Should You Keep Paid Media In-House or Outsource It?

I’ve built, managed, and restructured both. Here’s what I learned.

Here’s a common scenario. You hire a sharp paid media manager, maybe the sharpest you have ever brought onto your team. They know Google inside and out and they understand Meta at a level that is difficult to find. And for the first six months, the results show it.

Then something starts to shift. Not dramatically, and not in a way that immediately raises concern, but enough to notice. Optimizations begin to feel incremental rather than transformative. Strategies that once felt cutting edge begin to resemble last quarter’s playbook. A new Google feature launches and your team does not hear about it for weeks. A competitor introduces a campaign format you have not seen before, and the response is, “we will look into it.”

This is how in-house teams lose their edge. Not all at once, but gradually.

It is also the moment when many marketing leaders begin to quietly ask themselves whether this function should have remained with an agency.

After many years of managing both in-house teams and agency partnerships across multiple industries, I heavily prefer outsourcing paid media to an agency. Not because in-house teams lack talent, but because of how paid media actually works.

Here is why.

Skill decay is inevitable

Let’s say you recruit the best paid media manager from a top agency or one of your competitors you admire. Day one, they’re sharp. They know the latest Google Ads features, Meta’s newest targeting capabilities, the bidding strategies that are working right now. But before you know it, those platforms change. There are new features that didn’t exist before and the algorithms have shifted.

Agencies manages tens of millions of dollars of combined spend across their clients, and that volume means direct access to Google, Meta, and other platforms. The best agencies have dedicated reps, insider access to beta programs, early access to new features, and training sessions that aren’t available to the general public.

In-house, that access evaporates. Your company’s entire yearly spend doesn’t get noticed by the platforms, and you are now behind because the pace of change in digital advertising is relentless. What worked in Q1 might be obsolete by Q3. In-house teams often can’t keep their skills as current as agency teams because they simply don’t have the same exposure to what’s changing and what’s coming next.

Agencies are becoming tech companies

The best agencies today are not just managing campaigns. They are creating proprietary data layers that sit on top of the major advertising platforms, aggregating signals across dozens or hundreds of clients. These systems are used to inform budget allocation, evaluate creative performance, and improve conversion outcomes across channels. Artificial intelligence and machine learning are becoming embedded in these workflows, not as a novelty, but as a core component of how optimization happens.

Without access to that type of technology, you are operating on an uneven playing field. Your in-house team is running campaigns with the same tools available to everyone else. Agencies are running campaigns with those tools plus their own layer of intelligence built on data from dozens or hundreds of clients.

External validation

One of the hardest questions for any marketing leader to answer is “How do we know if we’re actually performing well?”

In-house, you’re benchmarking against yourself. Last month, last quarter, last year. That’s fine for directional trending, but it tells you nothing about where you stand relative to the market.

Agencies have real-time visibility into performance across a wide range of clients and can identify which creative approaches are gaining traction, which channels are becoming more or less efficient, and how cost metrics are trending across similar portfolios. This perspective allows them to answer critical benchmarking questions with a level of confidence that is difficult to achieve in-house.

Agencies educate you

There’s one more benefit that tends to get overlooked. Good agencies don’t just execute, they educate. They bring you new ideas, share what’s working in the market, challenge your assumptions, and push you to evolve your approach. This is a form of ongoing professional development for your marketing team that you don’t get in a silo.

When an agency shows up to a QBR and tells you that video creative is outperforming static across their entire client portfolio, that’s a strategic signal that should influence your content strategy, your creative production priorities, and your budget allocation for the next quarter.

The flexibility advantage

Budget flexibility in an outsourced model is something that rarely gets discussed but matters enormously.

Want to shift resources toward conversion rate optimization (CRO) for a few months? Cut spend in a specific channel and redirect those dollars. Want to test a new programmatic ad platform? Scale back somewhere else and give it a go. With an agency, this kind of reallocation is a conversation. With an in-house team, it’s more sensitive because you may not have the experience in-house.

There is also a significant difference in how performance issues are addressed. Changing agency partners is fundamentally a business decision. Replacing an internal team member involves organizational disruption, human considerations, and time. While this may seem like a secondary factor, it has a direct impact on how quickly teams can respond when performance is not where it needs to be.

The tooling gap

Top agencies have access to off-the-shelf SaaS tools that are often cost-prohibitive for in-house teams. Digital experience intelligence, creative testing tools, budget pacing technology, AEO/SEO tools, and more. When these tools are spread across a portfolio of clients, the per-client cost is manageable. When you’re funding them for a single company, the math often doesn’t work.

This means your in-house team is either working without these tools entirely or you’re absorbing costs that the agency model distributes more efficiently.

What I would never outsource

Even in an outsourced model, there are two functions I would never hand off.

The agency relationship owner

Outsourcing paid media does not mean handing over the keys. Even the best agencies need someone on your side who owns the relationship day to day. That person should be responsible for translating business objectives into campaign direction, providing the context an external team will never have on their own, and holding the agency accountable when results slip.

Think of it like construction. You can hire the best subcontractors in the world, but you still need a superintendent on site. Not because the subs aren’t capable, but because the project needs coordination. It needs someone who sees the full picture, can spot when things are drifting, and can course-correct before small misalignments become expensive problems.

Your internal owner should deeply understand the business, the properties, the competitive landscape, and the leasing goals. They should also have a strong background in paid media and hands-on experience managing campaigns. If the person managing the agency relationship does not understand what good campaign execution looks like, they will not know when to push back. They need to be strong enough to challenge the agency when the strategy doesn’t add up and collaborative enough to let the agency do what they do best.

Analytics

Your analytics function is how you know what is actually happening across your marketing. It is the source of truth that informs every decision, from budget allocation to channel strategy to creative direction. It requires deep access to your data, a clear understanding of your business, and long-term continuity that an external partner simply cannot replicate.

Without strong in-house analytics, you are relying on someone else to interpret performance for you. And when the team telling you how campaigns are performing is also the team running them, you have an accountability gap. Over time, you lose the ability to challenge what you are being told.

A word of caution on agency costs

Agency commission rates in multifamily range from 8% to 50%, which is an enormous spectrum. Unfortunately, the correlation between commission rate and the value delivered is not as clear as you might expect

I have worked with agencies charging 12% that delivered exceptional results because they had a strong process and deep expertise. I have also seen agencies at 35%+ that coasted while delivering mediocre performance. I would not assume that paying more means you get more.

When leadership compares in-house vs. agency, they almost always look at the commission rate in isolation. But that’s not the full picture. The total cost of in-house paid media includes salary, benefits, recruiting and onboarding costs, tool subscriptions, training budgets, management overhead, and the opportunity cost of what that headcount could be doing elsewhere. Factor in the risk of turnover, and the fully loaded cost of in-house often exceeds what you’d pay an agency when you account for everything.

The agency commission looks expensive until you run the real numbers.

The bottom line

I believe the cost of paying agency commissions to manage paid media is well worth it compared to the overhead of running an in-house team. The access to technology, platform relationships, cross-client intelligence, and flexibility to pivot creates an advantage that is difficult to replicate internally.

But this works only when you have someone strong managing the relationship internally. And only when you choose the right agency. Not the cheapest, not the most expensive. The one that brings real capability, real technology, and real industry expertise.

Outsourcing paid media is not a concession. It is a strategic advantage when done right.