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Key Takeaway: The answer is DIY if you have hours a week and moderate stakes, and a freelancer, agency, or AI operator once lead volume, response speed, or your own time becomes the real bottleneck.
Most small business owners can technically build a Facebook ad in twenty minutes. The real question is whether you can run one well enough, and consistently enough, to matter, not whether you can launch it. That’s worth answering before you touch Ads Manager.

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What does running Facebook ads yourself actually involve?

DIY Facebook advertising is defined as managing the full cycle yourself: setting up Meta Ads Manager, writing creative, defining an audience, setting a budget, and watching performance closely enough to catch problems before they burn money. A boosted post is not the same thing. It’s defined as a simplified promotion with limited targeting and reporting, where a real campaign in Ads Manager gives you audience controls, placement options, and conversion tracking. Setup is the easy part. The ongoing work is where DIY gets expensive in a currency other than money: checking cost per lead most days, rewriting creative when it fatigues, and judging whether the leads coming in are actually good. For a home service owner already running jobs, that’s a second part-time job stacked on the first.

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What do you get from hiring someone?

Hiring buys three things: time back, a second set of eyes on money you’re spending daily, and someone who already made the expensive mistakes on a different budget. What hiring doesn’t automatically buy is speed at the other end of the funnel. Google’s research has found that a significant share of searches carry local intent, exactly the kind of buyer a Facebook lead form reaches: someone close by, ready to talk now. Whether that lead gets answered in ten seconds or two days usually has nothing to do with who built the campaign, and everything to do with who’s watching the inbox it feeds.

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DIY vs freelancer vs agency vs AI operator: how do the options compare?

Ad spend itself doesn’t disappear in any column. What changes is who’s minding it and whether anything happens after the click.

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How much should you expect to spend either way?

Cost per lead for Facebook lead-gen in home services often runs somewhere in the $30-80 range in many markets, though this swings hard by trade and geography. That spend is separate from management cost, whether that’s your own time, a freelancer’s invoice, an agency retainer, or a flat monthly fee for a tool that runs the account for you. This market varies more than most comparison pages admit. A freelancer might charge a flat few hundred dollars a month or a percentage of spend; an agency retainer commonly lands in the low thousands once management, reporting, and creative are bundled. Get actual quotes before assuming a number.

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When does it make sense to run ads yourself?

  • You’re testing whether Facebook lead-gen works for your trade, with a small budget you’re comfortable losing.
  • You genuinely have a few hours a week free and want to learn the platform.
  • Your lead volume is low enough that a slow response doesn’t cost you the job.
  • You want full control over every targeting and creative decision.
If none of those describe you, DIY is probably costing more in missed leads than it saves in fees.

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When should you hire out?

Hire something, person or system, once any of this is true: campaigns are live but nobody’s watching daily, leads arrive faster than you can respond, or your time is worth more doing actual work than watching a dashboard. McKinsey’s research has found that a majority of businesses now report using AI in at least one function, and ad management plus lead response is one of the more mature use cases. The harder question isn’t DIY versus hiring. It’s whether “hiring” means someone who builds campaigns and stops there, or something that also handles what happens the moment a lead clicks submit.

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A hypothetical example: a residential painting company

This is an illustrative walkthrough, not a claimed Ares client outcome. Say a solo painting contractor spends two evenings a week in Ads Manager, tweaking a campaign that produces leads inconsistently: some weeks five solid inquiries, others two and a handful of tire-kickers. Leads sit in a form notification until he checks his phone after the day’s jobs wrap, sometimes six or eight hours later. A freelancer would likely bring more consistent execution and give him his evenings back, but the response-time problem wouldn’t move unless the freelancer’s scope explicitly included answering leads, which most freelance ad arrangements don’t. An AI operator like Ares runs the campaign under similar oversight, but every lead also gets a text back within seconds, day or night, which is where more of those clicks turn into booked estimates instead of cold leads nobody called back in time.

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How Ares fits into this decision

Ares is an AI operator, not a drafting tool or a traditional agency. It runs on GoHighLevel as the CRM layer and manages Meta lead-generation campaigns through its ads connector, with owner approval required before any spend goes live. You state the goal in chat; Ares assembles targeting, creative, and budget, and you review the exact preview before anything launches. Full detail is in Launching campaigns and Budgets. What separates it from hiring a person to just manage the ad account: every lead gets an instant SMS or chat response, gets qualified, and gets booked or followed up automatically, with a human owner looped in when a conversation needs judgment. Harvard Business Review research by Oldroyd and McElheran found that businesses contacting a lead within an hour were roughly seven times more likely to have a qualified conversation than those who waited even a bit longer. A well-run campaign with slow follow-up is still leaking value at the point that matters most. Pricing is $299 a month standard, or $100 per seat for enterprise, on top of ad spend. Multi-location operators get one fleet dashboard instead of separate accounts. Ares doesn’t do call tracking or answer phone calls today; it’s text-first, and voice answering is on the roadmap, not live yet. None of this makes DIY or a freelancer the wrong call. If you have the time, enjoy the platform, and lead volume is modest, running it yourself is reasonable. The math changes once volume, speed, or your own time becomes the constraint. For the broader agency-versus-AI question, see Should I fire my marketing agency and use AI instead?

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Frequently asked questions

Not technically. Ads Manager walks you through setup in under half an hour. The hard part is the ongoing work: watching cost per lead, refreshing creative, and responding fast enough that the campaign pays for itself.
It varies widely. Freelancers often charge a few hundred dollars a month or a percentage of spend. Agencies commonly run in the low thousands once management, reporting, and creative are bundled together. Get quotes in your specific market.
Yes, within approval limits. Ares builds and monitors Meta lead-generation campaigns, requires owner approval before spend goes live, and checks performance daily, flagging or pausing issues automatically.
Usually not. Most freelancers and agencies scope their work to the ad account itself, not to answering the leads it generates. That gap is often where the real cost of a slow campaign shows up.
A boosted post is a simplified promotion with limited targeting and reporting. A campaign built in Ads Manager gives you real audience controls, placement choices, lead forms, and conversion tracking.
No. A freelancer typically manages the ad account and stops there. Ares also answers every lead it produces by text or chat within seconds, qualifies them, and books the appointment, escalating to a human when needed.