As the ancient saying goes, the best time to hire a pay-per-click (PPC) agency was yesterday; the second best time to hire a PPC agency is today. As a leading paid advertising and marketing agency, we would say that of course, but there are things to consider before giving your business to a PPC agency.
You can be entirely new to online advertising, or looking to optimize your current campaigns — but either way, you will still need to ask yourself a few fundamental questions to see if now is the right time to hire a PPC agency to take your digital marketing to the next level.
This article is part of our “Working with a PPC Agency”, series where we work to demystify the process of hiring, firing, and otherwise working with a PPC agency to give your business the best shot at PPC success.
With that in mind, let’s take a look at the 6 things to consider if now is the right time to hire a PPC agency.
1. You Don’t Know Where to Start
Okay, if you feel like you’re a seasoned PPC vet, you can skip this section, but if you are new to PPC, you will need to start at the beginning — and quite honestly, we consider this an advantage.
By seeking out a PPC agency at the beginning, you have the edge over those businesses who invested a lot of time and money in trying to figure out PPC themselves, only to turn to an ad agency later on.
Given that you are almost immediately handing your PPC efforts to a team of experts, your results will come faster, and with much better results (unless you know what you’re doing).
Honestly, learning the basics of PPC isn’t rocket science, but it does take time. There are plenty of free courses out there (including those given by Facebook and Google themselves), but the sheer volume of acronyms, metrics, and theory to learn will not be enjoyable to most people. Plus, knowing what will ultimately work for your business takes experience and ongoing testing, and cannot be learned through theory alone.
By hiring a PPC agency that already knows the paid advertising field and all of its intricacies, you can leap right over any time consuming trial and error phase, and jump right into the results that boost your bottom line.
We do get it; many businesses have concerns about PPC agencies being costly — however in many cases we find that by taking away that time consuming (and often expensive) period of learning, it actually makes things more cost effective for clients new to paid advertising.
2. When Your Budget Is Right
While we will forever champion the amazing return on investment paid advertising can bring, those returns require an investment. There are some agencies that will take on any client, no matter how small the budget, but those agencies probably don’t have their client’s best interests in mind.
We always want to provide legitimate and sustainable results for our clients, so we prefer to work with clients that can invest at least $5,000 to $10,000 per month in PPC. While the goal is always to return a substantial return from that investment, we acknowledge it can be hard to find that money initially.
For organizations that are just starting out or can only commit to a small PPC advertising investment, we have seen results with smaller clients with PPC budgets as low as $2,000, so access to a PPC agency is not out of reach entirely.
A good PPC agency will want to be accessible to clients of all budgets, but if an agency says they can perform magic with budgets under $2,000, we recommend you look for other options. Agencies that promise the world with a tiny budget most likely want your money more than they want your ongoing business. Starting with budgets lower than this threshold is certainly possible (some of our clients have done this as well) but the goal should be to scale your advertising and grow your business profitably.
3. You Have a Growth Mindset
Hiring a PPC agency requires a few things from a client, but the overarching reason for this delegation would be having a mindset of growth.
Paid advertising really can provide fast results. After all, the idea is to send traffic to your website as quickly as possible. However, a truly good agency will prefer clients that have the foresight for a long-term relationship that builds on the growth of the previous campaign’s investment.
Clients with a growth mindset will be willing to reinvest their returns in more PPC advertising with a goal to achieve even more growth. Yes, this might mean hiring more staff to handle rising demand, but that goes hand in hand with a long-term growth strategy.
Assuming you have picked a PPC agency that is invested in your growth, they will be at least aware of your growing pains, and will help where they can. At the end of the day however, it will be your responsibility to make sure your company is prepared to grow, and you are willing to put systems in place that don’t upset your customers or your existing staff while you grow.
Growing quickly as a result of working with a great PPC agency isn’t the worst problem in the world of course — but nevertheless, we do encourage our clients to keep their eyes wide open for the future.
If you are prepared to put in the work that comes with more business, and you find a PPC agency that is excited by that prospect, we say go full steam ahead with that agency.
4. Your PPC Has Plateaued
Whether you have been studiously working on paid ads yourself, or if you have some marketing staff dedicated to your advertising, your business will almost inevitably hit a PPC ceiling.
You might just run out of time to give your Google, Social or Amazon ads the attention they deserve. Even if your advertising efforts are competent, you have other core responsibilities that will take priority over PPC marketing and advertising. This is where you should delegate to a professional team of paid advertising experts.
