PPC Agency, Freelancer or In House: Which Suits Your Store?

Key Takeaways

• IT Jobs Watch reported a £45,000 median UK PPC Manager salary from 20 quoted vacancies in the six months to 21 September 2026, with the London median at £60,000.
• Employer National Insurance and the minimum pension take that salary to about £52,162.80 a year before recruitment, tools or training, and to roughly £59,163 in year one on our modelling assumptions.
• YunoJuno puts the average UK Biddable Manager day rate at £367, so one day a month is £4,404 a year and four days a month is £17,616.
• Of the Google Ads accounts we have inherited, 95% were owned by the previous agency or freelancer rather than the merchant, which is the first thing we put right.
• At £3,000 a month of ad spend, a modelled in house hire costs more than the entire media budget, while at £50,000 a month the three models sit much closer together.
• The models buy different shapes of resource, so the right question is which skills your store is missing, not which invoice is smallest.

Quick Answer

For most small and medium ecommerce businesses, an agency or an experienced freelancer costs less than employing a PPC manager, because you buy only the resource the account needs. In house becomes more attractive as ad spend, catalogue complexity and the need for daily commercial coordination grow. For a growing store the strongest answer is often hybrid: keep stock, margin and promotion decisions in house, and use a specialist for Search, Shopping, Performance Max, feeds and tracking.

Table of Contents

• The Three Options at a Glance
• What Each Option Really Costs in the UK
• The Skills an Ecommerce Account Needs
• Control, Speed and Knowledge of Your Products
• Risk: Holidays, Handovers and Single Points of Failure
• Who Should Own the Google Ads and Merchant Center Accounts
• The Hybrid Model
• How to Decide
• Red Flags When Hiring Any of the Three
• Why Matters Perspective
• Frequently Asked Questions
• Final Thoughts
• Related Articles

There are three obvious ways to run PPC for an ecommerce store, and all three can be right. A store spending £3,000 a month on Google Ads rarely needs a full time PPC manager, while a retailer spending £50,000 a month across Google, Microsoft and Meta may find that a few freelance days a month cannot keep up. This guide puts real UK numbers against each option, then looks at the things the numbers miss: skills, commercial context, risk and who ends up owning your accounts.

The Three Options at a Glance

Those three numbers are not comparable, which is the first trap in this decision. A day rate buys a day, an agency retainer buys an agreed service, and a salary buys a person's working year. Choosing on the smallest headline number usually produces the wrong answer, so the sections below compare what each option costs over a year, what it can actually do, and what happens when something goes wrong.

What Each Option Really Costs in the UK

IT Jobs Watch reported a median UK PPC Manager salary of £45,000 for the six months to 21 September 2026, with a 25th percentile of £42,500, a 75th percentile of £47,500 and a 90th percentile of £60,000. That sample contained only 20 quoted salaries, so we use it as a planning benchmark rather than a definitive market rate, and it is worth noting that the London median in the same data was £60,000 against £45,000 for the UK excluding London.

A salary is only the start of the cost. HMRC sets employer National Insurance at 15% on earnings above the £5,000 secondary threshold for 2026 to 2027, which adds £6,000 on a £45,000 salary. GOV.UK says employers must pay at least 3% of qualifying earnings into a workplace pension, which under most schemes means earnings between £6,240 and £50,270, adding £1,162.80 more. Eligible employers can offset some of the National Insurance through Employment Allowance, worth up to £10,500 in 2026 to 2027, although it applies to the whole payroll rather than to one hire.

That total still excludes recruitment, equipment, software, training, bonuses and management time. Rather than invent an industry average, our model adds two stated assumptions: £5,000 of first year recruitment and £2,000 a year for tools and training. Those are our planning figures, not published benchmarks, and they produce an illustrative £59,163 in year one and £54,163 in later years.

