Hiring for paid media: the complete guide

Hiring help for Google Ads goes wrong when people start in the middle, usually by picking an agency before they have settled a budget or learnt what the work should cost. This page puts the whole journey in order, from budget to brief to vetting to firing well, and links a full guide for each step.

Read it top to bottom if you are hiring for the first time, or jump to the step you are stuck on. Every guide is written so you can act on it without paying anyone, including me.

• 1Settle the media budget
• 2Learn what management should cost
• 3Choose freelancer, agency or fractional
• 4Write a brief that protects you
• 5Judge the work with your own eyes
• 6Leave well if it fails

How much should I spend before I hire anyone?

Budget comes first because it decides whether hiring makes sense at all. How much should I spend on Google Ads? works the arithmetic from your target leads backwards, using cost per click and a clicks-per-lead assumption, with worked examples clearly labelled as examples. It also carries my standing rule: below roughly R7,500 per month in media spend, around $400 to $500, you should pay no management fee at all, because the fee eats the budget that was supposed to buy clicks.

What should management actually cost?

Before you take a single sales call, learn the market. What Google Ads management costs in South Africa breaks down local pricing models, including percentage-of-spend fees, which commonly land somewhere between 10 and 20 percent, and where each model quietly misaligns incentives. For reference, my own management runs R6,500 to R10,500 per month.

If you are hiring across borders, Google Ads management costs in the UK, US and Australia does the same exercise for the three markets South African businesses most often buy from or sell into. Reading both tells you immediately when a quote is out of line in either direction.

Who should I hire: a freelancer, an agency, or someone fractional?

Freelancer vs agency vs fractional paid media compares the three models honestly, including what each one is bad at, and matches them to business size and spend level. It is the page to read when every vendor you speak to insists their model happens to be the right one.

What is white-label PPC? explains the arrangement where the agency you hired quietly subcontracts your account to someone you have never met. I do white-label work myself at R5,500 to R8,500 per account locally, so this guide explains how the model works from the inside and which questions expose it when an agency will not volunteer the truth.

How do I brief the person I choose?

A good brief prevents most of the disputes that end these relationships. How to brief a Google Ads freelancer gives you the full structure, and hammers the one clause that matters most: you own the account, and the freelancer or agency works through linked manager access. Google Ads access comes in admin, standard and read-only levels, and the guide shows exactly which to grant so a departure never takes your account history with it.

How do I know whether the work is any good?

Once the campaigns are live, do not judge them on the vendor's own report. Is my ads agency doing a good job? gives you an evidence-based checklist you can run inside your own account in an afternoon. Pair it with The three receipts, the three pieces of proof that reporting matches reality, because my takeover work keeps showing why this matters: one account I inherited counted 75% of clicks as conversions because the tag fired on page load, and the monthly reports had looked wonderful throughout.

How do I fire an agency without losing everything?

Sometimes the answer to the previous question is no. We fired our marketing agency, now what? covers the exit in order: reclaiming admin access, transferring billing, and keeping the tags firing through the handover. The timing matters more than people expect, because remarketing audiences decay daily while a site runs untagged and the lost days are unrecoverable, and smart bidding degrades without conversion data and re-learns slowly once it returns. Leave well and the next hire starts from your history instead of from zero.

Where do I fit in this?

I sit in the fractional and freelance lanes myself, at R6,500 to R10,500 per month for management, $3,000 to $6,000 per month fractional, or $50 per hour for smaller jobs. I put my rates on every page because the whole point of this guide is that you should walk into any hiring conversation, including one with me, already knowing what the work costs and how to check it is being done.