PPC consultant UK: what one costs and when not to hire one

What a consultant does that an agency does not, what UK consultants actually charge and the three situations where you should hire an agency instead.

A PPC consultant is one senior person who works on your Google Ads account directly. No account manager, no pod, no junior running the day-to-day while a director turns up for the quarterly review. You brief the person who does the work, and when something is wrong you tell them rather than a middle layer.

That is the whole difference, and it matters more than the phrase "direct access" suggests. It is also why a consultant is the wrong answer for some businesses, which we get to before the pricing.

What a PPC consultant actually does

Strip out the pitch deck and the job is narrow: stop the account buying the wrong clicks, buy more of the right ones and prove which is which. Six things, in the order they usually get done.

What a consultant does that an agency does not

Agencies win on capacity. They lose on attention. A junior with fourteen accounts is not going to read three thousand search terms line by line, and the process is not built to expect it. A consultant with six clients can, and the difference shows up in money.

Here is a real example, anonymised. We run monthly Google Ads measurement for an industrial manufacturer. An automated match expansion setting had been quietly buying searches for competitor company names. We judged every costed search term by hand, marked each one relevant or not and wrote the reason. In one campaign, 97% of the itemised spend was verified irrelevant. On one account the same review found 97% of itemised spend going to searches that could never have become a customer.

None of that is clever. It is just slow, and slow work is the first thing a scaled account structure removes. If you want the fuller version of what the agency model buys you and what it costs you, we wrote it up in what a PPC agency actually does.

When a PPC consultant is the wrong choice

This is the honest bit. There are businesses where hiring one person is a mistake, and we would rather say so here than three months into a retainer.

The third case is key person risk, and buyers underrate it. If one consultant holds all the account knowledge and then takes a full-time job, you start again. The mitigation is boring: the account lives in your own Google Ads and GA4 properties, everything is documented and you own every login. Any decent consultant agrees to that on the first call. If they will not, that is your answer.

If you have read all three and an agency is clearly the better shape for you, our rundown of the best PPC agencies in the UK covers who does what and how to read past the marketing.

What a PPC consultant costs in the UK

These took digging, because most operators will not print a number. Of 50 UK agencies studied, 47 published no price at all. Freelance PPC management is cheaper than agency management, and the gap is roughly the cost of the people you are not paying for.

Sources for those ranges: hourly rates of £50 to £150 from Essential Marketer, day rates of £600 to £800 from Vixen Digital, plus retainer and audit figures published by Mike Ncube. Our own fee for this work is £495, and it is on the page rather than behind a discovery call.

Two notes. Rates are higher in the bigger cities, so a PPC consultant in London usually quotes above one in Brighton or Leeds for identical work, and location buys you little when the account lives in a browser. Second, think hard about percentage of spend: it pays your consultant to grow your budget. For the agency-side equivalent, see what Google Ads management costs in the UK.

The Google Partner badge is a spend threshold, not a competence test

Almost every PPC consultancy website carries the badge, and buyers read it as a quality mark. It is worth knowing what it actually certifies. Google's own Partner requirements are a 90-day ad spend of $10,000 USD across managed accounts, at least half of your strategists certified and a minimum optimisation score of 70%.

Spend and exam passes are easy. The optimisation score is the interesting one, because it is calculated from Google's own recommendations, and applying them raises it. So the badge quietly rewards accepting whatever Google suggests, including the broad targeting settings that bought one industrial client a pile of competitor searches.

None of that makes badged operators bad. Plenty are excellent. It just means the badge tells you they spend money and pass exams, not that anyone has read your search terms.

How to tell a good one from a bad one

Five questions. They take ten minutes on a call and they sort the field faster than any case study page.

Question two is not a technicality. On another build, two-thirds of "direct" traffic turned out to be three office devices, and one paid enquiry was a customer who had already bought, so that ad acquired nobody. The discipline behind those catches is in our tracking and reporting work.

How to hire one without wasting a month

Do not start with a shortlist of names. Start by finding out what shape the account is in, because that decides what you are hiring for. A rebuild, a clean-up and an ongoing hand are three different jobs at three prices.

The cheapest way to find out is a read by someone who is not going to manage the account afterwards. Our PPC audit case study shows what a keyword-by-keyword read turns up, and in that account most of the fixes that mattered cost nothing. Take the findings to two or three PPC consultants, ask the five questions above and hire whoever answers most specifically.

We sit in a slightly unusual spot. We are one senior engineer rather than a pod, and we build the measurement as well as running the ads, so the numbers you judge the account on are ones we have verified. Our paid ads page covers how that works. Ongoing management is £495 and a first read of an account is £495.

FAQ

Related: a Google Analytics audit.