How to Find the Best PPC Management Agencies
In order to find the best PPC management agencies, you need to do these 9 things:
- Establish Your Goals
- Look For Reputable Agencies
- Evaluate Their Expertise
- Evaluate Their Experience and Credibility
- Confirm Exactly What You’re Getting
- Look In The Right Location
- Choose A PPC Agency With Transparent & Consistent Communication Styles
- Pick An ROI-Focused PPC Management Agency
- Look For The Right Pricing To Fit Your Budget
Hiring PPC management services for your business will result in a lower cost per result and a higher ROI- but only if you pick the right PPC agency.
PPC stands for pay-per-click and PPC advertising gives businesses a 5x return on their ad spend on average.
The reason PPC ads tend to yield a high return for business owners is because PPC ads target high-intent consumers.
PPC ads are also sometimes called Google Ads because most businesses run PPC ads on Google since it’s the largest search engine.
With Google Ads, you tell Google which keyword, or search query, you want your ad to appear for and then you pay every time you receive a click on that ad.
As a result, PPC ads are delivered to high-intent audiences who are searching for the exact product or service you offer and that’s why they tend to deliver high results.
What Is A PPC Agency?
A PPC agency creates and manages your PPC strategy and ad campaigns.
These are the top services a PPC agency usually offers:
- Competitor & Industry Research
- Target Market Research
- Keyword Research
- Strategy Development
- Visual Ad Creation
- Ad Copywriting
- Ad Account Setup
- Bid & Budget Management
- Regular Reports & Performance Analysis
How to Find the Best PPC Management Agencies
These are the top 9 things you need to do and factors you need to look for when looking for the best PPC management agency.
1. Establish Your Goals
The first thing you need to do when hiring a PPC management agency is decide what your own goals are. Is it to get more website leads? More website traffic? More online sales?
Is it a combination of those things? You need to know exactly what you’re hoping to achieve from running PPC ads so that you can measure success accordingly.
For instance, if you’re getting waves of website traffic from a PPC agency, but what you really want is online sales, then that agency is not really achieving your goals.
You need to know what your goals are so that your PPC agency can know what your goals are and create the right ad campaigns to meet them.
Once you have your goals nailed down, you can start measuring them appropriately.
For example, if you want online sales, you can start measuring not just the number of sales, but your ROAS (return on ad spend), your conversion value, cost per conversion and more.
The same goes for any goal. If you want leads, you can measure the number of leads, the cost per lead, the quality of the lead etc.
It’s also important to remember that in establishing these goals, you will usually create short and long term goals that go hand in hand.
Your PPC agency can help you in establishing these, but here are some examples:
- Your immediate goal may be direct website sales, but a long term goal may be to tap into new markets or locations and sell to a bigger audience.
- Your short term goal may be to drive down your cost per lead, but your long term goal may be to become a well-recognized authority figure in your industry.
Make sure you identify both your short term and long term goals for yourself so that you can successfully communicate them to your PPC agency and work towards them together.
2. Look For Reputable PPC Agencies
As you start looking for a PPC management agency, one of the first things you can do to narrow down your search is look for reputable agencies.
A reputable agency is one that has a good reputation, so you want to look for positive reviews.
More specifically, you want to look for 5-star reviews on a third party website. Don’t just look at the reviews listed on the agency’s website.
Look at Google Reviews, Yelp Reviews and directory site reviews such as Clutch or Fit Small Business to find agencies that have a lot of good reviews.
Most reputable agencies will have one or two bad reviews, but the majority will be positive.
If you find an agency with only 5-star reviews, it’s likely that they don’t have a lot of reviews (and therefore may not have a lot of experience).
Or, it’s possible that some of the reviews are fake (submitted by their friends and family).
So, you want to look for agencies that have a lot of reviews, most of which are positive. This will help narrow down your search right from the start.
3. Evaluate Their Expertise
The next thing you want to evaluate is the agency’s level of expertise. Not every PPC agency is made equal, so you want to find the agencies that are knowledgeable at what they do.
Look for the PPC agencies that are an authority in their space with educational blogs, insightful social media posts and maybe a YouTube channel sharing their expertise.
