Freelance covers an enormous range, from someone who took a course last year to people who have run eight figure budgets. The useful question is not agency versus freelancer, it is how senior the person touching your account actually is.
Including me. These are the questions I would ask.
With a freelancer this should be a trivial question with one answer. If it is not, you are talking to a small agency describing itself as a freelancer.
Someone who can only change bids will keep hitting a ceiling set by your tracking and your landing page. Ask what they do when the account is fine and results still are not.
A freelancer with twenty five clients has agency economics without agency infrastructure. Ask how many accounts they run and what happens when one has a crisis.
If campaigns, tags or landing pages live in the freelancer's own accounts, leaving means starting over. This is worth settling in writing before you begin.
Deliberately fewer clients, which is the entire reason the model holds up.
The person who audits your account is the person who builds it and the person who answers your messages. There is no handover because there is nobody to hand over to.
Before anything gets scaled, the data has to be right. GA4 and Google Tag Manager audited and rebuilt where needed, conversion actions deduplicated, Meta CAPI or server-side tagging where it applies, and offline conversion import so the platform optimises toward revenue instead of form fills.
Paid traffic dies on a bad page. I build and iterate the landing pages the campaigns point to, so the conversion path is one system instead of two vendors blaming each other. Fixed scope, tied to the campaigns, not open-ended web design.
Not a percentage of spend, and no annual contract. If the work stops being worth the fee you should be able to stop, and I would rather earn the renewal each month.
Your Google Ads account, your GA4, your tag manager, your landing pages. If we stop working together you keep all of it, history included. This should be the standard and often is not.
Because capacity is limited, I turn work down. If your situation genuinely needs a large creative team or 24/7 coverage, an agency is the better answer and I will tell you so.
Some engagements have verified public numbers. Others are longer-running or confidential roles where I can speak to scope and approach but not exact percentages. I would rather show you the real mix than invent a case study.
Roughly $20K per month in Google Ads spend, in a market with $45 to $80 CPCs.
Ongoing role as Senior Paid Media Manager, leading strategy and a growing paid media team in a heavily regulated industry.
I go through the account, the tracking and the conversion path and tell you what is actually broken. You get the findings whether or not we work together.
Tracking, conversion actions and structure get corrected first. Optimising on top of bad data just makes you confidently wrong.
Campaigns, ad copy, audiences and landing pages built around how your buyers actually search.
Weekly optimisation against the metric that matters to your business, with a monthly written read on what moved and what is next.
Long-form writing on this topic from the blog.
The honest answer is that a solo freelancer is a single point of failure, and you should weigh that. In practice accounts are set up so they are safe to leave running, you get notice of time off, and for anything urgent I am reachable. If that risk is unacceptable for your business, hire an agency.
The retainer usually is, because you are not funding account management, sales and an office. But the better argument is seniority per pound rather than price alone.
Few enough that I know every account without opening it. That is the constraint that makes this work, so I hold to it even when it means turning down revenue.
Yes, most of my work is with US, Canadian and European companies, run remotely. Time zones matter less than response time, and mine is same day.
A short form beats a long discovery call. Give me the basics and I will come back with a straight read on whether I can help, usually within one business day.
Rather book a time directly? Schedule a call.