5 Questions You Should be Asking Your PPC Agency

How do you know you’ve got the right PPC agency for the job? If a supplier is spending money on your behalf it’s in your interests to know how they’re spending that money, and have the reporting to back up their reasoning.

We’ve put together the top 5 questions you should be asking your PPC agency – regardless of how long they’ve been working for you.

And if they can’t answer these questions, it might be time to look for a new agency…

1. Is my agency a proactive and experienced Google Partner?

Firstly, look for the Google Partner logo on your agency’s website.

Ask them what Beta products they are testing currently and what they are looking forward to being released.

Have you ever been given business insight, consumer insight or Google data to back up decisions and tests? Your PPC agency now have a direct link to your customer. They know what they were searching when they stumbled upon your site, they know where they’d been before they came to you, and where they went after visiting your site. And importantly, they know what people searched even if they didn’t click your ad.

This means they have insight that could guide your product development, competitor research, and market. This is hugely valuable – they should be making you aware of any trend they spot.

What we say:
WMG are a proactive agency, a preferred partner member, and we have a team with over 15 years combined PPC experience.

We are frequently asked to test Beta products by Google which means we know whats coming, and what will benefit our clients the most.

We report back on market trends to our clients to make decisions to drive their business forward. This often includes recommending new product lines, price promotions, and helping them to inform other marketing activity such as their SEO campaign, blogger outreach or email marketing. (Read more about that here).

2. Do I have an experienced team behind my campaign?

From the outset, you should know who is handling your campaign daily; your budget, your conversions, your optimisation. You should also know who you should direct questions to, and this person is probably not the person doing the “doing”.

You should also know their level of experience and how long they’ve been managing PPC campaigns for, and ensure you’re comfortable with that.

What we say:
At WMG, all of our PPC account managers are ex-Google employees. And because they’re Google trained – they really do know their stuff!

Not only that, you have a dedicated point of contact – a PPC executive – who will send you monthly analysis and reporting.

All of our account managers and account executives are trained and qualified in Google exams.

We believe that PPC is as much about optimisation as it is about expanding your market. If we feel your campaigns would benefit from using other paid search platforms, we will put our most experienced people behind that campaign to achieve the very best results.

We have YouTube specialists, remarketing specialists, display specialists and each of our account managers can draw upon these specialists to benefit your account, plus as ex-googlers themselves, they have experience of growing and managing thousands of accounts.

3. Is my agency completely transparent?

• Do I have regular calls, meetings and receive regular reports detailing progress?
• Do I control the billing and agree to each month’s budget in advance?

What we say:
It goes without saying, all of our clients have full access to your PPC accounts, including change history.

Many agencies rely on brand terms and tweak campaigns to avoid having to do the work on optimisation. If most of your conversions are coming through on brand words and words which are the “low hanging fruit” instead of the more difficult terms which agencies need to work hard for, you should perhaps question why.

A good agency will work on both brand terms as well as the harder keywords, and will be searching out and testing lots of new avenues, whether that’s site extensions, other platforms (like YouTube or Bing) or testing landing page elements.

4. Is your tracking set in place correctly?

It goes without saying, a campaign without tracking is like throwing money down the drain. Literally.

Not only should your agency be tracking the conversions, but they should be tracking (if the product is appropriate) the ROI on the conversions. This means if they are leads rather than sales, they should be interested to know what happens to them – did they convert to sale? And if not, why not? Does something need tweaking or fixing?

What we say:
We use 3rd party software to see the full picture. Where adwords stops tracking we start. This creates a clearer picture of your campaigns and means we can optimise the truly successful campaigns, and get rid of misleading campaigns which were costing you money and bringing on poor quality leads.

5. Has your budget spend gone up due to success?

As we keep saying, it’s not just about optimising what you have got, it’s about expanding on the potential and generating more opportunities through other channels, platforms and products.

If your campaign is a success, you should be increasing your spend on PPC incrementally throughout the time you are working with an agency.

What we say:
Our client Anglia Tools is a shining example of this. They were already active on PPC when they came to us, but they knew they could be achieving more in terms of conversions and ROI.

We implemented some sophisticated remarketing, display and YouTube campaigns, alongside making onsite changes such as adding limited-time offers and adding prices to ads where they were cheaper than the competition.

The results meant that we tripled their monthly revenue at a cost increase of just 60%.

So seeing a budget spend increase due to success is a key factor in determining whether your agency is performing.