How To Rate Your Pay Per Click (PPC) Agency Five ways you can evaluate your PPC agency- even if you don't have access to your campaigns.
By Freya Jones
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Allowing another company to manage your digital performance presence is a major marketing decision. As the pay per click (PPC) industry continues to develop, it might start taking increasingly larger chunks of your businesses marketing budget due to seasonal trends or rising cost per click (CPC) costs.
Do you know how much your clicks cost? Are you bidding on all the keywords you should be? Are your ads any good? What would happen if you stopped using pay per click? Are you meeting with your agency at least twice a month? To help you answer these questions and more, here are five ways you can evaluate your PPC agency- even if you don't have access to your campaigns:
1. Are you getting results?
A huge advantage of PPC is its accountability. Knowing your conversion rate however isn't enough. What matters is how an agency develops your revenue and performance over time. If improvements to your key performance indicators have no growth since your launch or are declining, then it may be time to get a second opinion.
2. Are they completely transparent with your account?
Unfortunately, many PPC agencies out there that will pass a quick 15-second change for a whole month's work and charge you for the entire month. There's an option within Google AdWords and Bing Ads that will allow you to see the changes that have been made to your account (this is known as "Change History"). Make sure that you have a look at these on a consistent basis. How often do you see how they operate? It's very important to be part of the process and come with your own input too. After all, you know your business better than anyone else.
Related: Google May Launch Dedicated Search Results For Mobile
3. How creative is your PPC agency?
The PPC industry is an ever-changing world, a commitment to professional development and staying up to date with AdWords is essential. Revolution goes beyond simply using the latest tools– it also matters how they are applied. Beyond best practice this also means thinking creatively about how PPC can best be applied to a client's benefit.
4. Are they proactive?
Many PPC agencies will do the regular routines of account maintenance, but do they ever take initiative to discuss new areas of potential growth? New beta tests, opportunities, and strategies are vital to stay ahead of the competition and gain market share. Please make sure who you hire isn't bottlenecking your businesses growth.
5. Do they have a clear PPC strategy for you?
An excellent PPC agency should sit down with you and establish your businesses main objectives that you want to achieve and outline a strategy to achieve this success. They should focus on a strategy that is tailored towards achieving your business goals, taking in to account your existing brand assets such as your website, blog, videos, brochures etc. Your account manager or specialist should be able to explain their keyword and ad creative strategy, as business owners you should ask how they will go about their keyword research and how they will monitor the results in the upcoming months.
So how did your agency stand up? Out of five, what rating would you give to your agency? From a personal perspective, at Digital AdDoctor, our "hands-on" approach makes us very personable and easy to work with. We guide you through every step of what we are doing, and we do this because we want you to learn about our industry and be able to challenge us in the future- and that's something you should be expecting of your PPC agency.
