Choosing between an agency, a freelancer, or an in-house hire is a familiar debate for anyone running a brand on Amazon, but PPC raises the stakes in a way listing copy or design work does not. At INNELS, we see PPC as the one part of an Amazon account where a single missed day of bid adjustments, a paused negative keyword list, or an unmonitored dayparting rule can burn real budget before anyone notices. That makes the question less about who writes the best ad copy and more about who is accountable when something needs attention at nine on a Sunday night during Prime Day.
The cost of a freelancer's day off isn't visible until you check the ACoS a week later."— Andrejs Klimovskis, Founder
We have watched Amazon's ad platform consolidate faster than most sellers have had time to notice. Sponsored Display was folded into a single display ads offering, and Amazon has been rolling out a unified Campaign Manager that brings Sponsored Ads and Amazon DSP into one console, with unified reporting reaching general availability this year and the old, separate report pages set to disappear by the end of 2026. Underneath all of it, search relevance still runs on Amazon's A9 system, now paired with an AI layer called COSMO that reads shopper intent rather than just keywords — not the mythical 'A10' still circulating in seller forums.
Every consolidation Amazon rolls out raises the floor of what 'competent PPC management' has to include."— Niks Saknitis, PPC Manager
None of this makes a freelancer incapable — many are genuinely skilled. The issue we keep running into with brands that switch to us mid-year is structural, not personal: a freelancer is one person, and one person gets sick, goes on holiday, or takes a better offer. When that happens, campaigns don't pause gracefully; they simply stop being adjusted while bids drift and budgets waste. An agency built around named account owners and backup coverage doesn't remove that risk entirely, but it stops one person's absence from becoming your account's problem.
We've inherited more accounts from a freelancer's vacation than from a freelancer's mistake."— Mario Reambonanza, PPC Manager
Scale is the second pressure point, and it shows up earliest around big sales events and multi-format campaigns. Prime Day and the Q4 peak both demand hour-by-hour attention that one person managing several client accounts simply cannot give consistently, and most freelance PPC specialists are strongest in Sponsored Products with far less hands-on time in DSP, AMC audience work, or the creative side of display ads. As accounts add formats, the work stops being one job and starts being several done in parallel — which is exactly where a small team earns its keep.
Display ads still need a creative eye, not just a bid strategy — that's a second skill set most solo PPC managers never had time to build."— Yuliia Hurenko, Design Lead
For brands selling across Europe, the complexity compounds again. Germany, France, Italy, Spain, the UK, and the Netherlands each run their own auction with their own competitive dynamics, and campaigns copied wholesale from one marketplace to another routinely underperform against ones built natively in the local language. VAT treatment adds another layer sellers rarely plan for — advertising fees on Amazon.co.uk carry UK VAT that registered sellers can reclaim, while EU marketplace ad fees are generally handled as a reverse-charge expense — and Amazon's own Partner Network tiers require a team of certified practitioners, something a solo freelancer is rarely positioned to hold.
Running six marketplaces well isn't six times the work of one — it's six different accounts wearing the same brand name."— Mark Daniel Zalomajev, Founder
On paper, freelancers are the cheaper option, often running somewhere in the region of a few hundred to a couple thousand euros a month, against an agency's typical 10–20% of ad spend or a flat retainer in the low thousands. We think that comparison misses the point once ad spend and marketplace count grow, because the real cost of PPC mismanagement isn't the invoice — it's the wasted spend, the missed Prime Day windows, and the weeks lost rebuilding history after a handover. Seven out of ten sellers now advertise on Amazon, up from four in ten five years ago, and rising cost-per-click across nearly every category means inattentive management is more expensive than it has ever been.
In our experience, the decision comes down less to brand size and more to how many things are moving at once inside the account. A single marketplace with a modest catalog running only Sponsored Products can often be handled well by one skilled freelancer, provided you have a clear plan for what happens during their time off. Once a brand adds a second marketplace, brings Sponsored Brands or display ads into the mix, or starts treating Prime Day and Q4 as make-or-break events rather than busy weeks, the question stops being who is cheapest and starts being who has a backup plan, a reporting cadence you can rely on, and a named person accountable for the account every single week.
There is no universal right answer here, and we would rather a brand outgrow a good freelancer than start with an agency it doesn't need yet. What matters is being honest about where an account actually sits — one marketplace or six, one ad format or four, a quiet season or a Q4 that can't afford a gap — and choosing a setup with real accountability built in, whatever that setup looks like.
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