So, you have decided to hire an agency to run you Pay Per Click activities.
But how can you know they are aligned with your targets? How can you really be sure they invest their efforts as agreed and in the right places? How to monitor their progress (or the lack of it)? No less important is knowing what your involvement in this relationship is.
In a previous post, I talked about the different considerations of having your PPC activity in-house versus outsourcing it to third parties. I also covered how to hire a PPC agency, and what to include in your agreement with them.
In this post, I’m going to dive deeper into the ongoing management of a hired PPC agency.
It Takes Two to Tango…and You Need to Take the Lead
If you would stop reading here, I would tell you this: The agency is not a foreign entity; it is a part of your team. The agency needs to know everything that you know, about your offering, your business progress, your weaknesses, etc. If you treat the agency as part of your team, residing in a remote site, you probably will perform better than others, and the relationship will last much longer.
Let's dive into some practical pointers that will help you set the right framework and monitoring tools, so you are always in control and making headway with you campaigns:
Assess the agency performance on a 3-4-month cycle basis.
Then flee or continue. Keep the loop.
Reports -- What you get in the report?
Know what you need from the business perspective and then hash it out with the agency in a comprehensive outline. It is very important to adjust the reports until you get what you need (usually around 3 months). There are lots of metrics there. Focus on the KPIs of your business instead of being “confused” with the clutter of the others.
Reports -- What do you do with them?
You have built an amazing report, but if you can't pull at least a few concrete action items from it, you have gotten it wrong. Another point I have seen over the years is that a report can have all the right metrics but the way it is constructed is counterproductive regarding how the information is laid out and doesn’t allow you to absorb the information simply and easily. Focus on presenting the information through graphs and trends rather than tables or specific periods. Remember, PPC is never about a specific month -- it’s a trend that is interesting.
Follow up on action items FAST
Try your very best not to hold them. Remember, the agency manages multiple accounts. You want to avoid the agency from waiting for you and then also waiting for its internal “context switching” until it gets back to handling your account.
The agency is blind to your brand activity
If you don't share, they don’t know. If you have made an upgrade to your product or your website or have found a bug that may affect the agency, share it.
Pay attention to "soft" metrics
These are the ones traditionally are key in SEO. Metrics such as page load time, bounce rates, “mobile friendly” and others are metrics you can’t ignore. Though for some mysterious reason, too many agencies and businesses tend to ignore or pay less attention when it is revolving PPC activity; this should really be of concern just as it would through your SEO activities.
Align internal resources and timelines with Action Items
With PPC, rhythm is everything. Upon every meeting and every report, you get action items. Make sure you follow up on them and align your resources so they receive prompt attention and priorities. Anything from tracking, attribution adjustments and testing, reporting, to creative copy to banner ads.
Keep your content and creative close to you
No matter how big the agency is, it will never know your business and messaging as well as you. Thus, the agency will never create marketing materials (banners, text ads, landing pages) at the quality you would. Though sometimes there is no choice (due to lack of resources or knowledge), if you can, keep it close to you. This way, you can monitor what actually meets your customers, make sure it is of the highest quality and align it with brand messaging, etc.
Decide on key metrics for optimization - Break through the clutter
You are responsible for your business performance, not to increase revenues for Google, Bing, Facebook, Twitter and the like. This means you should set your agency and measure it according to how much business it gets, and not based on the Quality Score, or CTRs.
Be fair
In some cases, you want to see fast results -- too fast. In some cases, tests should be made. In other cases, you need to accept that there is a learning curve because your product is more complex to learn. When you come to assess the agency’s progress, be fair and take all measures into account.
Always be challenging
The agency, the baseline KPIs - sometimes, numbers just get into a sort of plateau. When you dig deep down you find the underlying assumptions for why you or the agency got to become comfortable with them. Challenging those assumptions and not accepting the benchmarks can prove to be highly beneficial. For example, the assumptions regarding an “acceptable” Cost Per Lead can be derived from what the agency knows from similar account they manage, or because there was already an improvement in a specific KPI, so it seems as it reached its maximum optimization level.
Monitor SQRs and Negatives
Probably no less than once a quarter, you should look into Search Query Reports and negative keywords - beyond the fact it provides the insights about your customers search patterns, it’s a great monitoring tool of your agency work. Specifically, how you can gage how well they understand your business, and then also how much do they drill down and pay attention to details. Sometimes, this issues can be the difference between a losing and a profitable campaign.
New KW/audience clusters
As mentioned, no one knows the business more than you. The agency through competitive analysis and business mapping will probably cover the obvious parts. It’s your job to run the brainstorming and give them the business core understanding so you can discover together additional keyword clusters and audiences which will allow you to expand the business and improve the overall performance.
Budget mix
One of the tools to understand the focus of activity your hired agency is by hashing it the budget mix. Understanding how much of the budget is allocated to branding, acquisition, conversion, retention or testing is vital. This is actually even move convoluted, as the question needs to be addressed per platform, target audience, line of product and other few other aspects. Defining these splits, and managing this on a monthly level will assure you are in control.
Check accounts' 'Change History'
If no changes are made to the account, it means your account doesn't get the love it needs. Most of all -- no work, no improvements.
Alignment of message
In search it’s the alignment between the search term, the ad and the landing page. In other platforms it’s the alignment between the target audience, the ad and the landing page. Numbers can take over all discussions and sometime it gets too easy to forget that your customers see your ads and landing pages. Being minding to it constantly is key. Make sure your hired agency is minded to it. It should have a dedicated slot in the meetings and reports. If you show it’s important to you, and will be important to them as well.
Tracking-Attribution-Reporting
Too many agencies, too many companies still don’t understand the value, thereby not allocating the resources and attention to it. For lack of other means, agencies will run optimizations based on the platform dashboards few conversion pixels, reflecting the upper funnel mostly. As a head marketer or CEO of an online business, understanding the multi-channel and platforms touch points to be an existing reality in almost any online business, you want to map out your tracking to the minute details and then allocate, test and refine attribution models that reflect best your business. Eventually the agency needs to pick 2-3 leading business KPIs to work by and monitor. If they it will be sign-ups in one time sale but oblivious to the revenue or costs it incurred you, your agency (or for that matter anyone else) will methodically kill your business.
Increase budget on 2-3-month cycle
Doing major changes to account takes time to be reflected in results, especially if you start off with relatively low budgets and traffic volumes or have long conversion funnels. Therefore, if your growth plans can allow it, I found the budget ramp up with agencies should be of a 2-3 month cycle. With each one you, test and improve, and upon positive results increasing the budget.
Agencies competition
Not happy with performance of your hired agency? Think they can do more? In some cases it may be sensible to hire additional agency to run in parallel. Think of it as running an A/B testing on your current agency. It may be a test with some investment on your end, but sometimes definitely worth it
Though the above is not a conclusive list, the notion is clear, recruiting and managing a PPC agency is not a fire and forget thing. Your involvement and leadership are key to your PPC activities success, as well as being demanding of performance, focus and creativity from the agency itself.
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