If they’re true PPC experts, you should also be able to find their platform certifications to confirm that they are proficient in leveraging platforms like Google Ads.
One thing you can ask the agency when evaluating their expertise is if they perform the work in-house or if they outsource it.
You would be surprised at how many PPC agencies actually outsource the PPC work to another digital marketing agency, in which case you’re just paying a middle man or a glorified spokesperson to manage your account.
So, do a little digging into their website and online content to determine if they are true PPC experts or not.
4. Evaluate Their Experience and Credibility
Once you’ve evaluated their expertise, it’s time to evaluate their experience and credibility.
Just because they have educational blogs or know how to physically click the buttons necessary to set up a PPC campaign, that does not mean they have experience in successfully driving ROI for businesses from PPC campaigns.
You’ll want to read through their PPC case studies, testimonials and more to see real results they’ve driven for other clients.
You want to confirm that they have experience putting their knowledge into practice and that they have a track record of driving the results you’re looking for.
You can also ask for industry-specific experience to ensure they are capable of driving results for your particular niche.
5. Confirm Exactly What You’re Getting
Before you hire a PPC agency, you should be very clear on the services that you’re receiving. You want to ensure the services they offer are the ones you need to achieve your goals.
Here are a few of the main PPC services you want to make sure you’re getting:
- Custom Strategy: You don’t want the same cookie-cutter strategy that every other business is getting. You want a PPC strategy that is custom-built to fit your needs and goals.
- Target Audience Segmentation: Ads will always fail if they are not created for and/or delivered to the right audience. A good PPC agency will conduct target market research and segment your ads accordingly based on demographics, interests, behavior and other relevant factors. This allows your business to deliver personalized ads to each audience segment.
- Keyword Research & Match Type Selection: As mentioned above, most PPC ads are delivered to people based on the keywords they’re searching. Therefore, the right PPC agency will perform in-depth keyword research. You want your ad to appear when someone searches for the exact product or service you offer. In addition to keyword selection, your PPC management agency will also need to manage your match type selection. There are three different keyword matching types to choose from on Google: exact match, phrase match, and broad match. A good PPC management agency will choose the right match type for your specific business and audience.
- Ad Creation: A good PPC management agency will create all of your ads from scratch including the ad copy and the visual creatives. The ad copy should be customized for each audience and keyword you’re targeting for maximum ROI.
- Landing Page Creation: If you don’t already have a high-converting landing page, your PPC agency should be able to create one for you. The landing page should be congruent with your ads and the keywords you’re targeting and allow for lead form submissions to be automated into your CRM.
- Ongoing Optimization: The best PPC management agency will not set up your ad campaigns and just leave them. Instead, they will constantly monitor them and optimize them so that they produce high ROI for your business consistently.
- Regular Reporting: You’ll want to receive regular performance reports from your PPC agency to ensure that they’re doing everything they can to meet your goals. The report should include high-level summaries of the results generated in that month along with any noteworthy insights and a plan of action for the upcoming month based on the data in the report.
6. Look In The Right Location
Not all PPC agencies service nationwide or in your specific area, so you’ll want to make sure that the PPC agencies you’re looking at service the right location.
Check to see if they service nationwide or if they offer PPC campaigns to businesses in your geographic location and/or the location your target market resides in.
7. Choose A PPC Agency With Transparent & Consistent Communication Styles
One thing that can make or break the success of a PPC agency partnership is their communication style.
If they do not communicate transparently and/or consistently with their clients, they are probably not the right PPC agency for you.
Even if you prefer a more hands-off approach, you still want to receive regular updates and reports from your PPC agency so that you can know at any given time what is going on with your campaigns and how they’re performing.
Inconsistent or vague communication is often a sign of incompetence on the agency’s part.
You don’t want to pay a PPC agency that doesn’t communicate well because they’re trying to hide the fact that they’re not generating good results for you.
So, clarify upfront how often the agency will check in and what their availability looks like when it comes to communication with you as their client.
