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At some point, almost every B2B SaaS company has the same conversation. The PPC spend is growing, the agency fees feel hard to justify, and someone in the room says: "Could we just hire someone in-house?"
It's a reasonable question. And the answer is almost always more complicated than the spreadsheet makes it look.
Having worked inside PPC before running campaigns for SaaS companies from the agency side, we've seen both ends of this. The mistake isn't usually the decision itself, it's the assumptions baked into it. Companies routinely underestimate what specialist PPC expertise actually requires at scale, and by the time the gap becomes obvious, they've spent six months and significant budget finding out the hard way.
Here's what we see...
The Cost Comparison Is Almost Always Wrong
The maths feels obvious on paper. A mid-level PPC manager costs £35,000-£45,000 per year in the UK. Agency retainers for a comparable scope often run £3,000-£6,000 per month. Run the numbers and in-house looks cheaper.
Except the numbers people run are never the full picture.
What the spreadsheet usually leaves out:
- Tools and platforms. Proper PPC management requires keyword research tools, bid management software, competitive intelligence platforms, and analytics stacks. Budget £5,000-£15,000 per year for a basic setup, and that's before enterprise-tier tooling.
- Training and development. Google and Microsoft certifications matter, but so does ongoing platform training as features change. Conferences, courses, and staying current aren't free.
- Management overhead. Someone senior needs to hire, onboard, manage, and review the in-house hire. That time has a cost.
- Ramp time. A new hire doesn't hit full productivity on day one. For PPC, where campaigns need time to learn and optimise, expect 3-4 months before you're seeing the output you actually hired for.
- Attrition risk. If your PPC hire leaves after 14 months, which is close to the average tenure for specialist digital roles, you restart the clock entirely.
When you factor all of this in, the true cost of an in-house hire often exceeds the agency retainer by the end of year one. And that's before accounting for the performance difference, which we'll get to.
One Generalist vs a Team of Specialists
This is the gap that surprises most SaaS founders, and it's the one that matters most to performance.
When you hire a PPC manager in-house, you're hiring one person. That person needs to cover Google Search, Google Display, Performance Max, LinkedIn Ads, and potentially Microsoft Advertising, across campaign strategy, copywriting, audience building, bid management, landing page testing, and attribution. Even the best individual contributors have strengths and blind spots.
When you work with a specialist agency, you're not getting one person. You're getting a team with dedicated expertise across platforms, campaign types, and B2B-specific challenges, with a strategic lead who's run this playbook for SaaS companies at different growth stages.
The practical difference shows up in a few specific places:
The SaaS-specific knowledge point is worth pausing on. B2B SaaS PPC has particular nuances: longer sales cycles, multi-touch attribution, targeting by job title and company size, trial-to-paid conversion tracking, and the interplay between paid and product-led growth motions. An agency that works exclusively in this space has seen these patterns play out across dozens of accounts. An in-house hire, unless they came from a similar role, is often figuring it out for the first time.
The "Control" Argument Usually Backfires
The other reason companies lean towards in-house is control. The agency feels like a black box. You want someone sitting next to the product team, responding in Slack, embedded in the business.
This is a legitimate concern, and it's also one of the most common reasons companies end up with underperforming PPC.
Here's what happens in practice. The in-house hire gets pulled into product launches, sales enablement requests, and ad hoc reporting. They're close to the business, which means they're close to everything. The focused, systematic work of campaign optimisation, the unglamorous stuff that actually moves the needle, gets deprioritised in favour of whatever's urgent this week.
The proximity that feels like control often becomes the thing that prevents good work from getting done.
A good agency relationship doesn't mean less visibility. It means structured reporting, regular strategy sessions, and a team whose only job is to make your campaigns perform. You get more focus on the actual work, not less.
The control concern is also often a symptom of a different problem: a bad previous agency experience. If your last agency was unresponsive, opaque, or clearly running templated campaigns with no SaaS-specific thinking, that's a valid reason to be sceptical. But the answer is a better agency, not a junior in-house hire who's learning on your budget.
When In-House Actually Makes Sense
To be fair: there are situations where building in-house capability is the right call. It's worth being honest about them.
In-house works well when:
- You're spending £500,000+ per month on paid search and the economics of a full internal team genuinely stack up
- Your product is so technically complex or regulated that deep institutional knowledge is a prerequisite for effective campaign work
- You have the budget and seniority to hire a Head of Paid Search (not a PPC manager) who can build and lead a team
- You want to complement an agency relationship with an internal strategic owner who manages the agency, rather than replacing it
What doesn't work is hiring a mid-level PPC manager and expecting them to perform at the level of a specialist team. That's the version of "in-house" that most B2B SaaS companies actually end up with, and it's where the gap between expectation and reality tends to be widest.
The honest framing: in-house and agency aren't binary opposites. The best-performing SaaS companies at scale often use both, an agency for execution and platform expertise, and an internal person to own strategy, brief the agency, and connect paid activity to the broader GTM motion.
What to Look for in a B2B SaaS PPC Agency
If you're evaluating agencies, the questions that matter most aren't about price or case study logos. They're about fit and depth.
Ask any agency you're considering:
- What percentage of your clients are B2B SaaS? If PPC for SaaS isn't a significant part of their work, you'll be subsidising their learning curve.
- How do you handle attribution for long sales cycles? The answer reveals whether they understand the fundamental challenge of B2B paid media, that a click in January might not close until April.
- What does your reporting look like, and what decisions does it drive? Good agencies report on what changed, why, and what they're doing about it. Bad ones report on impressions and clicks.
- Who actually works on our account day-to-day? You want to know if you're getting a senior specialist or a junior account exec with a senior face on the sales call.
- What's your onboarding process? The first 90 days are critical. A structured onboarding with clear milestones is a sign of a team that's done this before.
The right agency should be able to answer all of these with specifics, not generalities. If they're vague on attribution or can't articulate a SaaS-specific approach, keep looking.
At Lever Digital, we work exclusively with ambitious B2B companies, SaaS included, and we're happy to have all of these conversations before you sign anything. No fixed-term contracts, no account manager handoffs. Just specialists who know this space and are
The Real Question to Ask
The in-house vs agency debate is usually the wrong frame. The right question is: what does excellent B2B SaaS PPC actually require, and do we have it?
If the honest answer is no, and for most companies at the Series A to Series C stage, it is, then the question becomes where to get it. Hiring a generalist and hoping they figure it out is an expensive way to learn that specialist expertise doesn't scale down.
The companies that get the most from their paid media spend are the ones who treat it as a strategic function, not an operational task. That means working with people who've done it before, at the level of complexity your campaigns require, and holding them accountable for outcomes, not activity.
If you're at a point where this decision is live, we're happy to talk through what good looks like for your specific stage and spend level. No pitch, no pressure, just a conversation with people who know this
