White Label PPC vs Hiring a PPC Manager In House

More than the salary. A UK PPC manager carries employer national insurance, pension, holiday and sick cover, software, training, a laptop and the management time of whoever they report to.

• Salary: [PRICING: confirm figures]
• Employment on costs, roughly 20 percent on top of salary
• Tools and reporting software: [PRICING: confirm figures] per year
• Recruitment, if you use an agency: 15 to 20 percent of first year salary
• Ramp up: two to three months before they are fully productive

That total is fixed. It arrives every month whether you have three accounts or fifteen.

A per account fee that only exists when the account does. Ten accounts costs ten times one account, and zero accounts costs nothing, which is the whole point of the model.

The fee structure and a worked margin example are on the white label pricing page. Compare the monthly per account fee against the fully loaded cost of a hire divided by the number of accounts that hire would realistically run.

A competent PPC manager can run somewhere between eight and fifteen accounts well, depending on complexity. Ecommerce with Shopping and feeds sits at the lower end, simple lead generation at the higher end.

Divide your fully loaded hire cost by that number and compare it with the per account outsourcing fee. Below about six accounts, outsourcing is almost always cheaper. Above about twelve, hiring usually is.

There are several cases where we would tell you to hire, and mean it.

• You already have ten or more accounts with steady retention. The utilisation is there and the fixed cost is the cheaper option.
• Paid search is your core proposition, not an add on. If you sell PPC as the main thing, the capability should live inside the business.
• Your clients need same hour responsiveness, such as high spend retail during peak trading, where a supplier queue is not fast enough.
• You are building an agency to sell. Buyers pay more for capability that stays after the sale than for a supplier contract that may not transfer.
• Your accounts are unusually specialist, for example a regulated sector where the learning curve is long and reusable across every client you have.

Hiring: you carry the salary through quiet months, you lose the knowledge if they leave, and a bad hire costs you six months and a few client relationships. You also need someone senior enough to know whether the work is any good.

Outsourcing: you are dependent on a supplier's attention and quality, your margin is thinner per account, and a poor supplier who contacts your client or holds the account can do real damage. Mitigate it by keeping the accounts in your own MCC, signing an NDA and non solicit, and starting with one account.

Yes, and it is the sensible order for most agencies. Outsourcing lets you sell PPC now and find out whether the demand is real before you commit to a salary.

When you do hire, the accounts are already in your MCC with their history and documentation, so the handover is a week rather than a rebuild. How that handover works is covered on the how white label PPC works page, and the service overview is on the white label Google Ads pillar page.