Questions to Ask A PPC Agency Before Signing Up

This is interesting bcoz if you’re not looking for years of experience, even a bad agency can sustain for a few years if it’s about achieving results

Instead, you’re looking for answers that show they understand PPC beyond the basic structure.

You’re looking for examples of how they worked with similar clients to get great results. Look for them to share their stats, such as Cost-Per-Click (CPC), Cost-Per-Acquisition (CPA), and general return on investment information for previous clients.

Look for answers that talk about the challenges that they’ve faced and how they may link to challenges that your campaign will face.

You’re looking for experience. But the number of years does not always make an experienced PPC practitioner.

It’s how they can relate their experiences to your project that matters.

Did you know that many Paid Media agencies operate on their own platforms? A Google Certified partner qualification shows that an agency takes itself seriously. It’s actively had the knowledge about the platform & it uses, which means you get a better experience.

Google AdWords isn’t alone here. There are Facebook, Bing Ads and more which plays a major role in PPC

Someone without the certifications won’t necessarily do bad work.

As a client, you’re trusting the agency which is working with you to get a result for your business. Let’s be honest, you’re going to generate the results. When your management calls you & you need to show the achieved results has impacted a strong ROI

Without transparency means that you don’t have an idea about the result or the business which you are dealing with.

Be aware if any agency doesn’t access provide access to your AdWords campaign. It means that they don’t want you to see that raw data, also avoid the agencies that offer inconsistent reporting to you.

Agencies should provide the details on leads, sales, and other important aspects which you are intended to know like CPC, CPA, and everything that’s come in between

If you don’t, then you’re dealing with lack of transparency which could hamper the results and put the organization in trouble

Every Paid Media specialist does the keyword research, but the quality of the research matters, anyone can find a lot of keywords for your ads, but if those keywords don’t lead to conversions, then what’s the point?

The correct PPC Specialist should provide an extensive list of keywords as standard, but you need to look more than that. Ask them about the match types, they should always know the difference between Broad Match, Exact Match. How are they going to use the match types to refine the campaigns?

Did you forget about negative keywords? Apart from the keywords that you target matters, but so do the keywords that you want to avoid. Will the agency use them? How they will determine the negative keywords for your campaign?

What are the other considerations that will they offer like a mix of short & long-tail keywords? What are the tools they use to select the keywords does matter?

Always make sure that the AdWords/Paid Media account ownership is the most important thing to discuss. More specifically, you need to make sure that the agency provides full ownership of the accounts.

This is important from a transparency perspective point.

The data that your campaigns generate can be integrated into other marketing efforts. Great Ads can show you where your audience is & what keywords to target & help with strategy elsewhere.

This is a practical aspect, what happens if you required to end your relationship with the agency? Doesn’t your data & the strategies will be gone along with them. It’s your duty to know about these things

The most aspect is the landing pages which play a vital role in the success of your PPC Campaigns.

Let’s know why:

• Landing page quality affects your Quality Score. An unhealthy/bad landing page means a low-Quality Score. It means a high CPC of which the agency must be aware of it.
• The number of landing pages that you have will have a massive effect also.
• If a business has more landing pages that get 12 times the amount of leads that business needs with 5 or lesser landing pages
• You need an agency that understands why landing pages are important, in vice versa the agency also needs to understand that what important role does that landing page plays

You need an agency that understands why landing pages are important.

They also need to know how to optimize them.

It’s important questions that a potential PPC Partner must answer the organization with whom they are working for. What’s important is that you as an organization should listen to the answer carefully.

You should look at them to start talking about your KPIs & their crucial metrics like CPC (Cost Per Click), Conversion Rate, CPA (Cost Per Acquisition)

You’re looking for them to start talking about your KPIs (Key Performance Indicators).

You are not the first person that has been burned by an agency, freelance or inhouse team. If you have an account and it’s not performing as well as it should.

It’s rare circumstances that I have seen a good agency will need to start from scratch. Most of them will take what you have and improve on it.

You need to look for someone who completes the full audit on your account and to see where you stand in present in your account

They should also speak about utilizing the data of the previous campaign to build the new ones.

Every PPC Account has useful data it’s up to an agency that can use the account to look at what keywords & ad copy didn’t work. Even they can pull data about how well the ads performed at different times of the day.

Many PPC Company gives their analysts many accounts to manage at the same time, As a client, you need to make sure that this doesn’t happen with the agency which you are trying to get on board.

Simple Reason: if your analyst has to manage many accounts at the same time, they will not be able to devout the time for your business.

