Hire a Google Ads Strategist: agency, freelancer, or in-house?
A Google Ads strategist owns campaign architecture, bid strategy, conversion tracking, and the monthly report that ties spend to revenue. Indeed puts the average base for a paid search manager at $80,280 (September 2026), or about $100,000 to $112,000 loaded. Agencies price by share of spend, retainer, or a hybrid. Spend, complexity and bench depth decide the model.
A 47-point written audit of your Google, Meta or Shopping account, back in five business days.
Get your auditBook a callDay-to-day
- Weekly review of bid strategies, negative keywords, search-term reports
- Monthly restructure decisions on campaigns that stopped compounding
- Owns the Google Ads, GA4 and Shopify (or CRM) reconciliation
- Ships written monthly report tying spend to booked revenue
- Owns Performance Max asset-group structure decisions
- Runs quarterly ROAS-target re-baseline against margin table
- Briefs YouTube video campaigns and reads them on lift, not cost per view
- Directs the specialist who runs daily search-term, pacing and disapproval work
- First responder on Search Console + Ads policy issues
Salary & rate benchmarks
Which hiring option wins?
- Access to senior operator without the salary commitment
- Cross-account pattern recognition (they see 20+ accounts a week)
- Bench depth if the primary strategist is out
- Execution layer and tooling come bundled (bid tools, call tracking, GA4 experts)
- Divided attention across multiple accounts
- Slower turnaround on urgent changes
- Ramp-up cost when strategist rotates out
- Dedicated attention to one or two accounts at a time
- Direct contract, no agency margin
- Faster informal communication
- No bench, sick day or vacation stalls the account
- You buy the tooling separately
- Harder to verify seniority claims
- 100% of their time in your business
- Direct alignment with product roadmap
- Compounding brand knowledge over years
- Only viable once spend is large enough that the loaded cost is a small share of it
- Single point of failure if they leave
- No cross-account learning; the market moves without them
Video and the team underneath
At modest video spend, a capable Google Ads strategist runs YouTube alongside Search. The job is matching format to objective, from reach to action-focused campaigns, protecting the first five seconds that decide whether a skippable ad is watched, and measuring contribution rather than cheap views. Two campaigns can post the same view-through rate while only one reaches people who later buy, so view metrics get paired with brand lift and downstream conversions. A dedicated YouTube specialist earns their seat once video is a sustained, funnel-wide channel with enough asset volume to keep them busy.
Underneath the strategist sits the execution layer: weekly search-term mining, negative keywords, budget pacing, ad rotation, and catching disapprovals before they kill live ads. Indeed's September 2026 average base for a PPC specialist is $67,819, about $85,000 to $95,000 loaded on the same 25 to 40 percent assumption. The strategist sets direction and the specialist keeps it running. Conflating the two jobs is where accounts drift, which is why an agency that supplies both layers is often better economics than an isolated in-house hire with no one setting direction.
Move from freelancer or agency to in-house once spend is high and stable enough that a loaded salary is a small share of it, and the product is stable enough to reward deep account knowledge. Below that, the benefits, taxes and tooling load makes in-house economics hard to defend. At larger scale, many eCom brands run a hybrid: an in-house owner plus an agency for specialised channels (Amazon DSP, LinkedIn ABM, LSA). See our full agency vs in house ppc breakdown for the math behind that call.
Common questions
Want this checked on your own account?
A 47-point written audit of your Google, Meta, or Shopping account. Five business days, no sales call.
