Every B2B company running paid media eventually faces the same decision: who should actually run it? Hire in-house, appoint an agency, or bring in a consultant? The wrong choice wastes both budget and the year it takes to discover it was wrong — and the right choice depends on factors most teams never weigh up properly.
This is an honest comparison of the three models — including the trade-offs each one would rather you didn't notice. We run B2B PPC ourselves, so we have a view, but we'll tell you plainly when each model is the right call.
What good PPC management actually requires
Before comparing models, be clear about what the job involves, because most teams underestimate it. Effective B2B PPC management isn't "set up campaigns and check in monthly." It's a continuous discipline:
- Weekly search-term review and negative-keyword work to stop waste.
- Ongoing creative testing and refresh as audiences fatigue.
- Landing-page testing and conversion-rate work.
- CRM-connected measurement so bidding optimises for pipeline, not form fills.
- Strategic decisions about channel mix, budget allocation, and when to scale or cut.
That's the bar. Judge each model on whether it delivers all of it consistently — most failures come from a model that handles the setup brilliantly and the ongoing discipline poorly.
"PPC isn't won at launch. It's won in the unglamorous weekly grind of cutting waste and testing creative — which is exactly the work every model is tempted to skimp on."
In-house: control at a cost
Hiring a PPC specialist gives you control, focus, and someone who lives inside your business and CRM. They learn your product, your buyers, and your sales team, and they're available every day. For companies with consistent, substantial spend, in-house is often the right long-term home.
Where in-house wins
Deep business knowledge, full alignment with your goals, no agency markup on media, and immediate availability. When spend is high enough to justify a full salary and the work is steady, a good in-house hire is hard to beat.
Where in-house struggles
The honest problems: a single hire has one perspective and limited exposure to other accounts, so they stop learning from variety. They're expensive once you add salary, tools, and overhead. They can't easily be scaled up or down. And the genuinely senior specialists are hard to attract and retain in a single in-house seat — so you often end up paying senior money for mid-level experience, or hiring junior and hoping they grow.
Agency: scale and specialism, with a catch
Agencies bring a team, broad exposure across many accounts, established processes, and the ability to scale effort up and down. For some businesses that's exactly right. But the B2B agency model carries a structural problem every buyer should understand.
Where agencies win
Breadth of experience, more hands available, mature processes and tooling, and flexibility to scale. A good agency has seen your problem across dozens of accounts and can move fast.
The catch nobody mentions
The senior person who wins your business is rarely the person who runs your account. After the pitch, day-to-day work usually drops to a junior account executive managing many clients at once. You're paying senior rates for junior delivery, and the unglamorous weekly discipline — the part that actually wins PPC — is exactly what gets squeezed when one person juggles ten accounts. Agency incentives also tilt towards spending more media (often the basis of their fee) rather than spending it more efficiently.
Consultant: senior hands, directly
A consultant — or a senior-led consultancy — sits between the two. You get experienced specialists doing the work directly, with the breadth that comes from working across multiple businesses, without the agency layer of juniors and account managers.
Where consultants win
The person you hire is the person who does the work. They bring cross-account experience like an agency but without handing your account to a junior. They're more flexible than a full-time hire and usually cheaper than a senior salary plus overhead. And a good consultant works the weekly discipline properly because their reputation depends on results, not on retaining a roster.
Where consultants struggle
Honestly: capacity. A consultant has finite hours, so they're not the right fit if you need a large team running enormous always-on spend across many markets simultaneously. They also need access to your systems and people, so the relationship has to be genuinely collaborative rather than fully outsourced.
- Choose in-house when spend is high and steady, and you can attract and retain genuine senior talent.
- Choose an agency when you need a large team and lots of hands, and you can get a guarantee about who actually runs the account.
- Choose a consultant when you want senior expertise doing the work directly, with flexibility and no junior handover.
The hybrid that often works best
The models aren't mutually exclusive, and the best setup is frequently a blend. A common pattern: a consultant builds the strategy, sets up the account properly, and establishes the measurement, then trains or oversees an in-house person who handles day-to-day execution. You get senior strategic direction and in-house ownership without paying for either at full whack.
Another: in-house owns the channels they know, a consultant runs the ones they don't, or steps in for a specific push. Don't treat the decision as permanent or all-or-nothing — match the model to the work, and revisit it as you grow.
The questions that actually decide it
Cut through the marketing and ask these:
- Who will personally do the weekly work? Get a name and their seniority, not a team description.
- How is the fee structured? Percentage-of-spend models reward spending more; flat fees reward efficiency.
- How is success measured? If the answer is clicks and conversions rather than pipeline, walk away.
- What happens to lead quality? A model that lowers cost per lead by lowering quality is failing — see how to lower your B2B cost per lead for the difference.
Our honest view
For most B2B companies spending between roughly £5k and £50k a month on paid media, a senior consultant or consultancy gives the best return — senior hands on the work, cross-account experience, and the weekly discipline done properly, without agency markup or junior handover. Above that scale, or with truly always-on global spend, an in-house team or a blended model usually makes more sense.
We built Betts & Burton specifically to be the senior-hands option: the partners who win your business are the ones who run it. If that's the model you want, see our transparent pricing or book a discovery call and we'll give you a straight answer on whether we're the right fit — even if the answer is in-house.