Pay per click advertising on search engines is an important strategy for many businesses, and you should consider it if you’d like to capture some of the billions of queries processed each year (and perhaps steal some pay per click traffic from your competitors). But PPC campaign management is also a time-consuming and technical process, meaning you’ll want to hire a PPC marketing agency to take care of the details for you. How can you choose the right PPC agency to guide your paid search efforts and keep your return on investment high? You simply need to ask the right questions. There are many you could ask, but here are the three most important questions to ask any PPC marketing agency before making a hiring decision:
- What Is Your Keyword Research Like?
Good PPC campaigns rely on good keywords. If your campaigns run on the wrong keywords, you’ll either get very little traffic or have a low conversion rate (meaning you’re paying for traffic without actually closing any deals). So you’ll want to make sure any management agency you’re considering uses good keyword research tools and ensures your keywords are optimized to help you challenge your competitors.
- Who or What Will Monitor My Campaigns?
Some agencies have account managers who oversee campaigns, while others use software. What you should be looking for is a combination of the two. Especially if you’re working with keywords that have high pay per click costs — dollars per click, rather than cents — it’s very easy for a campaign to go off the rails to the tune of thousands of dollars. For that reason, it’s good to have 24/7 monitoring via computer. But there are some strategies that only a human can envision and implement.
- How Long Are Your Minimum Contracts?
Pay per click doesn’t start working miracles immediately, but it shouldn’t take six months to see results, either (that’s in sharp contrast to PPC’s search engine marketing counterpart, search engine optimization). You should be looking for either short contracts or no contracts at all so that your agency is forced to show some progress in order to keep your business. Talk about a realistic timeline at the outset of your campaign or campaigns.
What else should businesses take into account when hiring a PPC marketing agency? Weigh in in the comments.
