Managing your store's ad campaigns: hire in-house, bring in a consultant, or combine both?

Three ways to run your ad campaigns

When your ad budget grows, you have three realistic ways to run campaigns on Meta, Google Ads and TikTok:

• An in-house specialist: a full-time employee who works only on your store and knows your products, margins and stock.
• An agency: a team that runs the accounts for a monthly fee or a percentage of spend, and handles hiring and training on its side.
• An independent consultant: one experienced person who sets strategy, audits the accounts and guides whoever executes, or executes alongside them.

Around the world, companies resource this work in very different ways, from fully internal to almost entirely external (4). So the question is not which option is best in general. It is which mix fits your store's size, budget and current stage.

The real cost of hiring in-house

The salary is only the visible part. The real cost includes:

• Salary and benefits for someone senior enough to make budget decisions, not just upload ads.
• Tools and training, plus the time you spend managing and reviewing their work.
• Hiring again when they leave, and the weeks in which campaigns run without a clear owner.

ANA frames the decision as weighing that initial investment against the agency fees you save (1). An ANA session summary adds that in-house teams usually see lower fees, faster turnaround and more control in their first year. In year two those gains plateau, because the team takes on the problems the agency used to absorb: staff churn, capability gaps and rising costs (2).

In Saudi Arabia these risks are concrete. Michael Page's 2026 salary guide found that 79% of professionals are actively looking for a new job (5). The same guide found that employers face shortages of digital skills despite national initiatives to develop talent (6). If your store has one ads specialist and that person leaves, the whole function leaves with them.

The real cost of an agency or consultant

With an agency or consultant you pay a fee instead of a salary, and the provider takes on hiring, training and replacing people. The risks are different:

• Less control: decisions are made outside your team, and you may not see why budgets move.
• Divided attention: your account may be one of many, run by a junior team member.
• Lock-in: if the ad accounts, Pixel and data are registered in the agency's name, leaving becomes expensive.

Large advertisers are aware of these risks too. In Gartner's 2025 CMO Spend Survey, 39% of CMOs said they planned to cut agency budgets. Their main levers include ending unproductive relationships, streamlining agency rosters and renegotiating contracts (7). For a store owner, the lesson is to judge an outside partner on results and transparency, not on how long the relationship has lasted. If you are at that point, read how to choose a Media Buying agency or consultant.

When each option fits, by store size and budget

No single number fits every store, but these signals help you decide:

• A small, early-stage store: the owner or a generalist runs the campaigns, and a consultant periodically reviews the setup, the tracking and the CAC the store can afford. A full-time salary is hard to justify before you know your numbers, so start by calculating your break-even CAC.
• A growing store with spend spread across several platforms: an agency or consultant brings a breadth that one hire rarely has, especially while the platforms keep changing. Performance Max, for example, has been harder to manage than many advertisers would like, and Google's March 2026 updates fill only some of those gaps (8).
• A larger store with high, steady daily spend and a constant need for new creative: here an in-house specialist pays off through speed and product knowledge, as long as you plan for the year-two problems (2) and for the chance that they leave (5).

At every stage, make sure you can read the numbers yourself. See the difference between MER, ROAS, POAS and ROI and the metrics to review daily, weekly and monthly.

The blended model: how to combine both

ANA recommends a deliberately blended staffing model, planned from the start, that combines full-time hires with outside talent instead of calling in help only when the team is stretched (3). In-housing has not gone away. ANA's 2026 report found its jurors five times more likely to say marketers are in-housing more than ever than to say they are pulling back (9). Yet during 2025, high-profile in-house teams in several industries were downsized, lost scope to external agencies, or were shut down (10). Both trends lead to the same conclusion: neither fully internal nor fully external is safe by default.

For a store, a practical split looks like this:

• Inside the team: someone who owns daily operations, writes creative briefs, aligns offers with stock and looks after customer data.
• Outside the team: a consultant or agency for strategy, account structure, tracking audits and a second opinion on budgets and testing, such as a structured approach to creative testing on Meta and TikTok.

What stays in your hands, whichever option you choose

• Ownership of the ad accounts, Business Manager, Pixel and Conversions API, registered in your company's name.
• Your customer data. Google Ads now lets you exclude existing customer lists from Performance Max so the budget goes to new customers, but that only works with clean, current data (11). That data should stay with you, not with an agency or an employee.
• Profit numbers: your margin and your break-even CAC are decisions you make yourself and do not hand over.
• Written documentation of campaign structure and test results, so that nobody's departure sends you back to zero.

Sources

1. (1) ANA (Association of National Advertisers) · 2026-11-03
2. (2) ANA (Association of National Advertisers) · 2026-11-03
3. (3) ANA (Association of National Advertisers) · 2026-11-03
4. (4) World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) · 2025-11-04
5. (5) Michael Page (reported by Arabian Business) · 2025-11-20
6. (6) Michael Page (reported by Arabian Business) · 2025-11-20
7. (7) Gartner (press release via MarketScreener) · 2025-05-12
8. (8) Search Engine Journal · 2026-03-26
9. (9) ANA (Association of National Advertisers) · 2026-06
10. (10) ANA (Association of National Advertisers) · 2026-06
11. (11) Search Engine Journal · 2026-03-26

Read also

• How to choose a media buyer for your online store