Exploring the Pros and Cons: DIY YouTube Ads vs. Hiring a Specialized Agency

Hi, marketing nerds!

It’s not a question of whether you should or shouldn’t start running YouTube ads. The real debate is choosing between managing YouTube ads in-house or outsourcing to a specialized agency…

As with all things in life, there is no one-size-fits-all answer to this question. Still, this simple framework can help you decide what suits your business case best at this moment.

Regardless of whether your business owns a brand-new product or service or you have an already established brand, here is what you should consider:

Managing YouTube ads in-house

👍🏻 Pros:

1. In-depth brand understanding: Your team already knows the brand ethos, voice, and goals, and they know these intimately. It is so much easier to construct the building blocks of an advertising campaign that speaks the language of your brand when you literally live and breathe your product. Comparing it to transferring your brand knowledge to a person or agency who is an outsider to your company, attempting to do things on your own saves you both time and effort. It also ensures that there won’t be an interpretation gap between your brand vision and values and what the “outsider”’s perception of it is. 

2. Cost control: We can analyze this from a creative and media-buying perspective. Agencies usually charge a set price for a certain number of videos, which is based to a great extent on the tools they use and their pricing. Your internal team might come across cheaper solutions that can be just as useful. From a media buying perspective, your team has a 24/7 opportunity to fine-tune ad spend, compared to leaving a monthly budget all in the hands of an agency. Despite the regular updates and reports agencies provide, not having full control might be a trigger for some companies.

3. Quick adaptation: Internal teams can swiftly adjust strategies based on real-time analytics or changing trends. Assuming that your team has already established a successful internal communication system, this will allow monitoring testing results to get directly translated into actionable steps for improvement. 

4. Direct control: You have complete control over any stage of the ad creation, campaign set-up, and optimization. Working with an external expert requires a constant feedback loop and a great amount of trust, both of which are synonyms of either time or energy dedication.

👎🏻 Cons:

1. Skill gap: Unlike other advertising platforms, YouTube offers a very small margin of error with lots of small tweaks and settings you should know about. What this means is that being profitable on YouTube requires top-level expertise in video creation, campaign set-up, optimization, tracking, and analytics. All of it may not be readily available in-house, and there is a steep learning curve to consider if you still decide to test your luck. 

2. Time-intensive: Creating and managing YouTube ads can be time-consuming, diverting focus from core business activities. Unless you have a dedicated team for YouTube ads specifically, you will present an overwhelming challenge to your internal talent by adding YouTube ads management to their daily tasks. It’s not all limited to producing any video with any testing options, but rather imagine YouTube as a complex mechanism with its own language to learn and its own quirks to get accustomed to.

3. Limited insights: Internal teams might lack exposure to industry benchmarks or cutting-edge strategies. Although it is not impossible, it is fairly difficult to get your hands on a Google Representative to help you with your YouTube ads journey or even understand the logic behind key metrics of successful case studies.

4. (Human) resource limitation: Smaller teams may struggle to handle the workload of ad campaigns effectively. If you want an expert in the field to take care of your ads strategy and research, core messaging, production and post-production, testing, optimization, scaling strategies, and building a custom tracking solution, then you’ll end up needing to hire more manpower. It is unrealistic to expect that a small group of people can properly do the job that a twice-as-big team would normally handle. On top of that, you shouldn’t forget about finding a substitute for anyone during illness, pregnancy, or another emergency.

Hiring a Specialized Agency

👍🏻 Pros:

1. Expertise and experience: An agency that excels specifically at YouTube ads will bring specialized knowledge and experience to the table, backing it up by proven results and a deep understanding of specific niches and testing strategies. For any challenge that you come across for the first time alone, an agency will (with 99% certainty) have a clear insight on how to overcome it based on their multiple past encounters with the same case. Having the right agency by your side will not only push your business to a further scale but will ensure you don’t bother searching for solutions.

   P.S. Take a look at what Brat from our team wrote about choosing the right agency: https://inceptly.com/choosing-marketing-agency/

2. Access to tools and resources: Agencies often have access to premium tools and technologies and, more importantly, know how to navigate through them effortlessly. Access to certain tools is surely not limited to agencies, but learning how to make the most out of using them is a challenge on its own. All tools subscriptions are covered by the agencies using them and won’t add a dollar to your monthly invoice, compared to covering all tools you might need internally.

3. Time efficiency: Having a well-established agency as a partner allows internal teams to focus on core business functions. Saving your team the learning curve ensures that your ads will achieve a bigger scale in less time. An agency will already have (almost) all answers to any possible scenario and be able to adapt to the ever-changing trends with ease.

4. Analytical insights: Metrics can be overwhelming, and as you probably already know, there is not a single universal metric as a source of truth for all advertising platforms altogether. Agencies can easily point out what is worth measuring and give actionable advice on how to reach your goal by providing in-depth analytics and performance reports.

👎🏻 Cons:

1. Costly: Hiring an agency involves fees, which might exceed in-house costs. If you are on a tight budget, you might as well consider investing it all in ad spend and not sparing your team the learning and adapting process.

2. Communication challenges: Misalignment in brand vision or communication issues might arise. You need to make sure the agency team has the same level of understanding of your product or service and its main value proposition to be able to promote it effectively. You need to work in tandem with the media buyer to constantly improve your offer and funnel according to the testing data and feedback you receive.

3. Dependency: Over-reliance on an agency could limit internal skill development. The perfect middle is to collaborate with an agency while simultaneously investing in internal capabilities. This will ensure that, while the agency brings expertise, the in-house team is also continuously learning and growing.

4. Lack of immediate adaptation: Agencies might take time to pivot strategies and collaborate with your internal team to adapt to needed changes. Unless you present your agency with a proven funnel, they can’t do magic to scale it and will rely on you to implement changes until it becomes successful.

Having all advantages and disadvantages in mind, your company’s long-term goals, current capabilities, resources, and objectives will dictate whether you choose to manage YouTube ads in-house or collaborate with an agency. 

If you are an established business with a huge in-house team with sufficient bandwidth and long-term scaling goals, then managing YouTube ads in-house might be the most cost-effective solution.

If, however, you are a smaller business with a multi-tasking team or without any knowledge of YouTube advertising, you should consider reaching out to an agency at least until you grow your in-house team or grow their skillset.

Most importantly, you should always be reminded that it’s not about adding another platform to your marketing machine, it’s about how good you are at it.

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