The real cost of doing it yourself

Running your own advertising is free in the sense that nobody invoices you. Here is an honest account of what it costs, including the cases where doing it yourself is genuinely the right call.

We sell this service, so treat the whole thing with appropriate suspicion. We have tried to write the version we would want to read if the positions were reversed.

The time, specifically

Setup. The first campaign takes most people somewhere between six and fifteen hours, spread over a fortnight. Account structure, pixel, conversion tracking, audiences, creative, a landing page or form. Most of that time is spent finding out what the options mean rather than making decisions.

The first month. Three to five hours a week, because everything needs checking and most of what you set up was wrong in some small way.

Steady state. Two to four hours a week if you are doing it properly. Checking search terms, adding negatives, refreshing creative before fatigue sets in, reading the numbers, adjusting budgets.

Creative. An hour or two a month minimum if you are taking the photos yourself, which you should be.

Call it ten hours in month one and eight to twelve a month after that. Those hours come out of evenings for most owners, because the working day is already spoken for.

The money you do not see

The learning period. Your first campaign will waste money. Not through incompetence, through the ordinary cost of finding out which audiences and creative work. An agency has made those mistakes on somebody else’s account already.

Keyword waste. Most self managed Google accounts spend a meaningful share on searches that were never going to buy, because the search terms report is not a habit yet. This one is big and it is invisible unless you look.

Running the wrong objective. Boosting instead of campaigning, optimizing for engagement instead of leads. Easy mistake, expensive, and the numbers look fine while it happens.

Creative fatigue nobody noticed. The campaign quietly got worse over two months and the explanation was “the market”.

Where doing it yourself genuinely wins

This is the part most agency content leaves out.

You know the work. You know what customers actually ask, what they are afraid of, what the objection is. That is worth more than any amount of platform skill and it is the hardest thing for an agency to replicate.

You can photograph the job. Every day, for free. That alone solves the creative problem that most campaigns die of.

You can react immediately. Weather, a competitor closing, a sudden gap in the calendar. No email, no approval, no waiting.

Small budgets. Below a certain spend, a management fee is a large share of the total. If you are spending $400 a month on ads, paying $499 to manage it is not sensible for you and we would say so.

You find it interesting. Some owners genuinely enjoy it, get good at it, and should carry on. Nothing here applies to them.

Where it usually falls down

Not skill. Attention.

The account does not fail because somebody set it up wrong. It fails because month four arrives, work gets busy, nobody opens the account for three weeks, creative goes stale, search terms drift, and the cost per lead climbs with no obvious cause.

That is the actual product an agency sells. Not cleverness, consistency. Somebody whose job it is to look at it on a Tuesday whether or not you are busy.

If you can guarantee you will look at it every week in your busiest month, you probably do not need us. Most people cannot, and that is not a character flaw, it is what running a business is like.

The comparison nobody puts in the table

Ten hours a month of your evenings. Put whatever number on that you like. Most owners, when they do, find it is not far off a management fee, and it is time taken from the part of the business only they can do.

That is the comparison worth making. Not agency fee against zero, but agency fee against ten hours and a learning period.

What we would actually say

If your budget is under about $500 a month, run it yourself. The fee does not make sense at that size and we will tell you so on the call.

If you are spending more than that, have tried managing it and keep losing the thread when work gets busy, that is exactly the problem we solve and it is worth the money.

If you are spending more than that and enjoying it and the numbers are fine, carry on. We would rather tell you that than sell you something you do not need.