Hiring a PPC agency to manage your paid advertising strategy is a significant investment of your resources. On platforms like Google Ads, anyone can run a campaign, but unless you’re an expert, you should probably be looking for an agency if you want the best return on your PPC investment. There are plenty of PPC companies in London all offering a host of different options and services, but your budget will probably only withstand hiring one company. If you’re struggling to decide which PPC agency in London is best for your needs, we hope you’ll find these sample questions useful to help you differentiate between them.
One good question to ask any prospective agency is what kind of day-to-day tasks they’ll carry out on your behalf. Ad performance can vary from hour to hour, so frequent optimisation is needed if you want to maximise your ROI. Therefore, you’ll want to know what your PPC agency is doing on a daily basis to manage your account.
Although a good agency will have lots of clients and you can’t expect them to be monitoring your account personally 24 hours a day, you should be able to expect them to be checking and tweaking your campaigns on a day-to-day basis so they can achieve the best results possible on your behalf.
You should also ask them who you can reach out to if you have any questions. You should be given a single point of contact for updates and queries on technical aspects like keyword research, copy for your ads, and so on. It’s reasonable to expect to have a dedicated account manager to answer these kinds of questions.
For this type of working relationship, communication is critical, and there are always some conversations that can’t be had successfully over email. You should know that you can call or video call your agency on a regular basis to discuss your goals, expectations, and progress – at least once a quarter or monthly is reasonable, depending on how your agency operates. The most important thing, though, is that it shouldn’t be hard for you to communicate with them.
You should also be fully informed of how they’ll report back to you on progress and results. Ask for a sample of their standard reporting framework and find out how it’ll be presented to you before you hire the agency. They should be able to explain what data points you’ll be given and what they mean in terms of performance – for example, what the impression share metric means in terms of search visibility.
Before you say yes to any agency, you should also ask about their experience and their achievements to date for other clients. Some agencies do try to offer PPC services without necessarily having extensive experience in the field. They may tag it onto existing services as an optional extra, or they may outsource it to freelancers so they can boast they offer a full package of marketing services.
This may work out well for you, but you don’t want to pay to be an agency’s guinea pig as they develop their experience and portfolio. Make sure you hire a PPC advertising agency that can demonstrate a good track record of success, or you could end up wasting your money.
This may work out well for you, but you don’t want to pay to be an agency’s guinea pig as they develop their experience and portfolio. Make sure you hire a PPC advertising agency that can demonstrate a good track record of success, or you could end up wasting your money.
Don’t just hire a PPC company and then let them get on with it. Agree some metrics or key performance indicators in advance so you can measure whether the contract you’ve agreed with them is worth the investment. It’s their job to devise and explain KPIs and metrics which align with your goals; and to be able to demonstrate the success or failure of particular campaigns. You should be able to scan through each report they send you to quickly assess performance, compare results, and see how things are progressing over time.
In terms of viewing their reports, if they identify any shortcomings or failures with particular projects, don’t be too quick to sack them and move on to another company. PPC and developing the right strategy can take time, so wait for them to provide a thorough plan on how wasted spending can be minimised in future.
PPC advertising is a game of efficiency. The goal is to get the best return possible for your budget. Every PPC campaign inevitably wastes some money to a greater or lesser extent, but your agency should do everything possible to reduce that wastage by optimising campaigns, budgets, and goal completions on an ongoing basis.
When interviewing a PPC company in London, ask how they handle wasted spend and try to pin them down to specifics. Learn about their methods for bid adjustments, targeting, and other such strategies so you’ll understand how they’ll make the most of your budget.
For example, as we mentioned above, it’s unreasonable to expect an agency to monitor your campaigns round the clock. But many agencies nowadays use automation to help them manage clients’ accounts. While Google Ads has its own built-in automation settings and features, the top agencies will use their own automation systems to optimise bids, carry out analysis and deliver reports, and other tasks besides.
Automation isn’t just about constant optimisation, though; it’s also about handling the repetitive jobs so that your agency’s staff spend less time repeating the same old tasks over and over again and more time on meaningful activities.
In line with automation and experience, the agency should have expertise in and an understanding of how to bid successfully correctly and make the most of a predetermined budget. While automatic bidding settings are available on most PPC platforms, they do give you less control over your bids and data visibility.
Good agencies will have their own automated bidding processes, giving them complete control over campaign data and settings. Both approaches have advantages and disadvantages, but the best PPC agencies use a combination of their own automation and technology and the platforms’ own built-in features.
Finally, if you operate in an extremely competitive field or have experienced significant problems with PPC in the past, you may want to find an agency that doesn’t just rely on PPC data but can also look at the bigger picture. The modern consumer has a more complex buying journey than ever before, and factors such as changes in the weather, high-profile sporting events, political movements, news headlines and more can all influence purchasing decisions. You may want an agency that’s sophisticated enough to take all this on board when planning and implementing ad campaigns.
If you want to gain a competitive advantage in the digital marketing world, it’s time to hire in professional assistance. PPC experts can use their knowledge and experience in SEO and more to develop a strategy that will set your company apart from your competitors. Contact us today to find out more about how our experts can collaborate with you to improve your company’s online presence.
You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking for the best PPC agency in London. We’re a group of innovative marketers, data scientists, and tech-savvy developers who help our clients achieve outstanding results. Through PPC, SEO, social media marketing, and web design, we focus on the best platforms and data insights to increase your online visibility.
We strongly believe that PPC is a science. We gather data, analyse it, turn it into actionable plans, and then implement these, all the while testing, monitoring, and adjusting our strategies as we go, all to ensure meaningful, long-term results.
We create, implement, and track engaging PPC campaigns that will increase your ROI and put you ahead of the competition.
