Choose management when someone needs to own ongoing campaign work, training when your team needs the skills to own it, and a review when you first need to understand what is wrong. Those are different responsibilities, even when they involve the same account.
Use this guide to decide which work to outsource, what your own team still needs to own and what to ask before signing a proposal.
Start with the work, not the supplier label
Write down who can approve spend, who can edit the website, who checks conversion tracking and who follows up enquiries. A capable campaign manager cannot repair an unowned sales handover merely by changing bids. A training session cannot supply the hours your team has not allocated to daily operations.
- Management: discuss campaign changes, reporting, budget approval, conversion checks and the boundaries of ongoing responsibility.
- Training: identify the decisions participants need to make afterwards, the account examples they can use and who will apply the learning.
- Independent review: define the question to answer, such as whether the reported conversions represent useful enquiries or whether a supplier proposal addresses the real constraint.
Compare the three options by responsibility
The useful comparison is not agency versus freelancer versus doing it yourself. It is who will diagnose the problem, make the changes and keep the account running afterwards. Use these distinctions when reading proposals.
Google Ads management: get someone to run the campaigns
Management is the strongest fit when the business wants campaigns operated on its behalf and can supply the commercial decisions the supplier needs. The provider might maintain targeting, search-term exclusions, advertisements, budgets and measurement, but the written scope must say which of those activities are included.
- Ask for: an agreed account plan, a change record, reporting tied to the chosen business outcomes and a regular opportunity to discuss decisions.
- Your responsibility: approve offers and spending limits, explain margins and capacity, and give feedback on whether enquiries are useful.
- Check separately: landing-page changes, creative production, CRM repairs and sales follow-up. Do not assume that a management fee includes them.
- Poor fit: nobody in the business can approve changes or respond to leads. Outsourcing the advertising will not remove those dependencies.
Google Ads training: build a team's ability to operate
Training fits a team that will own the work and has protected time to apply what it learns. Choose learning outcomes before choosing a course length. “Understand Google Ads” is less useful than “check conversion actions, diagnose irrelevant search traffic and explain the next budget decision”.
- Ask for: a skills assessment, exercises at the right level, reference material and a clear boundary for questions after the session.
- Your responsibility: nominate the person who will implement changes and review their work.
- Check separately: whether live account edits, tracking repairs or campaign builds are included, or whether the service teaches your team to do them.
- Poor fit: the trainee will not have the permissions or time to operate the account afterwards.
An independent review: answer a bounded question
A review is useful when you need a diagnosis before making a larger commitment. It can examine measurement, campaign structure or the connection between an offer and its landing page. An audit report and implementation are separate deliverables unless the agreement explicitly joins them.
- Ask for: findings with supporting evidence, business consequence, priority and a practical verification step.
- Your responsibility: provide enough account and commercial context, then assign the recommended work.
- Check separately: whether the reviewer will implement fixes, retest them and explain the result to the existing supplier.
- Poor fit: you already know the problem but have no capacity to carry out the repair. Another report may simply add to the backlog.
Build a comparable budget, not a misleading headline price
Ask each supplier to separate media spend paid to Google from their own fees. Then list initial setup or audit work, ongoing management, training, landing-page production, tracking or CRM integration, creative assets and any software subscriptions. Request the billing currency, payment timing, cancellation terms and whether quoted amounts include VAT where applicable.
A cheaper management quote may exclude the measurement repair that your business actually needs. A once-off review may be the sensible first purchase if it prevents you from expanding campaigns that count the wrong outcome. Neither observation establishes a universal minimum budget or a market price.
Judge affordability against your own margins, sales capacity and lead quality. For the measurement side of that discussion, use the worked cost-per-lead example in our qualified-enquiry guide. Do not treat a low cost per button click as proof of profitable acquisition.
A worked decision: a service business with weak measurement
Illustrative scenario, not a client result: a Pretoria service business has campaigns running, an office manager answering enquiries and a website it can edit. Its report counts contact-button clicks, but nobody can reconcile those clicks with actual enquiries. The owner is considering both a new agency and a training course.
- First decision: commission a bounded measurement review. The question is whether a valid enquiry reaches the CRM and whether the chosen advertising outcome reflects that enquiry.
- Evidence to request: the existing conversion configuration, an authorised test record, the failure point if one exists, and a prioritised repair plan.
- Second decision: decide who will operate the repaired account. If the office manager has neither campaign experience nor allocated operating time, a training day alone does not solve the capacity problem.
- Possible arrangement: ongoing management for campaign operations, with focused training so the owner can interpret reports and supply lead-quality feedback.
The point is the sequence, not a recommendation that every business buy all three services. Diagnose uncertainty, fix the foundation and then allocate ongoing responsibility.
Protect account access and the eventual handover
Retain an authorised administrator within the business and document who controls billing, the website, analytics and the CRM. Use named access invitations rather than sharing a personal password. Start a diagnostic review with the least access required; editing authority should follow an agreed implementation scope.
Google distinguishes user access levels from manager-account ownership. Linking a manager to an existing account does not automatically grant that manager administrative ownership. Review the actual arrangement rather than accepting “we own the account” as a complete explanation.
Before appointing anyone, ask: Who approves changes? Where are they recorded? Which conversions inform bidding? Who fixes a broken landing page? How is lead quality fed back? What records and access will remain if the engagement ends? Clear answers make the proposal easier to evaluate than promises of more traffic.
Use a short brief to compare options
Copy these headings into your brief: business objective; service and operating area; current account owner; monthly media budget; website and CRM dependencies; internal time available; decision required; evidence of completion. Keep media spend separate from management, setup, training and software charges. Ask what is included, excluded and dependent on your team, rather than comparing a single monthly figure.
An illustrative choice: an owner with no campaign capacity may need management plus a reporting handover. A marketer with allocated time but weak measurement knowledge may need focused training. If both are unsure whether the account is counting button clicks as leads, a scoped measurement review can come first. These are decision examples, not fixed packages or performance predictions.
Check what the recommendation will leave behind
For a review, request the finding, supporting evidence, priority, responsible person and verification step. For training, agree an exercise and usable reference material. For management, agree what decisions the supplier can make and how outcomes will be discussed. A certificate and an impressive dashboard are not substitutes for those boundaries.
Google provides free, self-paced Google Ads learning through Skillshop. That is a useful route for product foundations. A tailored working session serves a different purpose: applying the concepts to the team's own responsibilities. Neither course completion nor an agency appointment guarantees commercial results.
A real delivery reference
The Rental Buddies case study lists landing-page structure, campaign setup, keyword research, ad copy, conversion tracking and an A/B testing plan alongside the CRM work. It shows why the campaign destination and operational handover belong in the brief. It does not publish a revenue uplift or prove that a particular training format is superior.
If the website cannot explain the offer or accept and route an enquiry, fix that before buying more traffic. If the priority is longer-term discovery and useful service content, compare SEO services instead of assuming advertising is the only next step.
Next step: compare Google Ads management, Google Ads training and an independent consulting review against the same brief.
Decide what help your account actually needs
If you want help choosing the next step, discuss your Google Ads brief with us. Tell us who currently runs the account, which business outcome you measure and what decision you need to make. You do not need to send passwords or customer records in the enquiry.
