Are you interested in making more sales and increasing your brand’s visibility? PPC advertising is the perfect way to accomplish your goal.
Studies show that PPC advertising can increase your brand’s presence by 80%. If you don’t want to wait forever for your company to gain traction, PPC can quickly get you there.
If you want to use a PPC management agency to provide PPC consultancy and handle your online advertising campaigns, you need to know what to look for in a company. Keep the following points in mind when finding someone to take the job.
Find Someone with Industry Experience
Anyone can throw up an advertising campaign and call themself a PPC expert. The question is, does someone have enough experience in your market to give you a better service than your competitors.
Someone who has general PPC experience might work well for your business, but someone who has created winning campaigns in your market before will be able to give you better service. They have enough data about your target market to get your ad campaigns up and running quicker.
Ask a PPC agency about campaigns they’ve run in your industry before. If someone can provide examples of past wins, they can likely deliver the same results to you.
Avoid Long-Term Contracts
Even if you do your due diligence when looking for someone to handle your PPC advertising efforts, there’s always the chance that you make the wrong choice. If you commit to a long-term partnership with a long contract, you’re stuck with a lousy agency.
Many agencies will try to lock you into a one-year contract during the negotiation process. This timeframe is too long when you’ve never worked with an agency before.
If you do commit to a time frame for services, keep it as short as possible. Three months is the maximum amount of time to commit in the beginning. There should also be ways for you to get out of the contract if your PPC agency doesn’t live up to its promises.
Find the Right Pricing
Not all PPC agencies are priced equally. Some companies gear their pricing towards small companies just getting started with online advertising, and others target large organizations with large ad budgets. If you don’t find the option right for you, you’ll spend more than necessary with your ad budget.
The first and most common pricing plan is a monthly management fee and the cost of any ads that are run. While you know how much your monthly payment is, you don’t always know how much your ad budget is when you get your bill. If you don’t have a big budget, this can use up all your marketing resources during the month.
Your other option is a fixed-fee. These plans offer fewer resources than a standard monthly retainer, but you also have more control over your budget. If you want to limit your PPC spend, this is a great option.
There are other pricing strategies out there, so make sure you research PPC management pricing to find the right one for your business.
Find Someone Data-Driven
PPC advertising is expensive these days. What used to cost pennies per click now costs dollars. You can’t afford to work with someone that doesn’t use data to make the most informed decisions.
Even the best PPC campaign likely won’t make money in the beginning. You’ll need to rely on data to optimize your campaigns and cut the ones that aren’t working.
If you’re lucky, you’ll find an agency that already has its own data from past work. This means they can start your ad campaigns without doing some of the initial legwork. They can use their past experience to help turn your campaigns profitable more quickly.
If you want to gauge how well an agency uses data, ask them about their optimization process. They should walk you through the process and convince you that they do things the right way.
Check on Reporting Methods
The last thing you want to do is spend a ton of money on ad campaigns and not see how well things are going. Your agency should be communicative and responsive. This means they should have reports that show you how they are using your money.
Ask for sample reports that show you the detail you’ll see during your time with an agency. It should cover things like total ad spend, conversion rates, net profit, and any other metric that makes sense for PPC campaigns.
Getting sales isn’t enough to know whether or not your campaigns are profitable. If you’re spending too many ad dollars for those sales, your agency isn’t doing its job.
Ask About Data Ownership
Even if an agency does a great job, there’s always the chance that your relationship with them will end after some time. The question is, what happens to the data and content they generated during that time?
Ideally, that data should belong to you after your relationship is over. You paid for those PPC efforts, after all.
Make sure you retain control over your advertising campaign history, headlines, descriptions, landing page, and graphics. You don’t want to start again from scratch if you decide to handle things in-house or move to another PPC agency.
Not All PPC Management Agency Services Are Created Equal
You don’t only have PPC management agency fees to worry about when you hire a company to advertise your services. You also have the money they’ll spend on PPC ads to consider, as well. Keep the points above in mind when hiring a PPC management company, so none of your ad dollars are wasted.
If you found this post helpful and want to learn more about marketing your company online, head back to our blog. Our latest posts cover the latest marketing strategies that will help your business.
