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 media budget do I need before hiring 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.

Keep the two figures apart on every quote you receive, because the media budget buys clicks and goes to Google while the fee buys someone's attention and goes to the person you hire, and a quote that bundles them into one number is hiding which half is which. Google Ads lets you set an average daily budget per campaign and change it whenever you like, so the figure that decides the hire is the one you can hold every month rather than the one you can afford once, and the floor sits where a management fee starts rivalling the media budget it is supposed to manage.

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.

Freelancer, agency or in-house, which one for my budget?

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.

In-house is the fourth option and people skip it because a salary looks enormous written next to a retainer. The fair comparison is a full working week against the few days a month an outside manager actually spends in your account, so in-house starts to win when you run several channels continuously or paid media sits close enough to revenue that you cannot tolerate a handover gap, and it loses badly on a single Search account where the work does not fill a week. Whichever way you go, the accounts stay in the business's name, so a resignation costs you a recruitment round rather than your history.

What should I ask a paid media freelancer before hiring?

Ask about measurement before you ask about experience. The one test that filters the field faster than any portfolio is written up in how to brief a Google Ads freelancer, so I will not repeat it here beyond its shape: you ask what fires when a lead comes in on your website, and you listen for whether the candidate traces the chain or reaches for audiences and creative in the first sentence.

Three more questions earn their place. Who owns the Google Ads account, and at what level do I hold access, given that Google's own list runs to five access levels and only an admin can grant access, change someone else's level or link a manager account. Is the fee flat or a share of my spend, and what happens to it if I double the budget. And what would you refuse to do in my account, which separates someone with an opinion from someone with a pitch. Expect the good candidates to ask what your media budget is and what a customer is worth before they quote, because a fee named before either number is priced off your logo rather than your account.

How do I check their track record without being fooled?

Screenshots of clicks and impressions prove very little, since both numbers rise whenever anyone raises a budget. Ask instead for the change history from an account they ran, the log Google Ads keeps of what changed, who changed it and when, which shows whether the work described in the reports actually happened and at what rhythm, and for a report covering enquiries and cost per lead across a stretch long enough to include a bad month.

Case studies quoting ROAS, return on ad spend, and CPA, cost per acquisition, are worth reading and worth one question: what was the conversion action counting? A tag firing on page load produces a beautiful ROAS for a business that received nothing, which is why the three receipts is the standard to hold a candidate to before you sign. One request should be refused, and the refusal is the good sign, because a freelancer who walks you through another client's live account is telling you what they will do with yours. Anonymised evidence and a reference you can phone are the reasonable versions of that ask.

What should the first month look like?

Measurement comes first and campaigns come second. A competent first month opens with someone checking what your conversion actions actually count, repairing what is broken, and telling you which of your historical numbers can be trusted, and only then rebuilding campaigns. By the end of it you should be able to open the change history yourself and find dated work rather than a burst of activity the day before the invoice, and you should have a report that reconciles against your own record of calls and forms even when the reconciliation is ugly, because an honest ugly number in month one is what makes month three readable. If the tracking was repaired along the way, expect the campaign numbers to look worse before they look better, since Google's automated bidding optimises toward whatever the conversion action counts and re-learns slowly once that data changes.

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.

• Is your media budget above the floor? · settle this first

  Below roughly R7,500 a month, hire nobody and do a once-off setup properly.

• Do you know what a customer is worth? · settle this first

  Every later judgement depends on this one number.

• Freelancer, agency or fractional? · settle this first

  Cost and directness, breadth and cover, or senior decisions. Pick the shortage you actually have.

• Does your measurement survive checking? · the one people skip

  Fix this before you judge anyone's campaigns, including your own.

• Does the business own its accounts? · the one people skip

  Settle ownership before the first invoice, not after the first argument.

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.

If you are an agency short a person rather than a business hiring one, the freelance and white-label page is the one you want. If you are a business that would rather have this run than explained, paid media is where that work sits.

Whichever way you go, you can tell the arrangement is working when the account is still in your name and the report still reconciles against your own inbox.