There are many very good agencies offering great Pay Per Click services, especially when it comes to Google Adwords. Unfortunately however there are many that quite frankly shouldn’t be offering a “service”. Here are eight tell tale signs that your PPC agency sucks:
No Understanding Of Your Business
No agency can legitimately claim to know your business and your industry better than you. If they do, that should set of the alarm bells straight away. To setup a successful campaign your agency needs to understand your business, your goals and your current successes. Information relating to your current cost per acquisition (online and/or offline), customer value and historic activities should all be discussed before the project commences.
No Conversion Tracking
All Online Marketing campaigns should be fully measurable, in truth Adwords is one of the easiest activities to measure, providing Adwords conversion tracking is installed correctly.
Many agencies fail to incorporate, or make their clients aware of different call tracking solutions available to them either, recently I had a conversation with a potential (and now a) client about their campaigns where it was more natural for customers to call them as opposed to completing an online form.
Their (now former) agency partner had failed to even discuss the different call tracking options to them, resulting in inaccurate campaign performance data which couldn’t be refined or optimised.
E-commerce data can also be incorporated into your campaigns (it varies based on your shopping cart and payment provider) allowing you to get a true reflection of the amount of revenue generated from each keyword. FYI if your e-commerce website is built using Shopify this is very straight forward to set up.
Skeletal Campaigns
I’ve seen the scenario all too often when taking over accounts, minuscule amounts of keywords placed in an Ad Group, with only one Ad. The agency has charged for multiple days to set this up, where in reality it probably only took an hour or so. Have a look at what your agency actually has up and running for you.
Your Adwords account (in the majority of cases) should consists of multiple campaigns, with separate Ad groups with different keyword match types in each. Also you should be running at least two Ads in each in order to see which performs better.
Lack Of Activity
Google Adwords logs every change made to the campaigns in the “Change History” section. Here you can see exactly what ongoing work has been completed by your agency. If there is very little activity, you have every reason to question what your management fee is being spent on.
Minimally you should expect to see new and negative keywords being added or paused and bids adjusted. Ad performance should be evaluated and new created. If you running a display campaign you can expect to see ongoing refinement there too.
A tell tale sign of when a campaign may not be being monitored as closely as it should be is when errors like these “slip through”, get shared around the major social media websites and are still available for all to see! The below examples show campaigns appearing to be bidding on the keyword “keywords”.
Ignoring Your Landing Pages
You could have a wonderfully crafted set of Adwords campaigns but if your Landing Pages aren’t up to scratch, to be blunt you aren’t going to get the success you crave. Simply pointing an Adwords Ad to the most relevant page isn’t enough (if your agency partner isn’t even doing this change your supplier now!), the page needs to be working for you.
Simple tweaks like adding enquiry forms and making an “Add To Cart” more prominent should be discussed before the campaigns are launched. Ongoing refinement such as experimenting with different layouts, copy and even A/B split testing should all be topics of conversation as your agency partner (should) look to get the most out of your budget.
If improving, or creating new Landing Pages hasn’t risen in conversation at all, I would be very concerned.
No Insight
Google regularly releases new features and innovations to help Adwords customers to get more from their budgets. It surprises me how often that potential clients are unaware of forthcoming or even not particularly new features – it certainly isn’t their fault, their agency partner should be discussing these with them.
Minimally I make clients aware of new features launched or announced as I’m a firm believer in education. Not all are relevant for every client, but it’s great to keep them in the know and prepare them for potential big changes (such as the return of device bidding and launch of extended ads announced at the Google performance summit) or new campaigns they can run.
Recently I had a conversation with another client who seemed a great fit to try a “Customer Match” campaign as they had a large database of customers that could be marketed to and were very excited to experiment with it– their former agency partner hadn’t even mentioned it to them! Was this because their partner wasn’t aware of the new innovation or were just lazy? Worryingly it’s probably a mixture of the two!
Low Fees
If you are only paying a nominal amount to your Agency to create & refine your campaign, how much time do you actually think they are dedicating to you and your business?
In reality it probably isn’t very much, meaning that you will be missing out on many of the opportunities available to you. Keep in mind that “cheap” isn’t always good value. Find out how much time your Agency has allocated to you and how their pricing structure actually works.
Substandard Reporting
The harsh reality is the bulk of reports I have seen produced by agencies are poor. While I’m sure you would prefer your agency to be spending time on your Adwords account other than reporting on it, you need to be able to see results and gain an understanding.
At a minimum your Adwords report should contain an overview of your spend, your cost per conversion at an overall and campaign level. Details about the work completed and what happens next should also be included.
If your agency seem somewhat shy about having an actual conversation with you about your Adwords performance, or doesn’t offer any suggestions about how things can be refined or improved, you should seriously consider moving away.
Sound Familiar?
So there you have it, if any of these describe your current situation and would like to have a conversation about your Adwords campaigns, or any Pay Per Click activity (with no obligation!), please get in touch.