YunoJuno puts the average UK day rate for a Biddable Manager, its term for paid media and PPC contractors, at £367, with experienced rates spanning roughly £250 to £600 a day. One day a month therefore costs £4,404 a year, two days £8,808 and four days £17,616. Agencies sit between the two models: our research into UK PPC agency costs found 25 providers publishing entry prices between £145 and £1,500 a month, with a £650 median.

A starting price is no use for modelling £50,000 of monthly media, so the comparison below uses one provider from that sample with published spend tiers, PPC Vibe: £1,200 a month up to about £10,000 of spend, £1,600 from £10,000 to £50,000 plus 3% of spend above £20,000, and £2,500 at £50,000 or more plus 2% above that. It is one real published structure rather than an average, and the freelance days are our illustration of what different accounts might need.

The pattern matters more than any single figure. At £3,000 a month of ad spend, the modelled hire costs more than the media budget it manages, which is why a dedicated PPC employee is hard to justify at that level unless the same person also runs email, SEO, marketplaces or merchandising. At £15,000 a month the outside options still cost less, but the gap has narrowed against a £180,000 media budget, and at £50,000 a month the difference between the three models is small next to £600,000 of spend, so capability matters far more than the invoice.

The models also do not buy equal amounts of labour. An employee may give you more than 200 working days a year, a freelancer on four days a month gives you 48, and an agency gives you fewer hours but from several specialists. Read the table as a guide to what each model costs, not as a ranking.

The Skills an Ecommerce Account Needs

Ecommerce PPC is not one skill. Search needs intent, keywords, match types, negatives, ad copy and landing page relevance. Shopping and Performance Max add a second layer, because Google says Shopping ads use Merchant Center product data, not keywords, to decide how and where products appear, which makes product titles, images, prices, availability, identifiers, categories, custom labels and disapprovals part of the advertising job rather than admin.

Measurement is a third skill. For Shopify stores using Google's Google and YouTube app, some conversion actions can be set up automatically, but somebody still has to confirm the numbers match the orders in Shopify, check for duplicate purchase events and make sure consent is handled. Analytics is a fourth: a 5x return on ad spend on a product at 20% margin can be worth less than 3.5x on a product at 60%, and only someone with the margin data can tell. Creative is a fifth, and Performance Max, YouTube and paid social all increase how much of it an account consumes.

Job titles hide a lot here. In the same IT Jobs Watch sample, 8 of the 20 PPC Manager adverts mentioned ecommerce and only 2 mentioned Shopify, so a hire with the right title will not necessarily arrive knowing Merchant Center, feeds or Shopify tracking. Ask every candidate, freelancer or agency the same practical questions about the parts of the job your store actually depends on.

Control, Speed and Knowledge of Your Products

This is where in house has its clearest advantage. An internal marketer knows this morning that twelve products are nearly out of stock, that a competitor has launched a sale, that the new collection goes live tomorrow and that a supplier delay affects three lines, and can act on all of it before lunch. An external partner only knows any of that if somebody tells them, which is why the hand over of commercial context matters more than the resourcing model itself.

Share gross and contribution margin, stock cover, best sellers, launches, seasonal ranges, the promotional calendar, returns rates and customer lifetime value, and an agency or freelancer can make the same decisions an internal manager would. Withhold it and they will optimise to the only numbers they can see, which is usually revenue and return on ad spend. Control and capability are also different things: when a Merchant Center feed breaks, an in house manager still has to know how to fix it, while an agency with a feed specialist and a Shopify developer can often resolve it the same day.

Risk: Holidays, Handovers and Single Points of Failure

Every model has a failure mode. A freelancer is a single person, so holiday, illness or a busy month can leave the account unattended, and the protection is practical rather than contractual: own the accounts, keep reporting accessible, use campaign names somebody else can follow and document the tracking setup. You should never need somebody else's laptop to understand your own advertising.

