Are Google Ads Agencies Worth It? An Agency Reads the Reddit Threads

One thing we should say first

Two of the four threads below are not ecom. One is a web development business. One is a personal injury law firm in Los Angeles. We run Google Ads for ecom brands, so those two are outside what we do.

We're keeping them because the question people ask is the same. Cherry-picking only the threads that flatter us is exactly what makes agency blogs worthless. Just know that the CPC numbers in a law-firm thread have nothing to do with your Shopify store.

What r/PPC actually says, thread by thread

April 2022: the web developer who hadn't hired anyone yet

Is calling a Google Ads agency worth it? (r/PPC, 27 April 2022, 20 upvotes, 62 comments). A web dev business had spent $1,000+ on ads himself with zero conversions, and was thinking about hiring an agency that wanted $1,000 of spend plus fees.

Note what this thread is not. He hadn't been burned by an agency. He'd been burned by his own campaigns and was asking whether a professional would help.

The top reply (24 upvotes) said web development is a brutal niche because clicks are expensive, and recommended spending more, closer to $3,000/month, just to gather enough data. Another well-voted reply said if $1,000 is already a stretch, don't do PPC at all and go chase referrals instead.

Nobody said "agencies are a scam". The room said "this niche is expensive and you're underfunded".

May 2023: the interior design store

Google Ads Agency with 1000€ Ad spend worth it? (r/PPC, 18 May 2023, 7 upvotes, 16 comments). An interior design online store had run Shopping ads themselves between 10€ and 70€ a day, got two conversions in a month, and found a German agency.

The top reply (11 upvotes) is the one worth reading twice. It came from someone who'd worked on both sides in Germany. At that ad spend, an agency simply cannot afford to put real hours into your account, and it's a red flag that they'd even take the budget. Their suggestion was a paid consultation to teach the owner instead.

Another reply (6 upvotes) said 80% of the work is in the Shopping feed, and to get feed work written into the contract. One more said you need around 25 sales a month before anyone can optimise anything.

This is the closest thread to our actual world, and it's the one we'd hand to a prospect.

March 2021: zero sales on about $15 a day

0 effects - one month afer hiring an Google Ads agency (r/PPC, 8 March 2021, 10 comments). An eco-food and cosmetics store hired an agency, saw zero sales after a month on about $15/day, and had signed a six-month contract.

We used to describe this thread as proof that silence at 30 days means a bad agency. That was wrong, and we've fixed it. Read it and the room says the opposite. The best-voted reply is blunt: at $15/day you're probably paying more in fees than in traffic. As they put it, "this isn't the 'agency not doing their job right', this is you making a poor business decision."

Reddit sided against the person complaining about the agency. We're leaving that in because it's what the thread says.

March 2026: a year, zero conversions, and a split room

One Year @5k/month. Zero conversions. (r/PPC, 4 March 2026, 48 comments). This is a friend-of-a-friend story: a personal injury lawyer in Los Angeles ran Google Ads and Local Services Ads for a year. $2,500/month in agency fees plus $2,500/month in ad spend. Zero conversions, so he stopped.

Get the numbers right, because we had them wrong before: it's $5,000 a month in total, split evenly. The fee equalled the entire ad spend. One commenter's reaction: "50% on ad spend, it's huge."

The room genuinely split:

• The highest-voted comment (33) said $2,500 with zero leads is obviously not normal.
• The next (27) said a PI lawyer in LA faces clicks that can run into the hundreds of dollars. So $2,500/month might buy under 100 clicks in a year, too little to work, whoever runs it.
• Another said zero after a full year smells like broken tracking or setup, not a budget problem.

There's no consensus to report. Anyone telling you this thread "proves" agencies are useless is selling you something.

Our take, as the biased party

Now our opinion, which you should trust less than the threads.

We think Reddit is right about the threshold. Under roughly $2,000 to $3,000 a month in ad spend, an agency usually isn't worth it. The fee eats too much of the budget and there isn't enough conversion data for anyone to optimise against. The German commenter said it cleanest: at a tiny budget, a real business can't afford to give you real hours.

Where we'd push back: r/PPC leans hard on "budget too small" as the whole answer, and sometimes it isn't. Zero conversions across a full year is not a budget story. That's a tracking, feed, or targeting story, and somebody was being paid to catch it. The split in that March 2026 thread is the correct response.

	Under $2,000-3,000/month	Above $2,000-3,000/month
Is an agency worth it?	Usually not. The fee eats too much and there's too little data.	Depends entirely on whether the agency is good.
What Reddit says	Fund it properly or run it yourself. Repeatedly, across every thread we read.	Much less agreement. The room splits on whose fault a failure is.
The real risk	Paying more in fees than you spend on traffic.	A bad agency at $10,000/month burns more than a bad one at $1,000.

Where ZenoX fits

We built our fees around exactly that 1,000€ problem. They're tiered and drop as a percentage as you scale, so the fee doesn't eat the same share of a growing budget that it did on day one.

We also turn budgets away. We work with ecom brands past the DIY stage with real spend to protect. If you're not there, we'll tell you instead of taking the fee anyway. That's not charity, it's self-interest: an underfunded account makes us look bad.

Across 200+ ecom brands and €200M+ in tracked revenue, the accounts that work are the ones where spend and management fit each other.

Ecom brands managed

200+

Revenue generated

€200M+

Reddit's answer to "is an agency worth it" is mostly "you can't afford one yet". We agree, and we're the ones losing the sale by saying it.

If your budget doesn't clear the bar, find out for free. Google Ads eCom Lab is our free Skool room with 1,100+ D2C and dropshipping operators. It's a fine place to get a second opinion on whether you need an agency at all. When the numbers make sense, see how we price it.