Choosing the right PPC partner can be a nerve-racking exercise because there are lots of factors to be considered. Unlike the traditional ads, hiring a PPC agency involves dealing with a bunch of strangers and entrusting them with your hard-earned cash to get you the best ROI. And, interestingly, their PPC efforts will not be as visible as the TV ads or the big billboards erected along highways.
Many marketing managers or business owners who’ve landed on the wrong PPC agencies will tell you how it hurts to invest in paid advertising. However, when you speak to those who’ve managed to get the best PPC partners, they will tell you about how marvelous PPC can be.
The steps below can help you to choose a partner who will turn your PPC journey into a success story.
Think About What You Want To Achieve
The first step in getting the best PPC agency is to set out your goals and objectives. What do you want to achieve with your PPC campaign? Your PPC adventure will only succeed if you align it with your business objectives. Your PPC objectives must also be measurable so you can tell whether your business is benefiting from the PPC investment.
Paid traffic has its rich metrics and its use of abbreviations is quite impressive, but what matters most are the key performance indicators (KPIs) because they are the pillars of your business. The agency should be conversant with your goals so there’s no conflict.
Ensure you get a PPC agency that can configure your accounts so they can deliver the highest ROI.
Identify Key Criteria
You need to come up with criteria that can help you identify the best PCC partner and eliminate those that do not satisfy your needs. In your criteria, you can consider factors such as how long the agencies have been in business, their client base, their success stories, etc. You can also consider the kinds of supports they offer and if they have any extras.
Come Up With A List Of Options
Based on your criteria, you can come up with a list of options. Speak to various agencies and find out what they have on offer. Take notes, conduct your research and compare with what they said.
You will easily tell which agency comes close to what you are looking for. It’s better to have just one agency dealing with your marketing strategies rather than having two or more agencies that might end up pulling in different directions.
However, if one agency cannot handle all your PPC marketing efforts, you can hire more but you must ensure they can work in sync to help achieve the company objectives.
Learn About Each Agency’s Methodology
Find out how the agencies define a successful conversion. Basically, they should be able to ensure inbound phone calls and form completions get attributed to PPC. If you have an online store, they should be able to record transaction values accurately.
Bing, Facebook, and other platforms do vary and they have their own limitations. However, a competent PCC partner should work with your platform of choice to ensure tracked goals are close to your KPIs as much as possible.
Paying Attention to the Various Stages of the Funnel
Paid traffic has many ways of exposing your brand to potential clients who are at different decision-making funnel levels.
Your prospective PPC agency should be able to work with multiple kinds of opportunities and offers from your content, promotions, and library to ensure that your business can continue engaging and attracting potential clients. A smart PCC partner should ensure that promoted offers and content match the social and economic state of the target group.
When you hire a PPC partner who can implement this kind of an approach, your high-quality leads will grow by more than 200% while you’ll still be using the same product offering, budget, and PCC channels.
Purposeful Testing of Keywords, Bids, Offers, and Ads
A good PPC manager is one who understands optimization efforts and can speak clearly to their nature and the hypothesis behind them. A PPC agency with a commitment to testing can ensure your campaigns don’t fail and that PPC can continue to be a reliable and ROI positive investment.
Since tests are very complex in nature, the technicalities are also bound to change whether they are messaging, demographic, geographic or new platforms.
Your prospective PPC partner should be able to communicate the nature and results of the ongoing conversion efforts and testing. A PPC provider who can not do this is not worth managing your PPC campaign.
Responsibility for Post-Click Metrics
A PPC campaign isn’t just about clicks. A good PPC agency shows care beyond clickS and impression. A campaign should not end up flooding your forms with low-quality leads that end nowhere. A PPC manager should keep a tab on downstream metrics to have an optimistic view of your business performance.
The manager should report on and initiate regular discussions about the opportunities, leads, and contact that your investment generates and oversee how best to use them.
Integrating PPC with Other Marketing Efforts
Your PPC campaign should not conflict with the other marketing campaigns you’ve put in place. A great PPC agency should have a team with in-depth knowledge of your marketing strategies so they can integrate PPC campaigns with your existing marketing efforts.
Uncomplicated Reporting
With dozens of KPIs and signals across hundreds of ads, multiple channels, together with thousands of keywords, PPC reporting can be a great challenge. That’s why many agencies rely on automation of their reports.
Some end up with reports littered with metrics, graphs, and charts that aren’t easy to comprehend and aren’t connecting to sales and leads.
Not everyone is an expert in PPC campaigns. The reporting should be easy to understand and interpret. Your PPC partner should be dedicated to transparency and your business KPIs to ensure the PPC efforts bring a positive change and a good ROI through uncomplicated reporting.
Narrow Down Your Options
At the end of the above steps, you should now be having a list of PPC partners that qualify according to the criteria you had set. You can go a step further and eliminate more of them so you can remain with only the best.
The process of selecting the best PPC agent can be overwhelming. You can contact us for a free PPC audit.