This is how you end with lower results; you need to ensure that you’re gaining a consultant who will dedicate the time on your account

A Campaign or an account is successful only if it delivers an ROI (Return on Investment) for your business, you can get a lot of leads & conversions. But that cost tons of money to get them, that means the campaign hasn’t done its job

Good agencies know that efficiency is the key, so they’ll need to reduce the excess spending, speak to the agencies on a regular basis monitor the campaigns.

Look at the agencies to speak about using the negative keywords for your campaigns that ensure that you don’t spend on traffic which has no chance of converting. The agencies will mention how they will target demographics & how they’ll tailor ad copy to match the intended audience is in your sales funnel.

If you’re working on the Google Ads, they should mention the Quality Score (QS). Each & every Ad which has been created or which will be created as a quality score.

Simple Rule: The Higher the Score Lesser your bid to get the clicks

The majority of the PPC Agencies claim to have a great track record with huge spends per year. But as a client, you need to pick an agency that suits a good fit for your requirements. Always make sure that you need to know what kind of clients the agency currently has & the result they have achieved.

I have seen many agencies try to tie you for long one-sided contract where you are expected to sign up for 6-12 months of contract after the initial pitch & risk is yours, the agency can keep your account over the period and they collect the fees, you need to pay the release fee to get out of the contract before the period.

All Agencies don’t charge for their services in a similar manner. Some may work on the fixed retainers on a monthly basis regardless of the results, while others charge a certain percentage of your monthly spend, while others run on certain models with retainer & even performance-based fees.

It always important to know if you have the ownership of your Google, Facebook or any Paid Media Ads Account

I have seen a few clients who propose with 6-12 Month Contracts with average experiences, now they are looking for a better agency to manage their ads. As an experienced professional, I would recommend to build over their existing campaigns and work with prior historical data. That’s the other reason clients should ask their old agencies for access and authority of their account.

Sometimes previous agencies answer as “NO” to clients as the claim as their own account. As a result, the client will lose 6-12 months of data, and they have to start again from scratch. Or in certain scenarios, clients have been scared to leave their current agencies after investing money, they fear to go backward.

Some of the PPC Agencies open & build the PPC Account in their Names, or transfer the existing campaigns into their new account not the clients and they can charge you spend plus their costs, the downside of this is if you wish to leave the existing agency and go for another agency they can turn off your account and you have to start from scratch in a new account; in most cases with no clue which keywords, ad copies worked best, which negatives used, etc. for the account.

It’s a common practice that most of the agencies overload their PPC Specialists with more clients (referred to as account managers) if you divide them by least clients, (exclude meetings & training) how much time do your campaigns really get? Agencies managing many clients per specialist will try to turn down the question, but it’s important to get a feel for it.

There are automation programs that are designed to take many manual work hours away from the client/account manager to save time. This allows for higher client loads and more time to focus on other strategies, in some companies, you will find that agencies may not have one dedicated specialist, they’ll have a client manager who you communicate with, while they report to tech team where the work is being carried out.

When a client is investing money in paid Campaigns they need to get regular reports and they should know what’s going on & how the money is spent, having said that too much data can be as bad not enough, Analysis paralysis occurs when too much information is presented to reporting should be functional and useful at all times.

When you are speaking to the agencies, you should exactly ask the question of who would be working on your account. Just bcoz you meet with someone very experiences doesn’t mean that they will be the ones working on your account; it could be authorized to a junior member of the team.

Most of the agencies actually do other services too, they’ll be also offering SEO, SMM (Social Media Marketing, Email marketing, and whole lots of stuff) This means the agency is a big one, in reality, many do all these kinds of stuff only fairly well, like a handyman

As a client don’t forget to ask your agencies how have you saved your client’s money, what specifically worked what didn’t? Many Agencies speak broadly, quoting averages or make out that PPC Management is 99% of it is simple processes, this hard work to get right, to take things to next level where great savings are made, Agencies will often deflect your request for specific examples or case studies by telling you what they would do for your account.

While many agencies use the bid management tools to manage the bids for their client, the tools may vary from basic bid changing to advanced portfolio management software, the cost of these tools are high, in few cases 17% of total spend which leaves less margin for manual work on the account by a PPC Manager.

Agencies offer an inclusive package for not only management fees but also your google ads with unlimited clicks! As a client when you hear “Unlimited clicks” don’t fall for it as they don’t exist & even Google says that anyone/agencies claiming unlimited clicks is a misleading claim. If Management & Platform payments are inclusive, how much money would be spent on your actual advertising?