Your organization’s knowledge of paid advertising will also likely hit its limit — we mentioned earlier that the basics of PPC are relatively simple, however the complexities and nuances are deep and tricky to navigate. Once you take on the help of an agency, you will find their knowledge will lift your PPC marketing and advertising to the next level.
Another reason for your PPC plateauing is that you are working to the limits of the tools and resources you have access to. A PPC agency has the scale and reach to have access to powerful software tools, as well as partnerships with Google and Meta and other advertising platforms. This can truly amplify any PPC campaign and help when you run into issues at some point or another.
Finally, your paid media efforts might be maxing out simply due to the fact you have run out of ideas. A PPC agency has a wealth of experience covering many industries, and they will likely have a whole raft of new and fresh ideas to help your marketing and boost your growth.
5. You Find Yourself or Your Marketing Staff Missing Things
This point is somewhat of an extension of our previous point, but its importance validates its own mention.
Earlier we mentioned that you have your core responsibilities. If you have marketing staff, so do they. PPC advertising cannot be the core initiative if there are other priorities.
We see this a lot — a company goes guns blazing into PPC in-house, and they might have some great success. That success in PPC can become addictive, and so other core competencies start to go by the wayside as more and more attention is focused on PPC.
This attraction to success is of course understandable, it’s just human nature after all. But when you and your staff pay less attention to the core functions of your business, mistakes are made, and your business as a whole suffers for it.
This is a real danger, so if this sounds even vaguely familiar, it’s time to start shopping for a reputable PPC marketing and advertising agency. By delegating your PPC strategy to an agency, you will be able to get even better advertising results, all while being able to focus on the fundamental components of what makes your business great.
And don’t worry, you’ll still get that sweet sugar high of great PPC results, you just won’t have to stress about it in your day-to-day operations.
6. When You Find the Right Agency
The final piece of the PPC puzzle is finding a digital marketing agency that you have a good fit with. Some aspects of the relationship won’t be known until you’ve actually started to work together, but nothing is stopping you from asking a prospective PPC agency lots (and lots) of questions about how they operate.
A good place to start is communication. How often will they talk to you and give you relevant information? Are they easy to get hold of, or do you need to make an appointment? How are calls and meetings handled? It goes the other way too, in the sense that you might not want a lot of communication, and that you only want a report once a month with the good news.
Your organization will also have a distinct culture. For example, you might want to avoid an overly corporate culture in favor for something a little more casual and relaxed. You’ll want to find a digital agency that mirrors that — it’ll make the relationship so much more comfortable.
Then of course are the results — how detailed will their data be, and how will they present it to you? Is transparency top of mind for the PPC agency, or will you have to tease information out of them? Find a PPC agency that suits your needs in terms of the provision and understanding of your data. You might want every last one and zero, or you might just want the top level information to let you know you’re heading in the right direction.
All of these mesh together to form the overall relationship between you and your PPC agency. You can read more about finding the perfect PPC agency in our article What To Expect From Your PPC Agency.
Conclusion – the Perfect Scenario for Hiring a Paid Advertising Agency
We’ve been providing solid and effective PPC advertising and marketing for quite some time, and for us, the titled question usually comes down to finding the perfect fit between client and agency.
Generally speaking, as a reputable PPC marketing and advertising agency, we will always welcome a client to our agency if they:
- Want to hire the best to get the best results
- Understand that hiring in-house will cost you up to 40% more than the actual base salary
- Have a minimum of $2,000 to invest each month
- Know that they should be spending the majority of their time on their field of expertise, not PPC
- Have a long-term growth mindset
- Wants a one-stop solution that avoids the need for finding other services like media buyers, designers, etc.
If those points sound like you, we’d encourage you to start shopping around for PPC agencies, or to get in contact with us to see if we can help. We make an effort to always remind ourselves that hiring the right PPC agency can seem difficult, so with that in mind, we are here to help make the journey as simple as possible.
All you need to do is ask.
Send us a message, and we’d be glad to respond with help.
Need more help? SOLID Marketing are specialized in helping marketers and business owners grow their brand online. We’re not just good at it — we really do enjoy the challenge of growing your business with the help of paid ads and conversion rate optimization. If you think your business has room to grow, please do reach out to us — our team would be glad to help you.
