By Drew Schulthess
Digital Influence Strategist

1. Will they get to know you and your brand?

First things first. Will the agency or service you are looking at truly get to know you and your brand? Both are very important. Let’s begin with the importance of getting to know you. You like to have fun, right? Work is work but why not have a little fun in the process right? Before working with a provider, truly ask yourself and your team if you think you can have fun with them? When fun, productivity and results get mixed together it can make all the difference in the world.

Secondly, make sure that they get to know your brand. There are a lot of services and agencies out there with turn-key solutions. It is great to get things going quickly but not at the risk of jeopardizing the integrity of your brand. Think about the power you are about to hand over to this new company. They are going to have the keys to creating massive amounts of brand awareness using search words, phrases and advertisements as based on your brand. What if they trigger a keyword that gets you in a tangle or promise something in an ad you can’t deliver? Make sure they know your brand or it can come back to hurt you!

Before making a decision make sure you feel like the agency or professional service you’re about to hire will work as an extension of your team. Typically, this involves at least one strategy session with their core group of experts or project managers. Also, make sure that they get to know your competition. Without having a clear picture of the competitive search environment it will be hard to break the clutter and selectively qualify the searchers in direct benefit of your value proposition.

2. Can they only offer PPC Related Services? Do they offer more than just PPC Related Services?

Does the provider specialize only in PPC services? If so, they may not have the ability to integrate a variety of tactics to support PPC efforts. Why is this important? There are more ways to drive targeted traffic to your website than just engaging in PPC. The problem arises when there are other viable opportunities to drive targeted leads to your website and a company can only provide one of them. If you want to have a healthy and well-rounded lead generation system in place, your dollars should be allocated properly and include search engine optimization (SEO) landing page design and other forms of internet advertising including banner advertising. Or as they say, you shouldn’t collect all your leads using one basket … forget about the chicken and the eggs.

3. What are their success metrics?

Impressions, click-through-rate, conversions, leads, opportunities, sales closed, downloads, time on page… and the list goes on. Every agency and service is armed with a unique set of success metrics. Before you get presented with the laundry list of metrics it is important to figure out what is truly important to you. Obviously, almost every business is looking for new leads. What about the actions that may lead a new visitor to recommend your site to a friend or sharing a piece of content? Or what about the new visitors that find your site but then don’t convert? What is that information truly worth to you?

In reality, success metrics should be unique and not universal. Try to come up with four desirable actions a new visitor could take on your website that you would consider a win. When working with the PPC service or agency, discuss these. See what they can offer. If they seem to be on top of it than work on figuring out a dollar value you can assign to each metric. This will make your investment easy to track. Make sure you help and are comfortable with their campaign dashboard.

4. Allocation of your budget. Is there any brand design included?

Make sure you find out where they intend to allocate your dollars. If you get one bulk price ask how much of that budget gets paid directly to the actual PPC service. If you don’t feel comfortable with your website and see zero dollars allocated to creating targeted landing page environments or upgrading your site, maybe you should reconsider. Remember sometimes your dollar is only as good as the environment you send a new visitor to. Make sure your site and landing pages are up to speed before opening the flood gates.

5. Past Experience

Make sure to go ahead and look at or ask for any past client examples and how they delivered success on their behalf. These services are measurable. Are there any situations or cases that align with or are similar to your needs? Can they show a positive ROI as based on the example? What was involved in the project and how many new visitors/leads have the services generated to date? Make sure to check out a few examples to ensure that the actual delivery of their services matches your expectations.

Now you’re ready

So now that you are armed with exactly what to look for when considering a search advertising or PPC service we wish you all the best of luck. We invite anyone and everyone to put our search advertising expertise to the test by asking us any of the questions or concerns shared above. You can also learn more by reviewing our Search Advertising (PPC) services. We would love to talk to you about how we can take your lead generation efforts to the next level, give us a call today.