How to Choose PPC Agency – 11 Things to Look for
How to Choose PPC Agency?
There many factors to consider, before making a decision.
Pay Per Click (PPC) is an incredible advertising model to promote your business online. A PPC campaign can drive high quality traffic to your website. But there are so many internal and external factors that influence the success of a PPC advertising campaigns.
You need the help of an experienced PPC agency or account manager to manage your complex PPC campaigns.
But it is not an easy task to identify a good professional PPC agency. Find how to choose a good one for your campaigns.
How to Choose PPC Agency? Why the selection is difficult?
There are some factors which makes the PPC agancy selection really hard.
- You are new to Pay Per Click advertising – PPC is a completely new field for you. You are finding it difficult to understand the technical jargon (CTR, CPC, CPA???) and you have no idea about the results that can be expected.
- There are so many service providers – Once you start searching for a PPC agency, you will find a large number of service providers. And the biggest dilemma is finding the right one for your business.
- Results can vary from advertiser to advertiser – There is no standard industry specific benchmark when it comes to results. The results can vary from industry to industry, from client to client within the same industry and from website to website. So it is impossible to demand certain result from a PPC campaign. And it is very difficult to assess the validity of claims of better result from different agencies and individuals.
Then how will you make the choice?
Choosing a PPC Agency – Things to Look for
There are some very important things that you need to look for, before choosing your PPC agency.
- Be clear about your advertising goals. Once you are clear about your requirements it will be much easier for you to select your service provider.
- Make sure you will be the owner of your Google Ads account. If you are the owner of your account you can access it at any time to evaluate the performance and you can change your account manager any time you want. You will have complete control of your data and you can protect your account history. Do not allow someone to run your campaigns from their accounts.
- Be careful with ready made plans, something like one campaign, five ad groups, 10 ad copies and 100 keywords. Your campaign structure should be decided based on your advertising needs. For example, you are planning to advertise in two different countries US and UK. The ideal account structure here would be two separate campaigns targeting each country. Having two separate campaigns will give you a chance to optimize each campaign for your respective target audience. You can use separate budgets and optimization techniques. The one campaign ready made package will not be a good fit here. The same is applicable if you have different products and services.
- Beware of guarantees. A good PPC agency or manager can help you to achieve your advertising goals. But no one can guarantee specific results as it depends on a lot of internal and external factors. So if someone is offering guarantees, be careful!
- Do not make any long term commitments. You will only know about the quality of service from your PPC agency only when the campaign starts running. Without knowing it, do not sign any long term contract as it will prevent you from finding a new service provider even if the results are not satisfactory. Retain your account manger or agency only if the results are positive.
- Don’t think only big PPC agencies can deliver quality service. Size of an organization does not have any influence on the quality of service that you will get. You may get a very good one to one service from an individual compared to the template driven approach of bigger agencies.
- Certification is not everything. Google Ads or Bing Ads certification is a good measurement of someone’s knowledge, but always remember certification is never a guarantee of better results and good account management.
- Ask questions and expect questions – Ask questions to your prospective PPC agency regarding their overall account management experience and expertise. And expect questions from them. No account manager or agency can offer a good solution without asking and understanding your advertising goals and expectations.
- Fix some targets from the beginning. Results can vary to a great extend once the campaign starts running. But at least you should have flexible but measurable result expectations set at the beginning of the campaigns such as an acceptable cost per sale. This will help you to measure the performance once your campaign is live.
- Reporting & Communication – Ask about the frequency of reporting and the communication channels. Make sure you are comfortable with the communication channels (phone, mail, chat), timing and frequency.
- Be patient, especially if you are new to pay per click advertising. Do not expect miracles to happen during the initial days of a PPC campaign. The initial time is the discovery phase for any campaign. During the initial stages your PPC agency will find out what is working and what is not working for your campaign. And a good manger will optimize it for better performance. This can take days or even months. So be patient, moving your PPC account from one manager to another every month will never help you to get the full potential of your PPC campaigns.
Conclusion
A good PPC campaign can take your business to the next level and a good PPC Agency is vital to manage a successful PPC campaign. So choose your PPC Agency with care and give them enough time to make your PPC campaigns a success.