Hiring help,
without the sales theater.
Nearly everything written about hiring a paid media agency is written by agencies who want to be hired. We are one of those, so treat this collection with appropriate suspicion — and then check whether the claims in it are falsifiable, because we have tried to make them so.
Real cost ranges with the reasoning behind them. An honest comparison of pricing models including where percentage-of-spend misaligns incentives. When a freelancer is genuinely the better answer, and when in-house beats any agency. The questions that separate operators from account managers with a deck.
If you are mid-way through a bad engagement rather than starting a new one, the account standards piece gives you something concrete to measure your current agency against.
How to choose a performance marketing agency.
Most agency selection is a pitch-deck beauty contest. The falsifiable questions to ask instead — about measurement, incentives, access, and reporting — and the red flags that predict regret.
How much does a Google Ads agency cost in 2026?
Google Ads management is priced four different ways, and the right one depends almost entirely on your spend tier. A neutral guide to what agencies charge, how each model behaves as you scale, and the pricing structures that predict a bad relationship.
How much does a Facebook Ads agency cost in 2026?
A Facebook Ads agency costs more to run than a search agency at the same spend, because the deliverable is a stream of creative, not a keyword tree. What the market charges, how creative production shows up in the fee, and what to verify before you sign.
PPC management pricing models, compared.
The four ways PPC management is priced, compared on the only axis that matters: what each model pays the agency to do. The incentives, the failure modes, and the spend tiers where each structure earns its keep.
Freelancer, expert, or agency: who should actually run your ads?
"Google Ads expert" and "Google Ads agency" are usually typed by the same person on the same afternoon, and they lead to very different places. Here is what each option is genuinely good at, the spend range where each stops making sense, and the failure mode specific to each.
In-house vs agency: the honest comparison.
In-house teams win on context and focus; agencies win on cross-account pattern exposure and infrastructure. The honest cost math, where each model breaks, and the hybrid most scaling brands converge on.
Questions to ask before hiring an ads agency.
Agency selection is usually a pitch-deck beauty contest. Here are the falsifiable questions — about measurement, incentives, ownership, creative, and reporting — that reveal whether you are hiring an operator or a marketing department.
How much should you spend on ads?
There is a minimum spend below which paid media cannot learn, and a maximum beyond which marginal returns go negative. How to find both numbers for your business, and the cadence for moving between them.
What good looks like: our standards for a healthy paid-media account.
Most advice about paid media is tactical and contradictory. Far more useful is a clear standard for what a healthy account looks like structurally, so you can measure any account against it. This is the checklist we hold our own work to.
The first 90 days: how we approach a foundation rebuild.
The interesting work in paid media, the bid strategy and creative testing and audience expansion, only compounds once the foundations are right. So our first 90 days on any account are deliberately spent on the unglamorous work first. Here is the sequence.
The high-spend monthly review, done properly.
A monthly review of a six-figure ad budget should not be a dashboard tour. It should interrogate the blended scoreboard, the marginal dollar, measurement integrity, structural hygiene, and next month’s allocation — in that order. The agenda we actually run.
Reading is the cheap part.
Strategic input, not full retainer.
For brands that want senior strategic input without full retainer engagement. Quarterly planning, growth diagnostics, and exec-level advisory.
View serviceA Google Ads agency run by senior operators.
Full-service Google Ads management across Search, Shopping, Performance Max, and YouTube, run by senior Google Ads specialists. AI-amplified, $200M+ in managed spend.
View serviceA Meta ads agency built for creative-driven scale.
Meta ads management for brands that need profitable scale. Facebook and Instagram campaign architecture, creative testing, and server-side measurement run by senior specialists.
View service