Comprehensive List of Questions to Ask When Setting Up a New PPC Account

 

For setting up a new PPC account, it’s best to rope in the experts. When seeking a PPC specialist or a company, it is for sure that you will never be short of choices. This is evident with the fact that a single search on Google with the term “PPC Company” return results in millions. So, it may be tough to find the right PCC partner when there are so many options to choose from.

Remember that most PPC companies and consultants ask for an initial setup fee, a flat monthly fee and an additional monthly fee, depending on your budget. But, it is important to know what you will get for your investment. Here are 10 questions you should ask a PPC consultant or an agency before you start working with them:

Question 1: What will I get for my setup fee?

This is certainly not a trick to charge unnecessary. In most cases, you will get something back for your investment. This may include the following:

• Initial discussion/consultation to know more about the business, customers, market, products/services, competitors, and so on, along with outcomes of any previous PPC efforts
• PPC account audit (if any) with recommendations
• Defining initial objectives
• Defining a monthly budget
• Establishing or re-organising the PPC account
• Keyword research and analysis
• Optimising existing ads
• Creating new ads
• Installing tracking code (if required)
• Optimising time scheduling and geographic targets as per the campaign objectives.

It is to be noted that none of the things above refers to internal processing. This means, your PPC partner will require earning what you are charged for.

Question 2: What will I get for my monthly fee?

This is a crucial aspect of any PPC services agreement. It should include critical elements like monitoring, performance reports, testing, keyword bidding, ad copywriting as well as other PPC campaign optimisation fundamentals – and most importantly, how many hours a month your PPC consultant or company will work on your account. Also, try to explore how long it will take to meet some of your primary goals, how pro-active your services provider is and what the turnaround time will be for any special requests. There are PPC agencies that are happily making cash from their clients by making just minor changes that don’t even affect campaign performance. A weekly £0.037 change on a seemingly random list of keywords doesn’t even require a PPC specialist.

Question 3: How many keywords will I be using?

Views may differ from one PPC agency to another, but this should ideally be based on the content of your website. If you are using just a few landing pages, it’s not recommended to use a lengthy list of keywords. Reason being, most of them would likely end up being irrelevant to the website content, which will impact your Quality Score negatively. Ultimately, you will have a higher cost per click (CPC) with less conversions. It is also suggested to limit ad groups to a maximum 50 keywords or so. Hence, you must ask your PPC company questions about the same and see if their answers make sense to you.

Question 4: Shall I use brand keywords?

Unless your business or company is widely known, keywords that are related to your brand(s) can be inexpensive to bid on. Hence, there is no point sending that audience and potential revenue to any of your competitor. Moreover, brand keywords provide a higher rate of conversion and studies have shown that using brand keywords for PPC as well as SEO campaigns can boost brand recognition and enhance overall click-through rates (CTR). Your PPC agency should track the performance of your brand keywords and offer recommendations, accordingly.

Question 5: Will I have access to my account?

While many PPC agencies and specialists don’t want their clients to make changes to PPC accounts on their own, you should always have access to the same.

Question 6: What other services do you offer?

This is not a key criteria when deciding on a PPC company, but it can be advantageous to have a PPC service provider that can help you with other types of marketing. Asking questions related to this, is a great way to explore their overall marketing expertise and competency. PPC networks constantly upgrade their systems and overall marketing experience is increasingly becoming more important. So, ask your PPC consultants if they know about marketing fundamentals like niche markets or market segmentation.

Question 7: Do you have any experience in geo-targeting?

This is an excellent question to see how knowledgeable your PPC partner is. Ask them if their geo-targeting approach is restricted to keeping ads from appearing in a specific country.

Question 8: How long will be the contract?

Many PPC agencies want to sign a long-term contract with their clients. But, you may not want to pay for the services you are not happy with. It is therefore wise to ask about the length as well as terms and conditions of your contract with them, so that you don't have to lose a huge sum of money to your partner if in case you need to terminate the contract midway.

Question 9: How will you manage negative keywords?

Negative keywords are something you should always take care of. If you fail to do so, you may end up losing a huge amount of cash on clicks that are never going to convert. Ask your PPC consultant how often they will update the list of your negative keywords and how they will include negative keywords into your keyword list.

Question 10: How will you monitor PPC activities?

While nearly every PPC networks offer basic reporting features, it is recommended using an external monitoring system that can collect data from multiple systems and compile everything within a single account. Try having a system that can track PPC as well as SEO leads, so you can easily compare their individual ROIs. Most PPC consultants and agencies have their respective tracking systems they are comfortable working with. However, it is good to register your very own account so that if you are not happy with your PPC partner’s services, you ultimately don't lose any critical information or reporting capabilities when switching to some other PPC agency.

To Conclude

It is a general recommendation to not associate quality services with high rates. Most PPC campaigns are complicated, and even the smallest of errors can drastically affect the outcome. If you are not comfortable setting up and running PPC campaigns all by yourself, it is good to get it done by experts. Asking the questions above will surely help you find the right one for your business. Contact us Now