8. Pick An ROI-Focused PPC Management Agency
Ultimately, you’re hiring professional PPC management services because you want to increase ROI, so make sure you pick an ROI-focused PPC management agency.
You would be surprised at how many PPC agencies drive low-quality website traffic to your site without tracking sales, leads or ROI and call the increased website traffic a win.
You should be able to tell whether an agency is ROI-focused or not when you look at their case studies and the results they’ve generated for other businesses, but it doesn’t hurt to clarify in your initial introductory calls as well.
9. Look For The Right Pricing To Fit Your Budget
When it comes to PPC management pricing, PPC management costs can range between $500 to $10,000 a month or more depending on the scope of work.
You’ll want to find the right PPC pricing model that fits your needs and budget.
There are 5 difference PPC management pricing models:
- Flat Fee
- Hourly Rate
- Percentage of Ad Spend
- Performance-Based Fee
- Hybrid Model
| Pricing Model | Description | Pros | Cons |
|---|---|---|---|
| Flat Fee | The flat fee model means you pay a one-time fee per month, in addition to a potential one-time setup fee your first month. | You can expect predictable pricing and billing. You can budget easily and accordingly. | The flat fee can increase depending on the complexity of your ad campaigns and size of your ad budget. |
| Hourly Rate | The hourly rate model means you pay a certain fee per hour for an agreed-upon amount of hours. | You can get specific tasks done quickly for a small fee without paying for a full range of services. | This often means you’re utilizing a freelancer PPC manager, and those can be hit or miss in terms of level of expertise and ability. |
| Percentage of Ad Spend | The percentage of ad spend model means the cost of your PPC services is a percentage of your monthly ad budget, usually 10%-20%. | If you have a smaller ad budget, you’ll pay less in service fees each month. | The bigger your ad budget is, the bigger your service fee is going to be. Agencies that operate off this model also often have a minimum ad budget requirement that small businesses can’t always meet. |
| Performance-Based Fee | The performance-based pricing model means the agency is working on commission and only charging when they provide the agreed-upon results, such as leads, demo requests, free trial signups, inbound calls, or direct sales. | You only pay when the agency provides the results you’re looking for. | Most agencies do not operate on this model as PPC results can be unpredictable and fluctuate month to month. An alternative that some agencies implement is Milestone Pricing, where you pay for more predictable metrics such as website traffic, increased average order value (AOV), customer lifetime value (CLV), lower bounce rates, and increased session times. |
| Hybrid Model | The hybrid model can include a combination of any of the other pricing models to accommodate a variety of different small and mid-sized businesses. | This model offers flexible pricing based on each business’s needs, goals, and budget. | This model can sometimes result in complicated billing and less transparent fees than the flat fee model. |
How To Find A List Of PPC Agencies
We have a list of the top 43 best PPC agencies that should help you in starting your search for the best PPC management service.
PPC Management Service FAQs
How do I choose a good PPC agency?
You choose a good PPC agency by doing these 9 things:
- Establish Your Goals
- Look For Reputable Agencies
- Evaluate Their Expertise
- Evaluate Their Experience and Credibility
- Confirm Exactly What You’re Getting
- Look In The Right Location
- Choose A PPC Agency With Transparent & Consistent Communication Styles
- Pick An ROI-Focused PPC Management Agency
- Look For The Right Pricing To Fit Your Budget
How much does a PPC manager cost?
A PPC manager costs anywhere from $500-$10,000 a month or more depending on if you hire an agency, a freelancer or an in-house PPC manager.
How much does it cost to hire a PPC agency?
Hiring a PPC agency costs anywhere from $500-$10,000 a month or more depending on the number of ads you’re running, the level of competition bidding on the same keywords you are, your target audience, industry and more.
What are PPC management services?
PPC management services are services performed by a PPC agency to drive more website traffic, leads, sales and/or ROI for your business. These are the PPC management services an agency usually offers:
- Competitor & Industry Research
- Target Market Research
- Keyword Research
- Strategy Development
- Visual Ad Creation
- Ad Copywriting
- Ad Account Setup
- Bid & Budget Management
- Regular Reports & Performance Analysis
