How to pick a PPC Management Agency

PPC or ‘pay-per-click’ advertising is one of the most efficient ways that brands use to generate traffic, increase brand awareness, and improve sales. PPC can be extremely fruitful, but can also be prone to mismanagement by untrained professionals. Moreover, pay-per-click management is also labour and time-intensive, so for many businesses, it is an investment to hire a pay-per-click management company to handle their PPC campaigns. Choosing a PPC management company can be fraught with challenges. In the wrong hands, PPC campaign management can lead to poor conversion rates, incorrect or ineffectual bidding, and a drain on the advertising budget. So here is a guide on how you can pick the best PPC management agency.

 

• They partner with the ad platforms you want to use

PPC advertising can be found on the most popular places on the internet. This entails search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Or social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and even LinkedIn. Depending on where you would prefer your PPC ads to feature the most, you should look for a PPC management company that is certified and partners with the ones you are most likely to use for your PPC campaigns. 

There are many partnership options for PPC, but the three biggest partners to look out for are Google, Facebook, and Microsoft. Look out for a PPC management agency partnering with at least the three biggest platforms, if not more. Partnership certifications are proof that the agency has in-depth knowledge of the platform and delivers consistently-high results regularly. 

 

These partnerships also come with significant benefits, such as 

 

• Bypassing the support line: These partnerships allow the PPC agency to bypass the support line, where they would normally have to wait to have a ticket resolved. Instead, they will have access to a direct representative with whom they can address immediately for any issues.
• The partnership certifications require the agencies to meet or surpass performance targets to maintain their partnership status. Any paid search management company that has these certifications has delivered remarkable results for its clients and is continuing to do so. 
• These certifications are also proof that the PPC management agency has taken and successfully got through extensive training programs specific to the platform. This is proof that the agency has the knowledge and skills to deliver excellent results for your PPC campaigns.

 

• They value and know how to use big data

PPC campaign management offers marketers something that traditional advertising does not—heaps of data. A good PPC agency worth its salt focuses on data, analyzing and testing the data the campaigns receive to continually optimize them for the utmost success. However, paid search management is more high stakes than traditional and even other forms of digital advertising because every aspect of the campaign that is tested for optimization will cost money in some way. This is where knowing how to go through and analyze the reams of data is paramount. A worthy PPC agency will employ decisions that have been backed up by data for campaigns. 

 

The PPC agency will appraise the following:

 

• They will scrutinise the keywords being used for the campaigns as keywords are the backbone of any PPC campaign. They will choose the best keywords that will draw the biggest reach and conversions.
• They will look at the industry and what your competitors are doing in PPC to attract customers. They will analyse which PPC strategies your competitors use are working and which aren’t.
• They will check the performance of any ongoing PPC campaigns and recommend further improvement.
• They will use past and contemporary data to inform all future PPC campaigns. They will continue to test and optimise current campaigns and use their findings to get future campaigns off on the right foot. 

 

Using big data correctly in PPC requires using the best tools and software to go through and make sense of the raw data. The same goes for testing the data and the campaigns. Be sure to ask a PPC agency 

 

• Which software and tools do they use to test data
• The kind of testing they do to improve campaigns
• What statistics, information, and data do they consider most important
• How they came to the advice they are offering you

 

• They have a familiarity with your industry

Look for a PPC management agency that has delivered PPC campaigns for your industry before. This is especially if your industry has a specific niche. When you collaborate with a PPC agency that has run successful campaigns in your industry, you get the following benefits

• The agency already knows how to reach and convert your target audience.
• They have experience in choosing the most appropriate advertising platforms that will work best for your industry, so you don’t waste valuable funding bidding on platforms where there will be few to no conversions.
• They will also have data specific to your industry, which they will use to assess how your campaigns are faring.

 

 

• They are transparent about pricing and reporting

 

A good company that offers PPC management services will be confident when working with data and numbers. They should have previous experience running campaigns in your industry and will also have an idea of how much your competitors spend on their PPC campaigns. Given all these factors, the PPC agency should be completely transparent about how much a PPC campaign for your particular goals will cost. There should be no hidden costs. All possible costs should be laid out in front of you.

 

A good PPC management agency will also have transparent reporting. They should be upfront about where and how your advertising budget is being spent. They should provide you with reports and maintain an easy-to-understand dashboard where you can access all the information, data, and analyses you would like for your PPC campaigns.

 

To get an idea of how they do this, ask them how they communicate campaign performance, the frequency of the updates, and what they do when the ads don’t achieve their targets during a bad phase.