Is an agency or software cheaper for managing ads?

It depends entirely on your spend level, because the two fees behave differently rather than one being universally lower. A percentage of spend fee rises as your budget rises, while a licence plus internal time is largely fixed. Calculate both at your current monthly spend, then recalculate at the spend you expect in a year. The crossover point between them is the only number that matters, and it is specific to your quoted percentage and your own salary costs.

Who should own the Meta and Google ad accounts?

You should, with the agency or contractor granted access into your assets rather than the reverse. That means the Business Manager, the Google Ads account, the pixel, the conversion actions and the product catalogue sit under your organisation. Access can be granted and revoked in minutes; ownership cannot be moved that easily, and in some cases it cannot be moved at all without rebuilding tracking history.

What should I check in a contract before leaving an agency?

The notice period and the exact date by which notice must be given to stop auto renewal, whether a handover is included or billed, creative usage rights after termination including whether source files transfer, and who holds admin on each asset. Confirm that the exit process has the agency stepping down from your accounts rather than removing your access from theirs.

Can software replace a media buyer entirely?

It replaces execution more readily than judgement. Repetitive operations such as budget shifts, rule based pausing and reporting are exactly what a tool is built for. Deciding what an acceptable acquisition cost is, when a campaign has had enough runway, and what the next creative should say still requires a person who understands the business. If no one internally is willing to take that on, a licence will not fill the gap.

Compare ad agency vs software for paid ads

The ad agency vs software question is almost always argued on capability: can a platform really do what an experienced media buyer does? That framing hides the three things most likely to hurt you eighteen months from now. You are choosing between buying labour and buying a licence, and those two purchases behave very differently on who owns the ad account, what you keep when the relationship ends, and how the bill moves when your spend moves.

This page stays on the commercial side: which clauses to read and which numbers to run, all of them sitting in documents you can open today.

The ad agency vs software choice: what you are actually buying

An agency retainer buys a share of a team's attention. That attention brings things a tool cannot supply: someone to call when an account gets restricted, a second opinion on a creative direction, a named person accountable when a month goes badly. It is also rationed across every other account on that team's list.

A software licence buys repeatable operations that run whether or not anyone remembers to ask. It supplies consistency and speed, not judgement. Someone on your side still has to define what good performance means. If nobody internally will own that, a licence is a subscription to dashboards nobody reads.

An agency converts a capability gap into a recurring cost; software converts it into a recurring cost plus an internal responsibility with a name attached to it.

The ownership question that decides everything else

Before fees, settle who holds the assets. In the service model this is where the pain lives: accounts get created quickly at the start of a relationship and nobody inspects the structure until it is time to leave. Write a name next to each line:

The Meta Business Manager containing the ad account, and who holds full admin rights inside it
The Google Ads account: yours with agency access granted, or sitting inside the agency's manager account
The pixel, the conversions API setup and the Google Ads conversion actions
The product catalogue and the feed that populates it
Custom audiences and customer lists, including whose account they were uploaded into
Creative source files, not only the exported videos and images
Landing pages, call tracking numbers and any tag manager container

The pattern that costs money is simple. Everything was built under the agency's asset and you were given access as a partner, which works perfectly for exactly as long as you are a client. The software route is usually cleaner, since a tool normally connects through the platform API to accounts you already own. Ask the mirror question anyway: if the licence lapses, do the automations stop cleanly, or leave rules and paused campaigns behind for somebody to unpick?

Exit terms: what happens on the day you stop paying

Exit terms are the cheapest thing to negotiate at the start and the most expensive to discover at the end. In a service agreement, find the notice period, the minimum term, the auto renewal window and the date by which notice must be given to avoid it, plus whether a handover clause exists and whether it is billable. Ask who removes whom: an orderly exit means the agency steps down from admin, not that you are removed while the account stays put.

Then look at what travels with you. Usage rights on creative are the most commonly missed clause: if a video was produced under the retainer, can you keep running it afterwards, and for how long? Do editable source files transfer, or only finished exports? Conversion tracking is the other. If the pixel or the conversion actions belong to the other party, you are restarting the signal history that automated bidding depends on.

The operational side of a transfer, what gets documented so the next team can understand the account, is a separate job: the contract decides what you receive, the documentation decides whether it is usable when it arrives.

Cost structure: a percentage of spend against a flat licence

Now the arithmetic, where the two models separate most visibly. Percentage of spend fees scale with your budget. Licences generally do not. Work an example with round numbers, then substitute your own.

Say you spend 200,000 TL a month and an agency quotes 13% of spend. That is 200,000 x 0.13 = 26,000 TL a month. Price the other route over the same month: a licence at 8,000 TL, plus the internal time it needs. If the person who would run it costs 45,000 TL a month fully loaded and gives 40% of their week to ads, that is 45,000 x 0.40 = 18,000 TL. Add them: 8,000 + 18,000 = 26,000 TL a month. At this spend level the two cost the same, which is precisely the point. This is not a price comparison. It is a comparison of how a price behaves.

So move the spend and watch. Halve it to 100,000 TL a month and the agency fee halves with it, 100,000 x 0.13 = 13,000 TL, while the licence route stays at 26,000 TL, so the agency now costs half as much. Double the original figure to 400,000 TL a month and the agency fee becomes 400,000 x 0.13 = 52,000 TL against that same 26,000 TL, exactly double. Held for a full 12 months at the higher spend, that is 52,000 x 12 = 624,000 TL against 26,000 x 12 = 312,000 TL, a gap of 312,000 TL across the year.

Every figure above is a placeholder chosen because it divides cleanly. Put in your own percentage, licence price and loaded salary and the crossover moves. The shape does not: below the crossover the percentage model is cheaper, above it the fixed model is, and the faster you intend to grow the more that matters. Either way the fee is part of what a customer costs you, so run it through a CAC calculator with media spend rather than filing it under overhead. Our overview of ad platform pricing models covers the per seat, per spend and tiered variants.

What to verify in your own contract before you switch

Do not take any of this on trust, this page included. Terms differ by agency, vendor and market, and they change. Open the real documents and check:

Notice period, minimum term and the exact auto renewal date in your signed contract
A named owner for every asset in the list above, confirmed in writing rather than assumed
Creative usage rights after termination, and whether editable source files are included
Whether handover support is included in the fee or billed separately
For any tool, the current pricing on the vendor's own site and its official documentation on what it does and does not connect to
A live demo run against your own account structure rather than a clean sandbox

Insist on that last one. A tidy sandbox tells you almost nothing about a real account carrying years of naming conventions, dead campaigns and half migrated tracking.

The hybrid most accounts end up running

Very few businesses stay purely in one camp. A common arrangement keeps the accounts, tracking and catalogue in your own name, licenses a tool for the repetitive operations, and buys a smaller block of agency or freelance time for strategy and creative direction. It only works if the ownership question was settled in your favour at the outset.

Three conditions decide the split more reliably than any feature list. First, whether a named person internally will own performance: no name, no software. Second, whether your spend is growing or flat, because a percentage fee and a licence diverge in opposite directions as the budget moves. Third, how much of what you receive each month is judgement rather than execution. Pull the last three monthly reports and mark every line as a decision or a task. The tasks are what is exposed to being licensed instead, so name them precisely: budget scaling, bid adjustments, creative rotation, reporting.

If you run an agency yourself, the same questions run in reverse, and our piece on ad management for agencies looks at where automation fits inside a client service model.

The honest summary is that ad agency vs software is not a quality contest. It is a question about who holds the assets, what you can walk away with, and how your bill behaves as you grow. Answer those three in writing and the choice usually makes itself.