
- Testing new ads and retiring tired ones
- Keeping up with platform changes, which arrive constantly and often reset a setting you'd tuned
- Checking that tracking still works, because a site update can quietly break it
Each of these is small. Together they're a part-time job, and it's one where a missed week costs real money rather than just a late deadline. Ad platforms are built to spend your budget. They're far less eager to tell you it's being spent badly.
Where running it in-house usually breaks
It rarely breaks on skill. It breaks on attention. You check the account when things feel off, tweak a few settings, and move on to the thing that's actually on fire. That's reasonable. It also means problems like wasted spend on irrelevant searches can run for months before anyone sees them.
The other weak point is tracking. Conversion tracking (the code that tells you which ad produced a real lead, not just a click) is easy to set up badly and hard to notice you've set up badly. If your account counts every form fill, repeat call, or page view as a win, the platform optimizes toward the wrong people. We've written about how that plays out in a real audit. Doing your own ads means being your own auditor, and it's hard to catch a mistake you made yourself.
What hiring out costs you
An agency isn't free of risk either. You pay a retainer whether or not the work is good. You can end up with a junior buyer learning on your budget, a report you can't read, or ad accounts that sit in the agency's name instead of yours. If you do hire, hold them to the standard in how to tell if your agency is doing a good job: plain-English reports, your own accounts, and an honest answer about what each customer cost.
Signs you've outgrown doing it yourself
None of these mean you did anything wrong. They mean the account has outgrown the time you can give it.
- You haven't opened the account in weeks, and you're not sure what changed while you were away
- You're spending enough that a mistake would hurt, and nobody is checking your work
- You run more than one platform, and each has its own rules, reports, and tracking
- You can't say which leads turned into paying customers, only how many came in
- You're stuck deciding what to change, because the numbers don't point anywhere
If two or three of those fit, the account is asking for more than a side task can give it.
A middle path
This isn't all or nothing. Plenty of owners run the day-to-day themselves and bring in an outside audit now and then, a second set of eyes on the structure, the tracking, and where the budget goes. That works well when you have the time and want someone to check your blind spots. If you'd rather hand it off, Bolo is built around senior-led accounts with tracking and data kept in your name. Whichever way you go, make sure someone is watching the account every week. That matters more than who it is.