Facebook Ads: Do It Yourself or Hire an Agency?

Most articles with this title are written by agencies and reach the conclusion that you should hire an agency.

This one is written by an agency and reaches that conclusion for some readers and the opposite conclusion for others, because that is what the maths actually says.

You can work out which one you are in about five minutes, and you will not need to speak to anybody to do it.

The decision hangs on one number, and it is not your skill level

Owners tend to frame this as a confidence question. Am I clever enough, will I break something, is there a knack to it. Those are the wrong questions, because the interface is not hard and nothing you press will ruin your business.

The right question is duller and far more useful. Management is a fixed monthly cost. Whatever it improves is a percentage of a variable one.

So the more you spend, the more a percentage is worth, and the easier the fee is to justify. Under a certain level of spend the sum simply does not work, however good the person is.

That is why the honest answer changes depending on who is asking, and why an agency that tells everybody the same thing is not really answering the question.

What running Facebook ads actually involves each month

Before pricing anything, it helps to know what you would be taking on. Setting a campaign up is the small part. The recurring work is where the hours go.

• New creative. Ads wear out. Something that pulled well in March stops working by May, so you need a steady supply of fresh images or clips rather than one good ad.
• Watching without meddling. Checking often enough to spot a genuine problem, while resisting the urge to change things that are merely settling. Knowing the difference is most of the skill.
• Moving budget towards what works and away from what does not, which first requires being able to tell which is which.
• Audience housekeeping. Keeping the customer list current so you are not paying to advertise to people who already bought.
• Reading the results properly, in the numbers that matter rather than the ones that flatter.
• Answering the enquiries quickly, which is not really the ad job at all but decides whether any of it was worth doing.

In our experience running these for South Yorkshire businesses, a single well-built campaign takes somewhere between four and eight hours a month once it is up and running, and considerably more in the first month.

That is our own observation rather than a published figure, and yours will differ with how much you enjoy it.

Doing it yourself: what it genuinely costs

The tools are free, which surprises people who assume there is a subscription somewhere. Ads Manager, which Meta calls "an all-in-one tool for creating ads, managing when and where they'll run, and tracking how well your campaigns are performing", costs nothing to use. Only the media spend goes to Meta.

The training is free too, and it is better than most of what you will find on YouTube. Meta runs its own courses under the Blueprint banner, described on its learning pages as "fast, free, self-guided courses to help build your marketing skills across Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp". Both of those were checked on 20 August 2026. If you are going to do this yourself, start there rather than with a guru.

So the real cost of DIY is your hours. Price them the way you would price them for a customer, not at zero. Six hours a month at whatever you charge is the true monthly figure, and for a tradesperson or a therapist billing at a decent rate it is frequently more than a management fee.

The bit of DIY nobody mentions: you own the compliance

UK advertising rules apply to your Facebook ads exactly as they apply to a billboard, and running them yourself means the responsibility sits with you personally. The Advertising Standards Authority says it "expects all advertisers to follow the rules when creating their ad campaigns", and the code it enforces covers non-broadcast advertising "including newspapers, posters, websites, social media, cinema, emails, leaflets, billboard".

Its reach was widened in 2011 to take in claims a company makes on its own website and in the social media spaces it controls, so this is not a technicality that only applies to national brands.

In practice the things that catch small businesses out are ordinary and avoidable. Saying you are the best or the cheapest in town without being able to prove it. Advertising a price that turns out to have conditions attached.

Using a before and after photo that is not of your own work. None of that requires bad intent, and none of it stops being your problem because you did not know.

The break-even sum, printed in full

Here is the calculation an agency is not supposed to show you. A management fee pays for itself, on results alone, when the improvement it produces is worth more than the fee costs.

To do the sum you need a figure for that improvement, so let us use a fifth. That number is not a promise, a benchmark or anything we can prove; it is simply something to multiply by, and anybody who promises you a figure before they have seen your account should be shown the door. Put your own figure in and the shape of the answer does not change much.

Read the bottom two rows and the case for hiring somebody is obvious. Read the top two and it plainly is not, at least not on efficiency. We would rather you saw that here than found it out three months into an invoice.

When you should genuinely do it yourself

• Your spend is under a few hundred a month. At that level no fee can earn back its own cost, and you would be buying convenience rather than performance.
• You have one offer and one town. The complexity that makes management valuable simply is not there yet.
• You quite enjoy it. Plenty of owners do, and somebody who finds it interesting will look after it better than somebody paid to.
• The work is seasonal or occasional. A campaign that runs six weeks a year does not need anybody on a retainer.
• You have time that is not billable. If the alternative to an hour in Ads Manager is an hour on the sofa, the hour is cheap.

When doing it yourself starts costing you

• The spend has grown past the crossover and a percentage now matters more than the fee.
• You are running several offers, several towns or several seasons at once, and keeping track has become a job.
• You cannot answer the question "what did an enquiry cost last month" without a long silence.
• You keep restarting the learning period by fiddling, or splitting a modest budget across too many audiences, which are the two mistakes that quietly cost the most.
• The hours are coming out of billable time. This is the one owners underestimate most, and it is worth pricing honestly before deciding. Our breakdown of the numbers behind Facebook ad spend carries the arithmetic for that side of the decision.

The option nobody offers you: split the job

It is presented as a straight choice and it does not have to be. The two halves of this work are quite different, and most owners are much better at one of them than the other.

You already have the raw material: the finished jobs, the before and afters, the customer who was delighted, the five minutes of phone footage nobody else could get. That is the half an outsider genuinely cannot do for you, and it is the half that decides whether an ad works.

The account side is the opposite: repetitive, fiddly, and much easier for somebody who does it every week. Handing over only that part is a perfectly sensible arrangement, and it is what we end up doing with a lot of clients who like being involved.

If the wider retainer question is what you are really weighing rather than the ads on their own, our honest guide to retainer pricing lays the going rates side by side, from a freelancer working alone up to a national outfit with a floor of several thousand. Our own organic social plans begin at £225 a month.

What it costs to hand it over to us

Our fee is £300 a month, flat, published on the packages page rather than produced at the end of a call. Meta charges the media budget straight to your own card and we take no cut of it, so the fee stays identical whether you spend £200 a month or £2,000.

That matters more than it sounds: an agency taking a cut of spend has a quiet interest in your budget going up. Our paid advertising service sets out what each month involves.

Whoever you end up speaking to, ours included, the questions worth asking barely change, and we set them out at length in what to check before you sign with anybody local. The short version: find out what happens to your account if you leave, and be wary of anybody who will not tell you their price until they know your budget.

Frequently asked questions

Do the sum before you ring anyone

Take your monthly ad spend, decide what a genuine improvement would be worth to you, and compare it with the fee you are being quoted. If the sum says do it yourself, do it yourself, and come back when the numbers have grown.

If it says hand it over, hand it over to somebody who published their price before you asked. Either way we are happy to look at your account and tell you which of the two you are, so get in touch if a second opinion would help.