Should your agency white-label Google Ads?

Most agencies back into Google Ads rather than choosing it. A web client you have looked after for years mentions they are thinking about paid search. Or a competitor starts running ads and your client wants to know why they are not. Suddenly PPC is on the table, and you have to decide how to handle it before someone else offers to.

That decision usually comes down to three roads: hire someone to run ads in-house, send the work to a white-label partner, or have whoever is least busy that week give it a go. I have been on the receiving end of all three for a good while now, mostly as the people agencies call when the third one has quietly gone wrong. So here is an honest look at how they actually compare, rather than a pitch.

The real cost of hiring in-house

On paper, hiring is the obvious answer. Bring the skill in, own it, keep all the margin. In practice the sums are harder than they look.

A genuinely good paid search manager in the UK is not cheap, and the salary is only the start. There is recruitment, the months before they are properly up to speed, holiday cover, training to keep up with a platform that changes every few weeks, and the awkward truth that one person cannot be an expert in everything. Someone brilliant at search campaigns may be shaky on Performance Max or feed management.

The bigger problem is the one nobody mentions in the job advert: keeping them busy. A PPC specialist needs a steady flow of accounts to be worth the salary. If you have three clients on ads, that person is expensive and bored. If you win eight more, they are drowning and you are back to recruiting. Paid search income rarely arrives in the neat, steady stream a full-time hire needs to pay for themselves, and the gap between "too little work" and "too much" is a narrow one to balance a salary on.

Hiring makes sense once you have the volume to keep a specialist genuinely busy and the pipeline to keep them that way. Plenty of agencies get there. Most are a long way off, and hire anyway because it feels like the grown-up option.

The DIY route, and why it bites

The muddle-through approach is more common than anyone admits. An account manager or a designer who is "good with this sort of thing" sets up a campaign between other jobs. It runs. Clicks happen. Everyone relaxes.

The trouble is that Google Ads is very good at looking like it is working while it quietly wastes money. Broad match keywords pull in searches that have nothing to do with the business. Conversion tracking is set up to count the wrong thing, or nothing at all, so the automated bidding is flying blind. Performance Max spends the budget on the easy clicks it can already get for free. None of this shows up on the surface. The dashboard is green, the spend is going out, and it can be months before anyone works out that the enquiries are not following.

By then the client has noticed too. And an account you set up casually to keep a client happy becomes the reason they start shopping around. I see these accounts regularly, and the pattern is almost always the same: not incompetence, just someone asked to do a specialist job in the margins of another one.

Where white-label fits

The third option is to sell Google Ads under your own name and have someone else do the work behind it. The client deals with you, sees your branding, pays you. A white-label partner builds and runs the account out of sight.

What makes this work for an agency is the shape of the cost. Hiring is a fixed salary whether you have three ad clients or none. A white-label arrangement is usually priced per account, so the cost only turns up when the income does. One client on ads costs you one account's worth. Lose that client and the cost stops with 30 days' notice. You are never carrying a salary through a quiet quarter, and you are never turning down a client because you cannot justify a hire for one more account.

It also lets you say yes faster. When a client asks about paid search, you can take it on that week rather than spending two months recruiting or crossing your fingers over a DIY build. For most agencies the appeal is simply that it closes a gap in what they can offer without changing anything about how they operate.

There are fair worries about handing a client over, and they are worth being blunt about. The two that come up most are whether the partner will start talking to your client directly, and whether the work will actually be good enough to put your name on. Both are reasonable. The answer to the first should be in writing: a decent partner never approaches your clients, and the account stays in your or your client's own manager account so nothing is hostage if you walk away. The answer to the second is to test it before you commit a client to it, which brings me to the sensible way to try this.

How to decide without betting a client on it

You do not need to pick a strategy for your whole agency on day one. The question is only ever about the next client in front of you.

Run the numbers honestly first. Add up what your paid search income actually is across your clients, not what you hope it will be. If it comfortably keeps a specialist busy and the pipeline backs that up, hiring may well be right. If it does not, a per-account arrangement almost certainly costs you less and ties up none of your cash.

Then test the quality on something low-risk. A good white-label partner will audit one existing account for free and give you the write-up unbranded, so you can read it yourself before deciding whether it is good enough to send to a client as your own work. That tells you more about whether a partner is any good than any sales call will. If the audit is sharp, specific and honest about what is wrong, you have your answer. If it is a generic list of recommendations you could have got from the platform, keep looking.

Whatever you choose, the thing to avoid is the accidental version: a casual DIY account that nobody owns, running up spend while everyone assumes it is fine. Paid search is either worth doing properly or not worth your client's money. There is not much of a middle.

If you run an agency and a client is asking about Google Ads you would rather not build yourself, send us one account to audit. You will get an honest read on what it needs, in your branding or none at all, and you can decide from there whether white-label is the right fit for you.