Google Ads agency or freelancer for a D2C brand: which should you hire?

A small D2C brand should hire a freelancer or a specialist when its Google Ads budget is small and the account is simple: Search and Shopping, one or two product lines, one person who can check the work. It should hire an agency when the account needs more than one skill at once: Google, Meta, marketplaces, creative and tracking, all pointed at the same sales number.

The deciding factor is whether anyone on your side can tell if the work is good.

A freelancer is the right hire when you can judge the work

A freelancer costs less and you get one person who knows your account. The risk is also one person. If they fall ill, move on, or take on too many clients, your account sits still.

Hire a freelancer when:

• Your monthly Google Ads spend is small and mostly Search and Shopping.
• You or someone on your team can read a search terms report and a conversion report.
• You own the Google Ads account, the Merchant Center and GA4 from day one, so you can move without losing history.

An agency is the right hire when Google is only one of your channels

Most D2C brands do not sell only through Google. They sell on their own site, on Amazon or Flipkart, and through Meta. If one person runs Google, another runs Meta and a third runs Amazon, nobody owns the number that matters, which is profit per order across all of them.

An agency earns its fee when one team moves budget to wherever the product sells. If the Google Ads fee is bigger than the extra profit the work adds, you have hired the wrong size.

Fees: ask for the fee separate from the ad budget

Your ad budget goes to Google. The fee goes to whoever manages it. Ask for both numbers, written separately, and ask what the fee covers.

Our own plan, for reference: a fixed fee of ₹25,000 a month plus GST, which is half our usual rate, plus 5% to 10% of marketplace revenue, set per brand. That fee covers ads on every platform we run for you, including Meta and Google for your own site. Additional services cost extra. The ad budget is never part of it.

Five questions to ask before you hire either

1. Who will actually manage my account, and how many other accounts do they run? A name and a number.
2. Do I own the ad account, Merchant Center and GA4? The answer must be yes.
3. How do you handle Shopping and Performance Max feed quality and conversion tracking? A good answer is specific. A bad one is "we optimise".
4. What will you report each month, and is it profit or only ROAS? ROAS ignores returns, shipping and fees.
5. What is the plan for the first 90 days? A plan with checkpoints, not a promise of a ROAS figure.

Ask for a case study from your own category

Ask for a recent case in a category close to yours, with the order value and margin stated. A ROAS screenshot with no margin tells you nothing about whether the brand made money.

Our view

Start with the cheapest option that has someone who can check the work. Move to an agency when Google stops being the whole story, because the question then becomes where the next rupee of budget should go.

If you want a view on your own account, see how we run Google Ads for D2C brands or website and marketplace ads as one team, or write to us on the contact page.