Choosing
PPC agency or PPC consultant? When each one is the right call
Written by a consultant, so read it with that in mind. It still names the cases where I would tell you to hire an agency, because sending the wrong client to the wrong model helps nobody.
The five questions that decide it
- Who will touch the account each week? At an agency, ask for the name and the years of experience of the person doing the weekly work, not the person on the pitch. With a consultant the answer is trivially the person you are talking to.
- How many markets, languages and creative formats? Five countries, three languages and a weekly video pipeline is agency work. One company, one or two markets, mostly search and lead forms is consultant work.
- How is the fee calculated? A percentage of spend pays the vendor to grow spend. A flat fee pays them to grow results. Ask what happens to the invoice if the right advice is to cut budget by a third.
- Are landing pages and tracking in scope? Most agency retainers cover the ad accounts and stop at the click. Most of the waste is after the click.
- What happens if you leave? If the campaigns, conversion actions and tags live in the vendor's accounts, the real price of the contract is that you cannot go.
Where an agency is the better choice
- Spend above roughly £80,000 a month across several platforms, where the work genuinely needs more than one pair of hands.
- Multi-country accounts needing native-language copy and local compliance.
- Paid social at scale, where creative production is the bottleneck and the agency has a studio.
- Procurement that requires a company with a team, insurance levels and SLAs a sole trader cannot sign.
- E-commerce with large catalogues and feed operations. This is also why I do not take e-commerce accounts.
Where an independent consultant is the better choice
- One company spending between a few thousand and sixty thousand pounds a month, mostly on lead generation.
- An account that has been through two agencies and nobody can explain what is actually being done.
- An in-house team that needs a senior second opinion, a structured audit, or someone to build the measurement layer once, properly.
- Owners who want to speak to the person doing the work, and want the fee to reflect that there is no office and no margin stack.
If you are in the second group, the audit is the low-risk way to find out. If you are in the first, the Lever Digital guide to UK PPC consultants and agencies is a fair place to start looking.
Questions people ask before hiring
Is a consultant cheaper than an agency?
Usually, for the same account, because there is no account manager, office or margin between you and the work. Senior consultants overlap with small agencies at the top of the range. The cheaper option is a marketplace freelancer, which is a different product.
Can a consultant handle Google, Microsoft, Meta and LinkedIn at once?
For one company, yes, and it is better that way: one measurement layer and one person deciding where the next pound goes. What a consultant cannot do is produce creative at agency volume.
Will you tell me if my current agency is doing a good job?
Yes, in writing. A fair audit that confirms the agency is competent is still useful: it tells you where the remaining gains are and gives you specific questions for the next review.
Related services
Tell me about the account
Spend band, site and what is not working. You get a straight answer on whether I can help, what I would do first and a price range. No proposal deck, no sales follow-up sequence.