Reporting is the most important exchange of information with your PPC agency. The numbers should tell you everything you ne! to know about the performance of your campaigns, formatt! in a way that’s clear and easy to understand without any expertise in PPC advertising.
Before you hire an agency, get a breakdown of the reporting you’ll receive and how this will be present! to you. They should be able to explain which data points you’ll be present! with and what this tells you about performance – eg: what the impression share metric says about search visibility.
Example PPC report from Vertical Leap
What SLAs do you have with customers?
It’s always worth asking about service dataset level agreements (SLAs) with potential agencies to understand the contractual obligations of both parties. This is where the agency defines the limits of liability and responsibility for things like deliverables, contract termination and communication response times.
SLAs spell out your agency’s obligations in specific terms (eg: customer email messages must be respond! to within 48 hours) but they tell you a lot about what you can expect from the services they deliver.
Experience in the industry
In modern marketing, there are few an will only make it worse in the end when agencies that only provide PPC advertising and you wouldn’t really want to work with one, considering how integrat! it is with SEO and other strategies.
That said, a result of this is that some agencies offer PPC services without necessarily having a great deal of experience. Maybe they provide it as an additional, optional service or they outsource it to freelance advertisers so they can provide the full package.
So make sure you’re getting an agency with proven expertise in PPC advertising because this isn’t something you can do by half measures.
What performance metrics will you put in place?
PPC performance is complex but your sab directory agency should be able to demonstrate results in clear numbers. It’s their responsibility to explain which KPIs and metrics align with your goals and illustrate success/failure. This allows you to look at reports and quickly assess performance, compare results and see how things are progressing over time.