An employee can leave too, and often takes more undocumented knowledge with them, particularly when one person holds all the admin access, the dashboards are personal and nobody else understands the feed. Agencies spread that risk across a team, but introduce account manager churn instead, so ask who does the day to day work, who covers holidays, what happens if your contact leaves and whether the strategy is documented internally. A team is only an advantage if knowledge survives a handover.

Who Should Own the Google Ads and Merchant Center Accounts

Your business should, and this is the least negotiable point in the article. Of the Google Ads accounts we have inherited from other providers, 95% were owned by the previous agency or freelancer rather than by the merchant, which usually means the merchant cannot see historic performance, cannot change billing and cannot leave without losing conversion history.

Google says that when a manager account links to an existing client account, the client account and its history are unchanged and existing users keep their access, so linking alone does not hand over ownership. Google also says the client account continues to own its data even where a manager has ownership privileges, and that access ends when the manager is unlinked. Because some critical actions need administrative access, keep at least one, preferably two, administrator logins on company email addresses. The same applies to Merchant Center, where administrators can add, remove and edit users and connect or disconnect apps and shops.

Before signing with anyone, agree in writing who creates each account, which company email owns it, whether you keep administrator access, who controls billing, Merchant Center, GA4, Tag Manager and any feed software, and what happens at handover. If the answer is that the supplier handles all of that for you, keep asking until you have names and access levels.

The Hybrid Model

The agency against in house debate assumes you must choose, and for a growing store you usually should not. In a hybrid, the internal marketer owns the commercial calendar, promotions, stock, margin, launches, briefing and approvals, while the external specialist owns campaign structure, Search, Shopping, Performance Max, feed optimisation, Merchant Center, bidding and tracking diagnosis. A Shopify developer or technical partner covers the third layer: theme changes, tracking fixes, landing pages, feed implementation and checkout issues.

The split works because each side answers a different question. In house answers what we should sell and why, the PPC specialist answers how to acquire the customer efficiently, and the development or CRO side answers what needs changing on the store to convert the traffic. That is usually easier to buy than one person who is genuinely excellent at all three.

How to Decide

There is no exact spend at which a store should switch models, so use spend alongside catalogue complexity and the capability you already have internally.

These are prompts, not rules. A £60,000 a month account can be run well by one senior consultant, and a £4,000 account can justify an agency when tracking is broken, Merchant Center is a mess, several countries are involved or nobody internally has run paid media before. Choose a freelancer when you know which specialist skill you need and one person can carry the account; choose an agency when you need several disciplines, holiday cover, feed expertise, analytics or creative; hire in house when paid media is central to the business and there is genuinely enough work to fill the role.

Red Flags When Hiring Any of the Three

The same warning signs apply whether you are interviewing an agency, a freelancer or a candidate:

1. You cannot access your own account. Administrative access should sit with the business from day one.
2. Reporting stops at clicks. An ecommerce account is judged on orders, revenue, margin, acquisition cost and new customers.
3. Guaranteed return on ad spend. Nobody controls competitors, conversion rate, stock or the auction, so targets and forecasts are fine but guarantees deserve scrutiny.
4. Long lock ins without a reason. A minimum term can be fair when real setup work is involved, but check the notice period, break clause and handover terms first.
5. Merchant Center never comes up. For an ecommerce account that is a serious gap, because Shopping and Performance Max run on product data.
6. Nobody asks about margin. Without it, the account will be optimised towards revenue rather than profit.
7. One person claims every skill. PPC, SEO, email, CRO, development, design, tracking, feeds, analytics and creative are separate crafts, so ask for evidence in the ones your store needs.

Why Matters Perspective

The neat version of this comparison says freelancers are cheap, agencies are flexible and in house gives control. What we actually see is that the models cover different amounts of the problem. An ecommerce PPC account touches Shopify, Merchant Center, feeds, analytics, tracking, consent, stock, margin, landing pages and creative, so a £45,000 employee is not automatically more capable than a £1,500 a month agency. The employee gives you far more hours; the agency gives you fewer hours from more specialists; a good freelancer can give you the strongest individual of the three for the least money.

