It doesn’t really matter if you’ve worked with a PPC Agency before. You should consider these things before you sign any contract. It’s likely that they will be an addition to your marketing team. They will be working closely with you to improve the campaign performance, adjust the strategy as required. Before you decide to hire your next PPC partner, here are seven things.
The TLDR version:
- Transparency
- Goals & expectations
- Strategy
- Agency vs. Client Contribution
- Experience
- Reporting
- Pricing structure
The complete script is available in the video podcast at
“We are very excited to begin this topic discussion today. We’ll be discussing how we can hire a PPC company in 2019, so we know we have plenty of information to start discussing this topic.
When you are evaluating and selecting a PPC agency, you should make a list of key factors to help you choose the right one for you. Today’s call features Lauren Holland and Jacob Wulff, who are our PPC managers.
Okay, so we have a few things to talk about but the main thing was transparency and partnership. Matt Ellis
#1 – Transparency
“Yeah. Transparency is one of the most important qualities you should look for when looking at an agency. You’re hiring people who are experts in their field to work on your product’s behalf.
You give them a budget and, depending on how they set up it, hours. Together, you work on the strategy. Which products and services do you think are most important to them? The advertiser owns all that geography-related information.
Although you are getting assistance from an agency to make the campaign live, optimize it and do all the other stuff.
If they aren’t transparent about what they do with their time every day, or they just sort of disappear and send you an email report without the details that you need, based upon the strategy that you guys have already discussed, that’s not going to be very beneficial for you. It doesn’t give you any information about what they’re doing with their time.
You should be capable of jumping into the AdWords Campaign or Google Ads Campaign and saying, “These keywords are good.” I’m not going to do that. There are seasonality issues. This is a great opportunity to become a partner with the agency. You’re relying on their extensive experience in the field to assist your business.
So you should be allowed transparency and participation in this process.” Lauren Holland
“Yes. “Yes. It is important to remember some of the things you should be aware of when working with an agency. Matt Ellis
“I believe that advertisers are intelligent. They see ads online and use the internet. My view is that the entire industry is beyond the point of being able send “Here’s my budget”, make some ads and then go out there. I’ll receive a report in 30 business days. I believe the industry has moved beyond this point. This is more of a strategic decision at this point. I consider it important to form a partnership.” Lauren Holland
“Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Yes, it’s very, very good. It’s really, really good. We want to be transparent and work with our clients.
I’m aware that there are expectations and goals that clients have for agencies. Jake had some things to say about that. Matt Ellis
#2 – Goals & Expectations
“Thanks Matt. Setting goals and expectations is essential. From the beginning, you want to be clear about your expectations and goals. It’s important to fully understand the reasons you’re doing PPC from the moment you contact an agency. We don’t want the agency to just shoot in the dark.
This is why you need to ensure that the agency you are working with understands your goals and expectations from the very beginning. How does this look? This can mean, for example, I want to sell X amount of products by the end of next month. Or, I would like to double my sales, my conversions, or my business leads within the first six month.
When you establish a partnership with an agency, it is crucial that you align your goals and expectations with theirs. This will help you both as a businessperson and with your agency. You can also keep track of the progress, performance and make adjustments if needed. If you don’t set a goal, it’s impossible to score.
It’s crucial. This is very important.
“What are some things that clients should be looking out for when evaluating agencies?” What makes them different? What are the things that make them stand out in their strategy? What are the clearest indicators that they know what they’re talking to when developing the PPC strategy?” Matt Ellis
#3 – What is the strategy?
“I believe optimization and strategy are terms that are often used. If you hear someone say that digital advertising can be really strategic, it may not make sense to you. Instead, talk with the potential agency to discuss your strategy. For every advertiser, a search campaign may not work for them all. You might need video ads, local service ads, remarketing, or something else.
Something different. You should have a strategy that is specific to the advertiser. Similar for industries. There is no way hotels could be any different from selling ladies’ shoes, or something similar. It is important to have a different strategy in all markets. Texas will be more diverse than the west coast. Costs will vary. The demographics will be different.
Your agency should consider a lot of things before they suggest a budget, strategy or start date. A list of keywords. This is because Google Ads, Bing Ads and Amazon have all kinds of wonderful data. It’s important that we are using it instead of getting it.
Optimization is the same. These keywords that you talked about at the end of the strategy calls, at campaign set-up, are going to change. Bids will be changed, the [inaudible 02:07:26] will be different, all that good stuff. It is important to establish a strategy, but it must also be kept going. You must keep it going with optimization, and just be involved. Lauren Holland
“These are some very good points. Lauren, these are all great points. Another thing that I wanted was to mention is that you might want to inquire about how the agency can help further develop your PPC strategies, or perhaps if they can help with creating one. Good points. It is important to inquire about their management strategies and tactics.
It’s something I am often asked. That question is one that I’m sure you have all been asked. What are you going to do for my account? What tools do your use to monitor the performance and condition of my account? You should also ask the agency if they expect you to contribute to the account in any way.” Jacob Wolff
#4 – Agency vs. Client Contribution
“Here, at Kobe Digital. We do have some things you need to get started. Are we required to have access Google Analytics or a search console? To be able to access ads, we will need the CID. We might need admin access to WordPress to be able to get into the backend to help us develop landing pages.
You can also let your agency have a look at your current PPC account, or any account you may have in the past. They will be able to make recommendations and show you how your agency would improve or maintain the performance of the account.
These are important too. Then, consider whether you are willing to let the agency manage your accounts. Sometimes, the account is in good shape and you just want it to keep what you have. Sometimes you might just want to start over and use data from another account.
