Do I Need a Marketing Agency? The Spend Levels That Decide It
You are running the ads yourself, late, after the store work is done. Revenue has been flat for a few months. You cannot say with any confidence which channel is paying for itself, the Meta dashboard and Shopify disagree about how many sales there were, and an agency pitch has just arrived promising to fix all of it. That is the moment most owners type this question.
I read the pages ranking for it first. Every one is written by an agency, every one lists signs that you need an agency, and not one names a spend level below which you should not hire one. That is the part that decides the answer, so it is the part this post is built around — including the point below which hiring me is the wrong call.
On this page
The symptom that makes owners ask this
The symptom is rarely “I lack marketing expertise”. It is usually one of three narrower problems wearing the same coat, and only one of them is solved by hiring someone.
| What it feels like | What is usually underneath | Does an agency fix it? |
|---|---|---|
| “Nothing I try works” | No target. You do not know the cost per sale your margin can carry, so every result looks ambiguous. | No. This is an hour with a spreadsheet, and you have to do it either way. |
| “Results jump around week to week” | Too little volume. The platforms cannot learn from a handful of sales a week, and neither can you. | Rarely. More skill does not create more data. More budget or fewer campaigns does. |
| “I do not have time to do it properly” | Time. The work is real and you are doing it last. | Yes, if the budget is big enough that the fee is a small share of it. |
Knowing which of the three you have is most of the decision.
Do I need a marketing agency?
You probably do not need a marketing agency if you spend less than $5,000 a month on ads, and you probably do if you spend more than that and are the one running it. The number is not arbitrary. It is where a management fee stops eating the budget it is meant to improve.
Here is the arithmetic with my own published prices, which are on the fractional CMO page and every service page. Running one channel is $1,500 a month. At $5,000 of ad spend that fee is 30% of the media budget. At $10,000 it is 15%. At $3,000 it would be half. Below the minimum, the work would have to improve results by an implausible amount just to pay for itself, which is why I tell owners under that line not to hire me.
An agency multiplies what the budget already does. It cannot multiply a budget too small to produce readable results, and at that size the fee is often better spent as ad spend or new creative.
The ten-minute check before you hire anyone
Answer these four before you take a sales call from anyone, including me. If you cannot, the first job is yours, not an agency’s.
- What can you pay for one sale? Average order value times your margin after product cost, shipping and fees. If the average order is $80 and 60% of it is left after costs, you can pay up to $48 for a sale before it loses money.
- How many sales a week come from paid ads? Meta’s guidance is that an ad set needs about 50 optimization events over seven days to get through its learning phase. If you are nowhere near that, the account is short of data, not skill.
- How many hours a week are you spending on it? Price them honestly. If that time would be worth more running the rest of the business, that is a real argument for handing it over.
- Does revenue move when spend moves? Pull the last six months of ad spend and total store revenue side by side. If they rise and fall together, the ads are doing something. If revenue ignores spend, find out why before paying anyone to spend more.
That check takes ten minutes if your numbers are in order, and an afternoon if they are not. Either way, it is the brief any good agency would ask you for on the first call.
What changes at each spend level
The right kind of help changes as spend grows, and the thresholds below are the ones my own pricing is built on. Other people draw the lines differently. The logic is the part worth keeping.
| Monthly ad spend | What makes sense | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Under $5,000 | Do it yourself, on one channel | Any fee is a large share of the budget. Spend the money on the ads and the creative, and learn the platform. |
| $5,000 to $10,000 | Someone running the channel that matters most | The budget now justifies a fee, and one channel run well beats three run thinly. |
| $10,000 to $20,000 | One owner for every paid channel together | Google and Meta start claiming the same sales. Someone has to decide the split between them on your numbers, not each platform’s. |
| Over $20,000 | A senior strategy owner, part‑time or hired | The problem becomes the plan, the budget split and the people, not the campaigns. |
On my own pricing those tiers are channel management at $1,500 a month from $5,000 of spend, every paid channel run as one at $4,000 a month from $10,000, and fractional CMO work at $7,000 a month from $20,000. I publish those so you can do this arithmetic before a call, not during one.
What an agency cannot fix
An agency cannot fix a product people do not want, a margin too thin to advertise, or a site that does not convert the visitors it already gets. None of the pages ranking for this question say so, because all of them are selling the agency.
- Margin. If your break‑even cost per sale is lower than what the channel charges to find a customer, better management narrows the loss. It does not reverse it.
- The site. Slow pages, weak product pages and a clumsy checkout waste paid traffic after the click. That is usually a Shopify fix, not an ads one.
- The offer. Price, shipping cost and returns policy are business decisions. An agency can tell you they are hurting, and cannot change them.
- Promised outcomes. Google’s own advice on hiring an SEO warns against anyone guaranteeing rankings. The same rule applies to anyone guaranteeing a return on ad spend.
What do I still have to do myself if I hire one?
You still own the numbers, the accounts and the decisions. An agency does the work; it cannot know your margins, your stock levels or next month’s launch unless you tell it.
- Own every account. Your business should be the owner of the ad accounts, analytics and pixel, with the agency added as a user. Google explains how to manage access to your Google Ads account, including keeping more than one administrator. If an agency wants to run ads from an account it owns, walk away — you lose the history when you leave.
- Give it a target. The break‑even cost per sale from the check above. Without it, the agency will pick a metric that flatters its own work.
- Answer questions quickly. Approvals, product details and stock changes. A week’s delay on creative sign‑off is a week of the old ads fatiguing.
How do I know if it is working?
It is working when store revenue grows faster than ad spend, measured in Shopify rather than in the ad platforms. Platform dashboards count sales under their own attribution rules and tend to claim more than they caused.
That is the test I hold my own accounts to. On Shurhold, which I have run for seven years, spend rose 35% year over year while revenue rose 44%. The useful part of that sentence is the gap between the two numbers, not either number alone: spending more is easy, and revenue rising faster than spend is the thing you are paying for.
Give any new arrangement three months before judging it, and agree the measure before it starts. If the answer at three months is “the platform says it is working” and your bank balance disagrees, believe the bank.
Agency, freelancer or one senior person?
If you have decided you need help, the next question is what shape. An agency gives you a team and usually a junior person running the account day to day. A freelancer gives you one pair of hands on one channel. A senior consultant gives you the person who sets the plan, and often runs it too. I compare the three, with what each is good and bad at, in in‑house vs agency vs consultant, and the questions that rule a candidate out are in how to choose a digital marketing agency.
Questions people ask
When should I hire a marketing agency?
What does a marketing agency do for an online store?
Why do you need a digital marketing agency?
Can I do my own marketing for my store?
Want this run properly?
I am Greg Asuncion, an ecommerce paid media consultant. I run Google Ads, Meta, Amazon and Microsoft for direct‑to‑consumer brands on Shopify — one person, published pricing, and a free audit after a call. Here is what fractional CMO work looks like for a Shopify brand.