Yes, and for a very small budget you probably should. Below roughly $1,000 a month in ad spend, an agency fee eats the budget that should be buying clicks. Learn the basics, run a tight search campaign on your own name and two or three core services, and come back when the account is spending enough that a few percentage points of improvement outweighs the management cost.

Google's automation genuinely handles bidding better than a human with a spreadsheet. What it does not do is decide what a conversion is worth to you, notice that half your leads are junk, write the offer, fix the landing page, or stop Performance Max from quietly spending your money on people already searching your brand name. Automation runs the levers. Someone still has to point it at the right target.

Enough to buy a statistically meaningful number of clicks in your category each month. In expensive lead-gen categories where a click runs $20 to $50, a budget under about $1,500 a month collects data too slowly to optimise against. In cheaper categories, a few hundred a month can work. The wrong way to set a budget is to pick a round number; the right way is to work backwards from what a customer is worth to you.

A good freelancer is cheaper and often more responsive. An agency gives you coverage when one person is on holiday, and usually more eyes on the account. The real question is not agency versus freelancer, it is whether the person managing your account can show you the account changes they made last month. If they cannot, the label does not matter.

You should. Always. Insist the account is created under your own Google account and that the agency is granted access, not the other way round. If an agency builds your campaigns inside their own manager account, you lose every conversion history, quality score, and audience list the day you leave. We build in accounts you own, without exception.

Almost always one of four things: the traffic is right but the landing page is wrong, the traffic is wrong because the keywords are too broad, the calls are happening but not being tracked, or the offer is not competitive against what the other ads on the page are saying. The diagnosis order matters — check tracking first, because if calls are being missed in reporting you will "fix" a problem you do not have.

There is no universal number, and anyone quoting one is guessing. What matters is your cost per lead measured against what a closed customer is worth and how many leads you close. A $200 lead is excellent for a business closing $15,000 jobs at one in three, and catastrophic for a $60 service. Work out your close rate and customer value first; the target falls out of that arithmetic.

Ads deliver traffic on day one, which is the entire reason to use them. Useful performance data takes two to four weeks, and meaningful optimisation needs a month or two of conversion volume. Anyone promising optimised performance in week one is describing a launch, not a result.

Usually yes, but for a specific reason: if competitors are bidding on your name, you either pay a small amount to defend the top of your own branded results or let them intercept people who were already looking for you. If nobody is bidding against you, brand bidding is often wasted money that would have been a free organic click. Check first, then decide.

They keep running in your account, which you own, and you keep every bit of history in it. There is no notice period designed to trap you and no handover fee. If you leave, you leave with the asset.

No. Month to month, cancel when you want. Long lock-ins mostly protect agencies from the consequences of poor results, and we would rather be kept for the opposite reason.

Some treatments can be advertised with careful wording, some are restricted, and some are outright prohibited depending on the claim being made and the country you are targeting. The failure mode is expensive: a disapproved ad wastes time, a policy strike risks the account. Regulated categories need the policy check done before the campaign is built, not after a rejection.

If you need leads this quarter, ads. If you are building an asset for next year and can wait, SEO. Most small businesses that can afford both should run a small, tightly focused ad campaign for immediate demand while SEO compounds in the background — the ad data also tells you which keywords actually convert, which makes the SEO work sharper.

Search term review and negative keyword work, bid and budget adjustments against conversion data, ad copy testing, landing page feedback, conversion tracking verification, and a plain-English report of what changed and what it did. If a month's work cannot be described in those terms, it probably was not done.