Should I run Google Ads myself?

What running it yourself needs

Not cleverness, and not a course. A fixed hour every week, in the diary, for the Search Terms report: sort by cost, read what spent money without converting, add the searches that could never have bought to a negative list. A fixed half hour every month to submit your own form and make a call to your own number, then check both appeared in the account once. And the discipline to read every recommendation Google sends and decline the ones that would spend more without a reason, which is most of them.

Where self-managed accounts lose money

• The campaign wizard's defaults: broad match, display expansion, search partners, and location set to presence or interest, each of which widens where the budget goes.
• Auto-apply recommendations, left on, adding keywords and raising budgets while nobody is looking.
• The phone call from a Google representative recommending Performance Max, a higher budget and broad match, which is sales advice with the platform's incentives, not yours.
• Conversion tracking that broke when the website was updated, so the account has been optimising towards nothing for months.
• A negative list that was built once and never grew, while the match types kept letting new searches in.

The self-management checklist

1. One Search campaign, one service, one area, ten to twenty keywords at phrase and exact match.
2. A seed negative list from a generator or a sector list before the first click, in a shared list applied to the campaign.
3. Location set to presence; search partners and display expansion off; languages set; ad schedule matching the hours the phone is answered.
4. One conversion action for the form and one for calls with a minimum duration, both tested by you and counted once.
5. Auto-apply recommendations off, in the recommendations settings, and checked again after any Google call.
6. The weekly hour for Search Terms, on a fixed day, and the monthly half hour for tracking.

When to hand it over

When the spend is large enough that a month of unread Search Terms costs more than a fee, when the account needs Shopping, Performance Max, Microsoft Ads or a CRM connection that you do not want to learn, or when the weekly hour has been missed three weeks running. Handing over does not mean giving up the account: it should stay in your name, with the manager's access removable by you, and the change history should show you what they did.

A middle path

A paid, written audit of a self-managed account gives you the change list in the order to apply it, and you can apply it yourself. It is the cheapest way to find out whether the account is leaking, without committing to either answer.

Where this leads

The service this question belongs to is PPC audit, and the longer read is our guide Negative keywords: the list that decides whether your budget buys customers or curiosity.