If you’re a business looking for help with your PPC advertising campaigns, you probably know that it can be difficult to find a PPC agency that’s right for your business.
There are so many factors when hiring a PPC agency, and sometimes it seems like all PPC agencies have the same requirements.
I’ve put together five fail-safe questions you can ask any PPC agency before deciding which PPC agency is right for your business.
There are many more questions that can and should be asked, but these will help you determine which PPC agency is right for you.
1. Do they specialize in PPC?
If you’re hiring an agency to manage your PPC advertising, this may be obvious. However, there are many full-service agencies that may promote PPC services even though they don’t have anyone who specializes in PPC advertising.
Someone who knows digital marketing in general could set up PPC advertising for you, but they might not be as good as someone who specializes in PPC services.
It’s not the end of the world to choose a full-service agency where PPC marketing is just one of the digital marketing services offered. However, if this is the case, you need to find out how successful their PPC department is and how successful they are in digital marketing in general.
Some agencies offer all sorts of marketing services to get as much business as possible. Often, web design agencies begin offering marketing services to their clients in order to sell more work to their web design clients.
We have also seen SEO agencies and influencer marketing agencies offering PPC management services to their SEO clients.
PPC is very different from SEO or web design. It requires different skills. If the SEO or web design agency is good at what they do, that doesn’t necessarily mean they are good at PPC advertising.
We would always recommend that companies choose an agency that specializes in just one area and is not a one-size-fits-all marketing or digital agency. This way you get specialized and not just average quality PPC services.
2. Do they have experience in your niche?
There is certainly no shortage of agencies offering PPC services. Some accept any client, others specialize in a specific niche. Therefore, they are only allowed to accept insurance customers, e-commerce companies or restaurants, for example.
In general, it’s good to find an agency that has at least a little experience in your industry. This is because they can better advise you on how best to run your PPC advertising based on their previous experience.
Choosing a PPC agency with no experience in your niche is still fine. It just means that there will be a learning period as you begin your PPC marketing journey with your PPC agency.
3. Do they work with similar budgets to yours?
Having managed both small-budget PPC accounts and large-budget PPC accounts, we know that management styles are different for both accounts.
With a large budget PPC account, you have more room to test and learn because you have a larger budget. You may identify a new area to test and then invest thousands of pounds in testing. You need an agency that can confidently handle such budgets.
The larger budget also means you’re always looking to increase your relevant traffic to meet your monthly spending goals.
This can lead to more upper-funnel keywords being targeted. Larger companies with larger budgets often have more processes to complete and may take longer to obtain approval.
A smaller company with a more modest budget may not have as many processes in place and changes can therefore be implemented much more quickly. The ability to make changes to a PPC account allows you to optimize it much faster.
With a PPC account on a budget, you don’t have as much budget to test and learn what works and what doesn’t. You also don’t have to target all keywords that are relevant to your niche.
Instead, you may want to target only the keywords that you believe will bring in the most returns while spending your more modest budget.
Therefore, unlike a big budget PCP account, the challenge is not finding more keywords to grow your account. This will determine which keywords you are not currently targeting in order to get the most return on your budget.
When choosing your PPC agency, be sure to ask what type of clients they have worked with and then see if those clients are a similar size to yourself.
4. What is the customer to account manager ratio?
If the PPC specialist assigned to your account already has a lot of clients to work on, they won’t be able to give your account the time and dedication it needs.
PPC specialists must be good at multitasking as they often manage multiple projects at the same time. However, if they are already overworked, they will not be able to develop a good PPC strategy for your business.
Larger PPC agencies often bombard their PPC specialists with fifteen or more clients. This means that the relationship you have with your account manager is worth next to nothing.
Regular communication with your PPC specialist is important so that you can stay up to date on your PPC account performance, your issues, and discuss the best next steps.
5. Do they have case studies of their success?
Check the PPC agency website for case studies. If they don’t have case studies on their website, ask about them.
Every PPC agency will claim that they are the best PPC agency on the market or that they are somehow different from the others. The way to really find out if the PPC agency is better than the rest is to look at their previous work.
Anyone can set up a Google Ads PPC account and spend money. Google makes it very easy. Getting results with Google Ads PPC advertising is completely different. It requires more thought and strategic planning.
Read the PPC agency’s case studies to get an idea of the challenge they faced, how they formulated a strategy, and the results they achieved.
All PPC agencies will showcase their best work. Therefore, the returns mentioned in the case studies should give an idea of the best-case returns you can expect from the PPC agency.
6. Do you think you can work with them?
Agencies are a collection of people. While good PPC agencies implement processes to ensure that every client has the same experience regardless of which PPC account manager is assigned to their client, your experience will still be different depending on who your PPC consultant is.
Before signing up with a PPC agency, be sure to ask to speak with the PPC account manager who will be managing your PPC account.
The PPC account manager should be present during the initial discussions between you and the agency. This way, you can see if you get along with the PPC account manager and if they have the expertise you want.
Wrap up
There are now many PPC agencies. The advantage of this is that businesses looking for PPC support are spoiled for choice and find the PPC agency that is best suited to the success of their business.
In summary, there are a few questions to consider when looking for a PPC agency:
- Do they specialize in PPC?
- Do they have experience in your niche?
- Do they work with similar PPC budgets to yours?
- What is the customer to account manager ratio?
- How good are your case studies?
- Do you think you can work with them?
If a PPC agency does well in all of these areas, then you may have found the right PPC agency for you.
