In-house vs Outsourcing Google Ads: The Opportunities and The Dangers

Owning and mastering their creative, tone of voice, and other brand elements were their competitive edge. It catapulted a great company into stardom.

That’s such an important perspective when thinking of what areas you should have in-house. If the area is so important for your business that it’s a competitive edge, then outsourcing it will undoubtedly cause problems in the long term.

Another take is that when you take areas that are considered “competitive edges” in-house, you will invest more resources into building that skill. As a result, it will increase the return of having that skill internally.

In-House Teams Have the Advantage of Rarely Being Limited on Time

They’re part of the business meetings. They eat, breathe, and sleep the products they’re selling.

So when they see a good idea, they’re much more likely to relate it to their own company and think of a way to use it.

That’s something you don’t get with most agencies.

In-house teams are almost always better at thinking outside the box on broader topics.

At an agency, you buy a specific framework. In some circumstances, that framework is specifically to help you think outside the box. But often it’s not. I’ve seen in-house people come up with initiatives that we would have never suggested.

It All Depends on Size

You can’t talk about outsourcing vs. in-house without touching on company size.

Because the size of the company is a huge factor whether you can successfully hire and keep in-house talent.

I know many people who have gone in-house and have loved it.

I know many who have gone in-house and ran away screaming.

The same thing goes for the agency-side of course.

In many cases, the size of the company pertained to whether they liked working in-house or not.

The bigger the company, the more work there is and the more exciting tasks there are.

The smaller the company, the more you’ll stagnate in a specialized position, so having a wide area of responsibility is key.

It’s Not All Sunshine and Butterflies

Now it’s my turn to put on my agency hat and talk a bit about the negatives.

This isn’t meant to dissuade you from going the in-house route. This is meant for you to understand some of the challenges of hiring in-house teams.

The Best In-House Employees Get Bored

This is very paradoxical. Unless you are the Momondos, Nikes, or Caspers of the world, then your in-house staff will get bored doing the same thing year after year. This means that they will have a healthy sense of expanding their responsibilities to other areas of your business, which is awesome!

And it’s exactly what you want from your star in-house marketers.

But it also means that there will be less focus on what they were supposed to take care of originally. All those low-end tasks that you were saving so much money on by not hiring an agency to oversee are now not being done at all.

This is a major struggle for many in-house positions.

Duh, Andrew – Just Hire a Junior!

The common solution is to go for hiring a Junior. And that will work in some cases.

But it’s not a magic pill.

I’ll just shortlist some of the challenges:

• The Senior PPC specialist is not great at teaching others, so performance decreases.
• The Senior is not great at managing a Junior, which creates tension, and the Senior is left overwhelmed.
• The original expense is now increased by 50 to70 percent and might mean an agency was a better ROI.
• The Junior hire makes major mistakes that the Senior must clean up (if she even catches the mistakes), which again leaves the Senior overwhelmed.

And more. These are scenarios that great agencies have perfected. The internal processes to hire, train, and manage are at the core of a great agency. The same can’t be said for  all in-house teams.

Hiring In-House Can Be Detrimental to Your Business

I’ve reviewed accounts for very well-known eCommerce companies where the entire Google Ads setup was made up of Dynamic Search Ads and limited Google Shopping campaigns, which isn’t good. They were growing year-over-year and hitting ROAS targets.

But it could be so much more.

I’m not the kind of person who says that all accounts should run on our framework. I routinely praise in-house teams for thinking outside the box and not just succumbing to “best practices.”

But sometimes, the setups are just not good enough and scream for an external second look.

Stimulate In-House Teams & Don’t Let Sit in a Silo

This might be the biggest challenge with in-house teams. All the positives that come with them,  like added business knowledge, a love for writing inspiring ad copy, and a lower cost of executing are lost when all they do is Google Ads. They get bored. They don’t get new ideas on what to do. They don’t get inspired. They don’t get feedback or receive any sparring. Everything will be the first time they see something.

Just in the last month, I’ve opened two in-house accounts where they couldn’t figure out why performance was declining. In both cases, I solved it in five minutes during the initial assessment.

One had a redirect error on their home page, and the other had missed setting up referral exclusions when they changed their payment gateway.

In the latter example, this had meant a net loss of 10,000+ conversions over four months. Not just in untracked conversions, but because the entire account ran on Smart Bidding. This meant that bids had been drastically decreased due to the lack of conversions.

These are the kinds of scenarios, along with many more, that you become intimately familiar with when you work in an agency setting.

It’s not because you’re smarter. It’s because you have seen almost everything before. And when you haven’t seen something before, then you have multiple people internally—and externally—that you can spar with to get other perspectives on how to solve the issue.

I couldn’t find the person behind this picture, but I want to credit that person.

A 1-to-1 Relationship of Salary vs. Fees Won’t Stick

Especially smaller companies look at the agency fee and compare it to an in-house position thinking that they can get so much more out of that position if they hired someone internally.

At SavvyRevenue, we joke that the best clients are established companies who have:

1. Tried to run Google Ads internally
2. Hired one to two agencies before
3. Tried to run Google Ads again
4. And then have given up

Because they know the grass isn’t greener. Our worst-case client is almost always one that hasn’t tried anyone else before. Because we know they’ll cancel within 12-18 months because of the “the grass is greener” effect.

But equating paying a full-time employee salary to an agency, then you’re likely to get someone in-house that misses the point.

At an agency, you (should) be buying the competencies of the entire agency:

• The intellectual property they produce
• The scripts they make
• The tools they have
• The founding team members
• The specialists across various functions

That’s what should be getting when you hire a great PPC agency. Not just the individual working on your account.

Andrew, now you’re just bashing in-house teams

As we read this article internally before publishing, we knew that almost everyone reading this article would already see me as being negative about in-house teams.

I’m not.

I love them.

At the size SavvyRevenue is in 2020, I wouldn’t take many of the clients on that normally would require an in-house team. Assigning 1-2 full-time people to a single client would simply be too much of a risk for us.

But I think many companies have a very one-sided idea of what it takes to manage in-house marketing employees. The resources it takes to attract them, keep them motivated, improve their skills and getting the most out of them are not on the lighter side.

Especially on the side of motivating and improving their skills, we have a couple of suggestions listed in priority: