Hiring a PPC Agency | You Should Ask 19 Key Questions

Hiring a PPC Agency

Hiring a PPC Agency: ‘Two heads are better than one’, right? If you are hiring a PPC agency, you will not just get to work with an expert but you can have a large group of PPC experts who will help you to manage your campaigns effectively.

But, you need to be clear with what you want from a PPC agency. An agency will take some time for a proper understanding of your business, products or services and your campaign goals. If you are in a hurry, you might land up making losses.

Before signing a contract with any agency, you must have an idea of the results you will get from the agency and what are the deliverables they would provide you.

Here Are a List of Questions You Should Ask Before Hiring a PPC Agency:

1. Can You Share a Success Case Study from One of Your Clients?

Before getting on-board, you must check any of the case studies from previous clients for a better understanding of the PPC agency and its potentiality about driving real-time results. There are a lot of agencies who charge high fees for managing PPC but they actually don’t follow through meaningful results. Hence you must ensure that you avoid these agencies.

You should also be aware of the type of results you are expected to get for your business. Ask them the results they are expecting to provide you. Try to get the best from the PPC agency you are hiring. Check all through prior to hiring a PPC agency.

2. What Will My PPC Budget Be Vs. The Cost to Pay Your Agency to Run the Campaigns?

You should have a clear understanding of the contract before hiring a PPC agency- regarding the monthly charges and the part of it as your Google Ads budget, the overhead charges for the resources to run your PPC campaign, etc. Make sure you are not spending any extra dollars on the agency apart from their hourly rates or monthly management fees, if not required for any additional tool or buying a domain for your website.

You should shop around a bit and try to find a few options for PPC agencies and compare their pricing and then decide the best for you in terms of price and services in return.

3. Who Will Own the PPC Campaigns — Me or You?

Some of the PPC agencies set up your campaigns under their business account and after the contact gets over or the client-agency relationship ends, your campaigns stay back with the agency and not in your business. This should be avoided and it is very crucial that you get access to all the data of your PPC campaigns. Try to keep in mind to set up the campaigns under your business account and not under the agency’s as they will stay with you even when you end working with the agency.

4. How Proactive Will You Be When It Comes To Adding Negative Keywords?

Once you would dig into the search terms results, you can easily see the number of search terms that are not converting for your business. At times, even the best PPC managers provide search terms that are totally debris.

Hence, if you notice low performing keywords, you need to be extra careful about the addition of negative keywords at the ad group level or campaign level.

Refer to the above image for negative keywords tab and you can see several negative keywords added within the campaign.

The addition of negative keywords can bring about a drastic positive change in the quality of search terms arriving from your ads.

5. How Much Time Will You Take to Understand My Business?

Being a business owner or an entrepreneur, you should make sure that the PPC agency is spending some time to learn about your business and they should ask you the right questions. It is not necessary for the agency will not require having an intense understanding of your product line or services. The agency might not be much aware about your geo-specific areas, top-performing products or services or the most profitable best sellers. But it should be aware of the negative keywords that are important for a proper PPC management. – Need to add more valid points 

The agency needs to be proactive with the client in regard to communication.

6. Will You Track My Conversions?

While talking with agencies, you will hear them about the ways of improving your website visibility or increasing your site traffic. But the more important part is to bring a rise in your conversions and sales in order to make your investment sound.

There are several companies that are running Google Ads campaigns but do not have tracking in the right way and in the right place.

Many of you don’t know about Dynamic Number Insertion (DNI) Tracking setup for your website. DNI is a dynamic phone number swapping out when someone clicks on your ad and lands on your website. When a user clicks on your ad and calls on to your business number, this should be considered as a credit of the PPC ad. But many of you are not aware of how to do this, they under-count conversions.

You can click on ‘Tools’> ‘Conversions’ in your Google Ads account and you can see many conversion tracking options. For phone tracking, you need to select the option for “phone calls” and then select “calls to a number on your website”.

The phone call conversion is the most complicated conversion for tracking and you need to place a Dynamic Number insertion (DNI) script on your website.

Choose ‘Phone Calls’

Next, choose ‘Calls to a phone number on your website’.

You should be able to track the revenue generated from the sales of your eCommerce website after a user clicks on the ad. This can help you to gauge your return on ad spend (ROAS) quite easily.

But in case you don’t have a proper tracking, you will not be able to make the correct decisions if you should pause certain keywords or your ads that are costing you too much dollars.

