GoodLads vs hiring a PPC agency

At a glance

What a PPC agency does

A PPC agency takes over the day-to-day running of your paid search accounts. That covers the routine work (search terms, negatives, bids and budgets, ad copy, reporting) and, at a good agency, the work around it: account structure, bidding strategy, feed management for Shopping, conversion tracking, and often creative and landing pages.

Agencies range from freelancers and small specialist shops to large networks. The better ones bring pattern recognition from many accounts in your industry, a view on what competitors are doing in the auction, and people who will tell you when the problem is the offer or the landing page, not the campaign.

How GoodLads approaches the same job

GoodLads is software. It connects to your Google Ads account, reads the last 30 days of each campaign, researches the company behind the account, and writes three hypotheses per campaign aimed at ROAS or CPA. Each one names the signal it found, the change it proposes and the metric move it predicts.

Your team decides. A hypothesis applies in one click, as a Google Ads experiment where the campaign supports one, a new paused ad where it does not, and a live change behind an orange button and a second confirm for the few levers with no safer form, such as a negative keyword. Nothing reaches Google Ads without that click. Each applied change moves across a board to a verdict, so the record of what was tried stays with you whoever runs the account.

Every plan also includes a read-only MCP endpoint, so your team can point Claude, ChatGPT or Codex at the account data and ask questions of it directly.

Where an agency is strong

• People. Somebody else does the work, which matters most when nobody in-house has the hours.
• Breadth beyond the ad account: strategy, creative, landing pages, conversion tracking and feeds, which no Google Ads tool writes for you.
• Several channels under one contract, where GoodLads covers Google Ads only.
• Experience across many accounts in your market, including what did not work elsewhere.
• Accountability you can negotiate: targets in the contract, notice periods, and a person to call.

Where an agency asks for trade-offs

• Cost that grows with spend. On a percentage-of-spend retainer, the fee rises every time the budget does, whether or not the work does.
• An incentive question. A fee tied to spend rewards spending more, which is not always what the account needs.
• Account-manager turnover. Agencies are staffed by people who move on, and each handover means a new person relearning the account and its history.
• Seniority varies. The person who pitched is often not the person who runs the account week to week.
• Less visibility. You see the changes in a monthly report and the change history, usually after they have been made to live campaigns.
• Leaving is work. If the agency built the account in its own manager account or holds the tracking setup, getting full ownership back takes planning.

Where GoodLads is the weaker choice

GoodLads does not run the account for you. There are no humans working in it day to day, except on Enterprise, where the two founders build the paid ads strategy with you and join up to 4 calls a month.

• If no one in the company has a few hours a week for Google Ads, a tool will sit unused and an agency is the better choice.
• GoodLads does not build landing pages, produce video or image creative, or run Microsoft, Meta or LinkedIn.
• It does not tune bids and budgets across every campaign, and it does not restructure an account for you.
• It proposes three hypotheses per campaign. A broken account that needs a rebuild needs a person first.

The two also combine. Agencies use GoodLads on their clients' accounts: the Agency plan covers up to 10 Google Ads accounts with seats for the team, and the board gives the client a running record of what was tested and how it did. It is not white-label.

Pricing, compared

Agency pricing varies widely, so check any quote against your own spend. The two common models are a percentage of ad spend, often quoted around 10 to 20% and frequently lower at higher spend, and a flat monthly retainer, usually with a minimum. Hybrids of a base fee plus a smaller percentage are common, and some agencies add setup fees or performance bonuses. Figures here describe common models, not any one agency.

A worked example at EUR 50,000 a month

Say a company spends EUR 50,000 a month on Google Ads. At a 10% retainer the agency fee is EUR 5,000 a month, or EUR 60,000 a year. At 15% it is EUR 7,500 a month, or EUR 90,000 a year; at this spend, quotes above that are less common. If spend grows to EUR 80,000 a month, a 15% fee grows with it to EUR 12,000.

GoodLads Pro is $100 a month for that one account, and Enterprise, with the founders' strategy work and up to 4 calls a month, is $2,000 a month. Both are in US dollars and flat, whatever the account spends. The comparison is incomplete without the in-house time GoodLads needs: someone on your team has to review and apply the hypotheses, and that person's hours are part of the real cost.

Pro and Agency start with a 14-day free trial, and the free audit reads one account before you pay anything.

Which should you choose?

An agency is likely the better fit if

• Nobody in-house has regular time for Google Ads.
• You need creative, landing pages or tracking work alongside the account management.
• You run several paid channels and want one partner accountable for all of them.
• The account needs a rebuild more than it needs the next round of changes.

GoodLads is likely the better fit if

• You have an in-house marketer or PPC lead who can spend a few hours a week on the account.
• You want to keep ownership of the account and the record of what was tried.
• You prefer changes tested as experiments or new paused ads before they touch the full campaign.
• A retainer that grows with spend no longer makes sense for the work being done.

The bottom line

An agency sells people and their time. GoodLads sells software that makes your own people faster at finding, testing and tracking changes to Google Ads. At EUR 50,000 a month, a percentage-of-spend agency costs thousands of euros a month; GoodLads costs a flat monthly fee plus the hours of the person using it.

If nobody has those hours, hire the agency. If someone does, GoodLads gives them a tested, tracked way to run the account themselves, and an agency that keeps the work can use it too.