Also, make sure strategy is always the first thing that you focus on. Jacob Wolff
“Really understands your business objectives and goals before starting a strategy writer. Then we can make optimization suggestions.
Lauren, I think that you raised a good point. Before you can come up with a concrete strategy, a lot agencies will give you a plan and then not go into detail about your business. You can also find a lot more details down the line.
It should take more time for you to get to know me, but are they able and willing to listen? Is it possible for them to first listen to my business goals before suggesting any optimization or strategy tips. Lauren, you mentioned experience as one of the things that you should be looking for.
You can compare agency to agency and find out what the different agencies have to offer. It is also important to look at their backgrounds to see who they are and what they know. Perhaps they have experience in your industry, or they don’t. But it’s important to look at different agencies and see what they can offer. Matt Ellis
#5 – Experience
“Yeah experience is super important. That’s why I was thinking about it as we were discussing agencies. It is something that I get asked about when I talk to potential clients about Kobe Digital or do audits. It will sort of come from somewhere, like, well…I’ve tried to run this ad for a hotel, but it keeps getting rejected and I don’t know why.
They’ll then ask, “Have you ever run hotel ads?” Is it allowed to run ads for hotels on Google Ads? Why can’t it be run?
I have the experience to examine your ad copy and spot any problems. It’s not enough to say that you’re the best, but you need to make it clear. This is how you should phrase it. We have certainly run a lot of hotel ads, and we sort of organized ourselves in this way.
So, I have a lot healthcare clients. This could be an urgent care centre, or perhaps someone selling supplements. It could also be a hospital. We have people in the agency with specialties. Someone else could run lots of legal ads. This just keeps us from being the best in our industry. Because they are specialists in that particular industry, you will be partnered with them.” Lauren Holland
“And with that, I think, going off of casestudies that obviously dives just to another topic, huge discussion about reporting where you can obtain a variety of different items from agencies now that are either shallow or clean cut, great reports. Jake had some excellent bullet points. What do you really search for, if a client? And how would you compare an agency’s reports to your own? Matt Ellis
#6 – Reporting
“Yeah, definitely. It is important to determine what type of reporting agency will be used. Also, I would ask you how often you expect updates and reports to be delivered by your specialist. Do you need a monthly report or a quarterly one? Do you want a monthly update? Would you like to receive a biweekly report from your specialist? A quick overview of some metrics, or regular meetings with your specialist to just go over the results, and to share the strategy. Kobe Digital works with a diverse range of clients.
Some clients are happy with a monthly report. There may be a client that needs biweekly meetings, weekly check ins, and a mid-month performance report. At Kobe Digital, we make it a priority to send a monthly and mid-month report. That seems to work pretty well for most of the clients. However, there are exceptions for clients who have a specific request.
It’s also important to ask what metrics the agency will measure and how it aligns with your company’s marketing goals. Is the agency reporting on something totally unrelated to what you offer? Are you concerned about CTR? Is it even possible to understand what CTR is? Do you consider CPC to be important? Or are you only interested in comparing the number of leads that we generated this month with last month and what their costs were? Do they want to track the results from the initial click until the conversion? Does their attribution model differ?
These are the most important questions you should ask. You can also ask to see examples of their dashboard and any reports they’ll be producing. It’s a good idea for clients to be aware of what they can expect when you start working together. Jacob Wilff
“Jake. I heard you mention that we can jump on the call to go through the reporting. There are so many acronyms that can be used to describe almost everything. After we have completed a report, I want to let everyone see it.
Many of these metrics are important to the campaign. But the advertising may not be able to understand what each of them mean or their significance. We like to just jump on a phone call like this and go through it together. There’s always time for questions and explanations.” Lauren Holland
“Yeah. Jake, I think that you brought up some great points. Let me see some examples of those reports before we sign on. Also, make sure to compare between agencies you are looking at to see what metrics they have to offer you.
Does the report include a video? Is there additional information included in the report? You will be able to discern which agencies provide you with less targeted, high-level reporting and which agencies provide you with more concrete reporting metrics. – Matt Ellis
#7 – Pricing structure
“And, I suppose to kinda go alongside that as we’re talking about interviewing agents is, one thing I wanted to touch on as we’re discussing agencies was understanding their billing cycles and how they price their services. PPC agencies charge their clients in a variety of ways, which I am aware.
Some require a retainer fee each month. Some charge a percentage of your spend. Others, like the ones we have at Kobe Digital, charge an hourly fee. It is important to understand that when you invite a PPC agency to your business, will they be taking a percentage from your spend? If so, how does that affect the performance of any campaigns that you are running.
It is important to know upfront what the commission and pricing will be. It’s important that you know what the agency will charge. To be able compare agency to agency and see which type of model is going to work best for you, and to decide what kind of reward you want, the client and what you can afford to pay to receive the results you may get. So you could look at this and see what pricing models each agency uses. – Matt Ellis
“Make sure to find out how the agency receives their fee. Let’s say they tell you that they can run ads for you and charge you about $10,000 per month. It’s important to know whether it’s a commission or if there’s an additional charge. They’ll send you a separate invoice if they tell you 2000 monthly. Your ad spending is only 8,000-9,000 depending on the commission they receive. It’s important to include this information in your ad spend budget. It will have a significant impact on your campaign’s performance. This is something you will need to know.
You must also spend a minimum amount. If you are told by an agency that you want us as your agency, you must send $25,000 per month. If you have a local service advertisement and you are not located in a large city, then you don’t necessarily need to spend $25,000 per monthly. There isn’t that much search volume. YouTube ads that are contextually relevant do not have the same amount of traffic. You might consider something like this to be suspicious. You might think it’s excessive or higher than anyone has suggested.
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