Performance questions you should be asking your PPC Agency
It’s that time again - the dreaded recurring call with your PPC agency which can sometimes feel like speaking to a toddler. If you’re not dreading a convo with your agency based on shitty results, lack of direction, and answers that make no sense, now’s the time to give your agency a high five because you’ve found a good one.
If you have been on the client side like me and have had some excruciatingly painful PPC performance calls, keep reading. I've often wondered how some agencies are so bad at Google PPC. I mean, it's not an easy job, but if they offer PPC services, they should be decent at running and optimizing campaigns. I have heard many exhaustive explanations from these agencies about why my ad campaigns weren't getting results.
These explanations were just disguised excuses which didn't lead to any new ideas to improve our ads campaigns. We were spending a lot of money on advertising each month. We were also paying high management fees. My executive team wanted to see results. Fast forward about 10 years to now being on what is considered the agency side. While I do not consider myself an agency, I learned that a lot of my clients didn't know what to ask to assess the current performance of their paid agency. I sat in on some brutal calls with their current agencies and asked the hard questions for them.
Do you know what you should be asking your agency to ensure they are producing results? I mean real results, not vanity metrics.
Throughout my career, I have worked with and managed 15 different PPC agencies. I have learned the key questions to ask in order to evaluate their expertise, effectiveness, and attentiveness. Here are a few of them:
The Hard Questions to Ask Your PPC Manager
What are the goals for Google ads as a marketing channel for our business? Can the agency recite them back to you? What is the main objective? Is it to sell more products, generate leads for the sales team, increase brand awareness, or boost website traffic? All of these goals should ladder up to a larger goal established by you and your executive team.
What are they considering a conversion? They should show you in Google Ads Conversion Goals what they are tracking as a conversion. A conversion can be a purchase or it can be a website view, it depends on what the agency is telling Google Ads is considered a conversion. Ensure that you are aligned with what they consider a conversion.
Why are they running the campaign types they’re running? They each have their own pros and cons and it’s essential to think outside the box to maximize your dollars. There's always best practices, but thinking outside of the box means your agency is working hard to find the best approach for your specific goals. If you're like me and enjoy a pretty graphic to explain the general best use cases for each campaign type, here ya go!
Each campaign type is tailored to specific advertising goals and leverages different parts of the Google ecosystem to reach potential customers.
4. Why are they using the bidding strategies they’re using? This article describes Google bidding strategies pretty seamlessly and highlights which strategy you should use for your individual campaign goals. I've restructured them a bit to show manual vs. smart bidding vs. automated bidding. But first, Here's a brief description of each:
Manual Bidding - Lets you choose the bids for individual keywords. This gives you complete control over how much you pay for each click. Just like the name, it is manual and usually not recommended because unlike smart bidding which uses machine learning to optimize your bids, it is generally less efficient.
Automated bid strategy - leverages machine learning to automatically adjust bids in real-time based on user behavior and competitive landscape, to maximize campaign performance. This approach helps advertisers achieve specific goals like increased conversions, higher click-through rates, or better return on ad spend without manual intervention. E-commerce businesses, lead generation companies, and other data-driven enterprises particularly benefit from automated bid strategies due to their need for precise, dynamic, and efficient ad spending optimization.
Smart Bidding - an advanced set of automated bid strategies that use machine learning to optimize bids for conversions or conversion value across campaigns. By analyzing a wide range of signals like device, location, time of day, and user behavior, Smart Bidding ensures that ads are shown to the right users at the right time to achieve the best possible results. Businesses that aim for high conversion rates, such as e-commerce stores and service providers, greatly benefit from Smart Bidding due to its precision and efficiency in managing large-scale campaigns.
Here's a fun and colorful chart divided by campaign goals > bidding strategies > descriptions of best use cases.
5. What are the metrics you consider to be most important to the success of our Google Ads strategy? If your agency is only focusing on impressions….Run. The most important metrics to focus on the success are directly correlated with #1. Really, it’s more about finding ways to spend less for more conversions (however you’re defining them). Usually, I focus on Click Through Rate (CTR), cost/conversion, ROAS, Cost Per Click (CPC), and Lead quality. Are they including these important metrics in an automated weekly report? They should be. We use Looker Studio to pull in and report on clients' digital performance so that our clients can easily review and ask realtime questions. You shouldn't have to be a GA4 or Google Ads expert to know how your campaigns are performing.
6. For lead generation accounts, ask your agency how qualified your leads are. If they are good at what they do, they should be asking you that question. Your leads should be tagged properly and should be flowing into your CRM. Are the people who are calling from your ads looking for jobs or are they looking for the service you provide? This goes back to conversion tracking. It’s the most important thing. I’ll shout it for the folks in the back…CONVERSION TRACKING IS THE MOST IMPORTANT THING.
If you’re not seeing the conversions you need, it’s time to start asking the hard and uncomfortable questions. If your current PPC agency can’t answer these questions or if you’re not liking their answers, reach out to me and my team at Demand Beacon.