Ask your agency about the platforms they use for call recording as well as reporting and if they comprise of development resources for pixel placement for every tracking requirement. – Please mention about Google Ads tracking, Pixel tracking, Platform based tracking for every platform they are running ads on 

7. What Is the Fee Structure?

Many of the agencies charge a certain percentage of your advertising spend; while others might charge their flat fees. The more budget you have, the more likely you are for negotiating with your agency for charging a flat fee.

If you are spending 1 million dollars on ads on a monthly basis, then the percentage of ad spend wouldn’t matter to you as you would pay a large sum of money to your agency or the freelancer whoever manages your account.

Keep in mind to not pay more to the agency as their fees even when your budget is less unless they are conducting an initial audit of your account for laying the foundation of your Google Ads campaigns. The usual agency fees range from 10%-20% of your ad spend so make sure you are not paying more while signing on with an agency. Some agencies may also have minimum requirements in lieu of their services.

We would recommend having an audit of your account first when you have a small budget. This way you can be assured that your account and campaigns were set up correctly and then you can safely run your ads initially for a month or so, and see if you are getting positive results. If yes, you should think about increasing your advertising budget.

8. Will You Do or Modify Landing Pages?

While discussing about your business goals, the agency should also look at different aspects from different perspectives.

Many of the PPC companies that you hire don’t have the expertise for the implementation of pixels on their website and then you get an additional developer to fix the technical things of your website. So make sure you ask your agency if they have technical skills- whether they should work towards your landing page- build or modify your landing pages.

Ask your agency if your website is properly designed and tell them to recommend the improvements or modifications needed for the landing pages, make it mobile responsive, increase their loading speed or restructuring of pages and inclusion of titles and subheadings. Your agency should be able to pick out the common website flaws if any.

With the help of great landing page builders such as Instapage and Unbounce, even non-developers can create landers using custom templates, but you should get someone who will actually design your landing pages beautifully to get you good conversion rates.

9. How Will You Report on Our Progress Month-over-month?

Your agency shall provide you with updates on certain intervals to let you know about the performance of your ads. Before hiring a PPC agency, you should know how your agency will give you updates, what would be their reporting system before signing a contract with them. A sound communication is a way to the effective accomplishment of your business goals. But if your agency doesn’t provide you with regular updates, you should not work with them.

You will require having regular updates from your agency to know if your ads are failing to perform and it all depends on the amount of access you have to the metrics. Ask your agency regarding their reporting system if they will provide you monthly, bi-monthly or weekly reports.

Ask them if they will deliver easy to read reports along with summarized versions of what went wrong and what brought in success to you. Ask them how frequently you will get the reports and the type of information the reports include.

The reports should help you to measure your success or failure of your campaigns through metrics such as sales, leads, ROI, etc. that are directly tied to the success of the business.

At Oxedent, we provide performance reports with data-backed information to gauge your success. We give you summaries of weekly activities and other valuable insights on a weekly, bi-monthly and monthly basis.

10. Do You Have Experience Managing Paid Campaigns on Social Channels?

You should be hiring a PPC agency that has experience in paid social media as well due to the decrease in organic reach of Facebook and other social channels.

Hence you must find an agency that has specific experience in management of campaigns on social channels. You should also check if the agency has earlier experiences of working with other businesses similar to your niche. You wouldn’t handover your campaigns to a complete amateur, right?

The agency should have worked with multiple industries and gained high expertise in a wide array of B2B, B2C, eCommerce and lead generation companies.

11. Do I Need to Provide Ad Banners?

Ad banners are used basically for two reasons- cold outreach and remarketing using display ads. Banner ads are used mainly for display advertising.

Ask your PPC agency if they will provide display advertising management and not only search ads. If they would, ask them if they will provide banner ads. Ask them about the sizes and image texts. Many agencies offer banner ads of the top ten sizes. You can get them both ways, you can provide your own images and texts if you want and the agency would design them for you. Or, the agency would provide images and text ads and get the designs approved by you before making them live.

Oxedent does both of these while charging the same. We provide text ads and images from our end or we design the banner ads with the images and texts provided by you through our services.

You should be aware of the deliverables by your PPC agency before choosing any.

How many accounts managed by one account manager?

This question might be the most ignored one to ask before hiring a PPC agency. There are several agencies where analysts manage more than a hundred accounts at a time. This means that they can spend as less as half an hour on a single account. And often it happens that the large campaigns consume all the time leaving the remaining accounts untouched by the managers. The analysts dedicate the maximum time to the big accounts while the small and medium-size accounts are left unattended for long periods of time.

But at Oxedent, we don’t think that 30 minutes is sufficient at all for taking care of an account and our account managers dedicate their time and ensure to provide sufficient time to each and every account. Our analysts work in every campaign every day and this won’t change ever.

