Tired of watching your ad budget click away without converting?

Why I think a freelancer beats an agency for most accounts

I've seen this from both sides, and three differences matter more than anything else in a pitch deck.

• Direct communication. You talk to the person actually pulling the levers on your account, not to an account manager relaying your questions to someone else's desk.
• Guaranteed seniority. Inside agencies, mid-sized budgets get handed to junior staff more often than clients realize. Hire a freelance specialist and your strategy is run by the person with the track record: there's no one else it could be.
• Costs that pay for expertise, not overhead. A freelancer's cost structure is lean. Your budget goes into media buying and strategy, not into an agency's office lease and account-management layer.

What I actually do, week to week

Running Google Ads well is not "picking some keywords." If that's the pitch, walk away. What I consider non-negotiable on every account I manage:

A specialist who's worth hiring never sells you "visibility." I sell conversions and sales: visibility is a side effect, not the goal.

How to tell a senior expert from someone who just knows the interface

1. Specialization, not a script. Some people run every account the same way regardless of sector. A senior specialist adapts strategy to your specific market through a method that's been tested, not a template copy-pasted between clients.
2. Ask for a portfolio, ask the right question. "Have you managed budgets similar to mine before?" A portfolio doesn't need to be public (client confidentiality is real), but a serious consultant can still show you anonymized charts or verifiable results.
3. Watch how they talk about data. A real expert brings up Google Analytics 4 or Google Tag Manager unprompted, early in the conversation. If ten minutes go by and neither comes up, that's a red flag worth taking seriously.

Does your freelancer need to be in the same city as you?

No. Google Ads is 100% digital work. I can run high-performing campaigns for a client in Milan without being anywhere near Milan: a call on Meet or Zoom closes the distance a lot faster than technical expertise can be improvised in person. The exception is hyper-local businesses that genuinely need frequent face-to-face meetings; for everyone else, geography is a non-factor.

What does a freelance Google Ads specialist cost?

There's no fixed rate card, but the pricing models I see most often are these:

• Hourly rate: workable for a one-off audit, a bad fit for an ongoing relationship.
• Fixed monthly fee: predictable cost for you, predictable workload for me.
• Percentage of ad spend: common once budgets go north of roughly €5k/month.
• Hybrid: fixed fee plus a success component, the model that aligns incentives best, because I only do well if your account does well.

Be wary of anyone offering "full management for €100/month." Serious, ongoing optimization takes real hours every week. If the price doesn't cover those hours, something in the account isn't getting the attention it needs.

Where to start

Request an audit of your account. I'll tell you plainly where things stand today and what a realistic path forward looks like, before you commit to anything.