The decision should therefore start with the capability you are missing. If you already have a strong ecommerce manager who knows stock, promotions and margins, you may not need another generalist marketer, you need a paid media specialist. If nobody internally understands feeds, tracking or analytics, one freelance day a month will not fill that gap. And whichever model you choose, fix the ownership first: 95% of the accounts we inherit were owned by the previous supplier, which is a problem the merchant only discovers at the worst possible moment.

For our own PPC clients, work is scoped around the account, billing is a month in arrears, there are no long contracts, and we start with a free Google Ads account review. The review is useful because the problem often is not PPC at all. It is a feed, a tracking setup, a Shopify issue or a landing page that cannot convert the traffic you are already paying for.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is it cheaper to hire a PPC freelancer or an agency?

A freelancer is usually cheaper where you need a limited amount of senior time. YunoJuno puts the average UK Biddable Manager day rate at £367, so two days a month is about £8,808 a year, while our sample of published UK agency prices found starting fees from £145 to £1,500 a month. Scope matters more than the rate, because an agency fee can cover several specialists.

How much does an in house PPC manager cost in the UK?

IT Jobs Watch reported a £45,000 median UK PPC Manager salary from 20 quoted vacancies in the six months to 21 September 2026. Adding employer National Insurance at 15% above £5,000 and the minimum 3% employer pension takes the basic cost to about £52,163 a year, before recruitment, software, equipment and training.

When should an ecommerce business bring PPC in house?

When paid media is big enough to fill the role and the account needs constant coordination with stock, margins, launches and promotions. Below that point, the same money usually buys more capability from a specialist freelancer or agency, because a single hire rarely covers Search, Shopping, feeds, tracking and creative.

Can a freelancer manage Google Shopping and Performance Max well?

Yes, if they genuinely specialise in ecommerce paid media and know Merchant Center, product feeds and conversion tracking. The distinction is expertise, not employment status, so ask how they handle feed disapprovals, product segmentation and tracking checks before hiring.

Should I own my Google Ads account if an agency runs it?

Yes. Your business should hold administrator access while the agency works through its own manager account. Of the Google Ads accounts we have inherited, 95% were owned by the previous agency or freelancer, which is the first thing we put right when we take an account on.

Can I use an agency and an in house marketer together?

Yes, and for growing stores it is often the strongest option. The in house marketer owns stock, promotions, margins and priorities, while the agency or freelancer owns campaign structure, feeds, Merchant Center and tracking, which gives the specialist the commercial context they would otherwise lack.

How long should I give a new PPC partner before judging results?

It depends on account history, spend, conversion volume and how much needs rebuilding. Google suggests allowing Performance Max campaigns at least six weeks of data before judging performance, and any partner should be able to explain what they are changing, which early indicators they watch and when a fair commercial review can happen.

Final Thoughts

The best resourcing model is rarely the one with the smallest invoice. At lower spend, a freelancer or specialist agency gives a store expertise it could not afford to employ. As spend and complexity grow, internal knowledge becomes more valuable, but that usually means adding commercial context rather than replacing the specialists.

Keep product knowledge, stock, margins and priorities inside the business, buy the skills you do not need every day, and make sure the Google Ads account, Merchant Center account and the data stay with you whatever happens next. If you would like a second opinion on how your account is resourced, ask for a free Google Ads account review.

Related Articles

• How Much Does a PPC Agency Cost in the UK?
• Top 10 PPC Marketing Agencies in the UK
• How to Choose the Best Shopify Development Company for Your Business
• What Is the Shopify Partner Program and Why Should You Hire a Shopify Partner Agency?
• What UK Shopify Agencies Publish About Their Pricing
• How to Get More Traffic to Your Shopify Store: A Practical Guide
• Your First 90 Days: A Marketing Plan for New Shopify Stores