You shall ask the right questions in order to vet agencies and make a better decision in finding the right agency for you to meet all your business requirements. Choose an agency that will meet up and even exceed your expectations, consist of transparency and produce high-quality results. Also, the agency you choose should hit the extra mile to provide excellent customer services thereby ensuring you a healthy long term relationship.

12. How Do You Approach Keyword Research?

There are several tools apart from Google’s own search query to help you to discover new as well as related keywords. Your agency should be aware of these tools:

• Google Keyword Planner Tool
• SEMRush
• SpyFu
• Bing Keyword research Tool
• Keywordtool.io
• KWFinder

There are several other programs but the most simple and accurate tool for you, we would suggest, is Google Keyword Planner Tool.

A qualified agency will easily make out the research methods and calculate the keywords that can make you rank and sort even those keywords that would waste your budget.

13. Who Will Manage My Account?

This is the most crucial question- who will manage your PPC campaigns. The big companies have a myriad of employees but each of the PPC analysts might be working on 100+ accounts. As a result, they can give very less amount of time for each campaign.

Ask your agency to make you aware of your account manager, the concerned person with whom you can communicate through email or Skype. You should also know how often you can contact your account manager regarding any query or information about your campaigns. You should also be assured that your PPC manager is certified.

Make sure your account manager is dedicating sufficient time and attention to your account to ensure that your marketing dollars are spent efficiently that will give you returns. Check if your analysts are worth your time and money, whether they are qualified enough to manage your campaigns.

15. How do you select keywords?

The selection of keywords involves both the processes- new setup of campaign as well as for existing campaign. Selection of keywords requires calculations and creativity on part of the account managers. You should ask your potential PPC agency about their formula and strategy regarding keyword research and selection.

The PPC agency should find commercial or buyer’s intent keywords and get approved by you for no one knows the business better than the businessman. In case of the existing campaign, the agency should be filtering out keywords and eliminate the losing keywords. Addition of negative keywords is also important in order to increase your conversion rates. The agency shall also add new keywords if needed but it should get the fresh draft approved by the client.

Again, if you have a big budget, your PPC specialist should choose less buyer intent keywords to fit in the funnel with long run customers. But for the smaller budgets, you should go for selected keywords otherwise you can lose your budget with thousands of keywords,

Hence your PPC manager should be careful about the keyword research and selection of keywords, addition, and emission in order to bring to you maximum conversions out of your Google Ads campaigns.

15. How Much Involvement Will I Need to Have?

With some agencies, you might have very little control over your campaigns’ daily operation and management process. However, most of the business owners prefer to be less involved in the day-to-day processes.

But, at times you need to know certain things and you might be willing to make changes while discussing with your account manager. Make sure that your PPC analyst respects and pay attention to your opinion and listen to your recommendations and work on them. You are the client so the PPC specialist should hear you.

16. What Happens When Your Strategy/Approach Don’t Work?

Each and every strategy will not work for sure! But your PPC manager needs to work towards this. Before making any major changes, the PPC specialist should keep a total back-up record of all your existing content.

In case the change made fails to bring the intended results, you can put the previous content back into its original place, as required.

If modifications are made, you need to check which areas are working with the changes and which are not. If not, they should be put back into its original position. In this way, you will be able to avoid larger risks thereby gaining a lot from the changes.

No matter your efforts fail, you will be able to gain valuable insights into what and what not to do in future. Make sure to keep track of the changes you have tested in the past, remember to apply them for continuous improvement.

17. Do You Offer Services Across Multiple PPC Platforms (Not Just Adwords)?

Google is undoubtedly the most extensively used search platform but you should also check with your agency if they use Bing Ads (Microsoft Advertising) as well for Bing shares 22% of the desktop search traffic.

18. How Will You Help Me Stand out from My Competition?

The agency you choose should be able to understand your target audience as well as what are you offering your customers that your competitors aren’t. The agency should find out your USPs and use them to target your customers thereby making you profits.

19. How Will You Improve My Site’s Conversion Rate?

The agencies you choose might speak about increasing your online visibility and improve traffic incoming to your website. But the more important aspect they should focus on is the increase of conversions and bringing in results to bring you great returns on your investment.

Conclusion

Outsourcing your PPC campaigns by experienced and dedicated PPC agency would help you get rid of expensive mistakes and in turn maximize profits. Outsourcing will leave you worry free regarding the monitoring and management of your Google ads campaigns. You will save a lot of time and can focus on other development plans and marketing tactics.

Just be careful about hiring a PPC agency just for the sake of it. Try to choose a professional and experienced PPC agency like Oxedent for effective management of your Google ads campaigns and make your business a profitable one.