Your company's fate can easily rise or fall on how your agency or a freelancer manages your online ads. A good PPC agency is proactive, reports properly, communicates with you constantly, and its goal is to generate more and more revenue for you, profitably.
In the 7+1 reasons below, we'll show you the warning signs that indicate it's time to look for a better alternative. We've rounded up the 7+1 warning signs that might prompt a switch.
1. Poor results
It's important to state up front that PPC won't be the solution for every company. Not every business can effectively reach its target audience through online ads.
The best example of this is companies working in B2B areas with a particularly narrow target group; on the other hand, 90% of companies can successfully grow their revenue with the help of PPC ads. If your agency is advertising without results and/or isn't brainstorming with you on how to solve the problem, then it's worth thinking about a switch.
2. No ongoing optimization
Carrying out optimization at least weekly should be a basic expectation of your PPC account manager. This can be skipped in only a very small percentage of cases. For example, when running low-spend evergreen campaigns, or in the case of low-spend, low-complexity accounts where only a few products or services are actively advertised. Regardless, you need to review the results at least once a week to make sure the results are holding at the right level, or have grown to the extent expected.
At Markestic, daily account monitoring and weekly comprehensive account optimization are expected of our campaign managers. And we share these weekly insights with our clients in our weekly meetings, so they can see exactly what happened over the past week and what's coming in the next 7 days.
3. No proactivity or ideas
A good PPC agency doesn't just execute campaigns; it actively looks for new ideas and opportunities to optimize them. If your agency isn't proactive and doesn't offer new strategies or suggestions, that can be a warning sign too.
Your campaign manager needs to think proactively about PPC and non-PPC improvement ideas whether your results are satisfactory or performing below expectations. If the results are good, they should help with scaling. If the results aren't good, they should brainstorm with you on how to improve them.
Fresh ideas you can expect from your campaign manager: testing new creatives, copy, audiences, conversion events and platforms, and/or testing other fresh ideas related to your online presence (for example SEO, conversion rate optimization, email marketing, social media management, testing a new/modified offer, and so on).
At Markestic, we also meet our clients in person every quarter or every six months, where we go through the results of the recent period, market movements, new online marketing trends, and our improvement suggestions for the period ahead.
4. Management fee that's too high
If weak performance is paired with a high campaign management fee, it may be worth requesting quotes from other agencies. It's possible that the initial period after a switch will take extra time while your new PPC manager gets to know your brand, but in the long run a lower agency fee can result in better returns on your online ads.
It's important to point out that if you're happy with the collaboration but find the management fee too high, then in the long run it may not be worth switching agencies.
A good PPC agency should be open to your views on the management fee and should help you find a fee or package deal that makes the collaboration profitable for you. Markestic offers plenty of arrangements for this, from per-channel and per-country pricing, through performance-based pricing, to developing custom package deals.
5. Inadequate reporting
Transparent and accurate reports are key to tracking and evaluating campaign performance. If the agency doesn't have a proper reporting system or doesn't share the relevant data with you, this can cause problems in decision-making and in optimizing campaigns. It's important that you get accurate numbers and insights about those numbers from your PPC manager.
We share reports that update daily with our clients, in which they can see the spend, revenue and returns of their online ads by channel. On request, we also create custom reports.
6. Inadequate measurement setup
Accurate measurement setup is essential for measuring and optimizing campaign effectiveness. If your agency doesn't have the right measurement tools or a specialist, this can cause problems in campaign effectiveness and cost management.
We work closely with specialists who specialize in setting up online measurement, so we can be confident that the numbers our measurement systems see reflect your real results as closely as possible.
7. Poor communication
Transparent and timely communication is vital between the agency and the client. If your agency doesn't respond to emails or doesn't keep the meetings you've agreed on, it can cause problems in the collaboration and in campaign effectiveness.
Markestic's specialists respond to emails within 24 hours at most and meet with their clients weekly, at times agreed in advance.
+1 No scaling
Here's a question it's important for your campaign manager to ask themselves every week: "The results are great, but how far can we grow the revenue generated by the ads?" If your ad manager doesn't ask themselves this question and doesn't actively help you scale, then you'll have to ask yourself the question: "The results are great, but why isn't my PPC account manager a partner in scaling? Why aren't they helping me with this?"
At Markestic, in the seasonal reviews mentioned earlier (and in the weekly meetings), we brainstorm together with our clients on how their business could reach the next level by strengthening its online presence.
Summary
If your current PPC agency isn't a partner on any of the points above, then it's time to think about how you could put your business on a growth path with a different partner. There are, of course, aspects that a PPC manager has no influence over, but we believe that a good campaign manager doesn't just understand the channels they manage; they can also evaluate your business by holistic criteria, based on the numbers measured online, and are able to present the potential problems behind those numbers and their possible solutions.
If, based on the above, you like the way we think about working together with our clients, get in touch with us and let's start thinking together about your company's success!