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Is it me or do freelancers do a better job than marketing agencies?
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You are hiring people in both cases. There are just as many sloppy freelancers as agencies out there. Same goes for consultants. There are pros and cons to hiring from either groups but things like budget and what you are selling can play a role in which one might be a better fit for you.
We just did an account audit and a freelancer make 4 changes in 2025 on a campaign that spent $2 million dollars last year. Don’t get tricked into thinking just because you hire from X bucket, things 100% better better and mistakes won’t happen.
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>Is it me or do freelancers do a better job than marketing agencies?
We do : )
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The gap between what they report and what actually moves the needle is wild. Agency problem: they optimize for the metrics that make them look good (clicks, visits) not the ones that matter to your business. Real talk: in-house or good freelancer will always beat an agency that doesn’t have skin in your growth.
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Freelancers can definitely be stronger in a few niche PPC areas, especially on one or two platforms where they’re very hands-on.
But when it comes to running structured experiments, deeper reporting, and scaling across three or four platforms at once, agencies usually have the bandwidth and systems to handle that better — and once a freelancer starts building support around them, they’re basically becoming an agency anyway.
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Agencies usually hand off smaller accounts to junior staff once the contract is signed. Freelancers have to do a good job to keep the business because they don’t have a huge sales team to replace you. It’s mostly about who is actually clicking the buttons in the account.
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Both have there pros and cons, I think freelancers can be better for short term projects and as a support. Whereas agencies are better for a complete handoff marketing wise
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Yes, until their reputation gets so good that they get overwhelmed, start hiring and become an agency that farms it out to juniours 🙂
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Honestly this happens more than people think. Agencies can look great on reports but miss basic execution details if there is not enough oversight. Freelancers sometimes do better just because you are talking directly to the person doing the work, so there is more accountability. If you are planning to handle things yourself, I would start by simplifying the workflow. Even basic things like consistent naming, checking search terms properly, and reviewing reports weekly already make a big difference. For the repetitive stuff like reporting, a lot of people use AI just to summarize performance and spot issues faster. I have seen people combine tools like Looker Studio with AI or even experiment with things like syndrAI to keep track of conversations and performance insights in one place.
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If you want to use AI, you can ask Claude to walk you through how to create and schedule a report in Google ads to be sent to your email. It will take 5 minutes. No need for 3rd party tools.
It still pays to have a freelancer on call to review the campaigns. They’ll spot things that AI won’t. Not yet at least.
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For most small businesses there is a benefit to working with an individual as they will typically invest more time into to learning about your company and take more pride/care because the buck stops with them.
In agencies where there’s a team based approach you can get lost in the shuffle with nobody really taking ownership of your account.
For this reason I keep my agency structure flat with PPC Managers being directly responsible for client accounts… no middle men or customer service managers.
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Highly depends on the agency/team.
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The agency inflating ROAS with vanity metrics while footfall stayed flat is unfortunately the norm not the exception… agencies optimizing for metrics that look good in reports rather than metrics that actually grow your business is a structural incentive problem, not a people problem.
The core issue is agencies spread attention across dozens of accounts while a focused freelancer with skin in the game treats your account like their own. For local tools stores specifically, the gap between reported conversions and actual revenue is almost always a tracking setup problem… they were likely counting website visits or micro-conversions as sales.
On the AI tools question, automated reporting is genuinely solved now… platforms like Looker Studio pull live campaign data into dashboards automatically. But honestly the reporting was never your real problem. Bad strategy with beautiful reports is still bad strategy.
What actually moves the needle for local retail clients I work with is tighter geo targeting, store visit conversion tracking properly set up, and separating brand versus non-brand campaigns so you can see exactly what is driving new customers versus people who already know you. The accounts that consistently perform well are the ones with clean conversion tracking from day one… everything else is just noise.
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This story is painfully common. The “promising results” that don’t match real-world outcomes is the biggest red flag in agency PPC management — they’re reporting on metrics that look good in a dashboard but don’t connect to actual business results. Higher ROAS and more website visits that produce zero change in footfall means they were either counting the wrong conversions or driving junk traffic.
Wrong logo, mistyped address — that tells you nobody at the agency actually looked at your campaign after setup. They built it, turned it on, and moved on to the next client. That’s the agency model. Your account gets set up by someone senior, then handed to a junior who’s managing 30 other accounts and checking a dashboard once a week.
Before you go fully DIY, a few things to consider:
☑️Google Ads is manageable for a local tools store, but the learning curve is real. The platform wants you to spend money. Smart Campaigns, broad match defaults, auto-applied recommendations — all of it is designed to increase your spend, not your results. If you’re going to self-manage, turn off auto-applied recommendations immediately and don’t use Smart Campaigns.
☑️The first thing to fix is conversion tracking. If you’re a physical store wanting footfall, you need to make sure you’re tracking the actions that actually lead to store visits — phone calls, direction requests, store locator clicks. Not just “website visits.” The agency was probably counting page views as conversions, which is why the numbers looked great and the store stayed empty.
☑️On AI tools for reporting: Google Ads has built-in reporting that’s decent for a single-account operator. Looker Studio (free) connects directly to your Google Ads data and builds automated reports. For a single local store, you don’t need a fancy reporting tool — you need to track the 3-4 metrics that actually matter to your business and ignore everything else.
The freelancer route is the right instinct. One person who actually looks at your account and whose reputation depends on your results will always outperform a team of 15 where nobody’s accountable.
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