PPC Management Agencies – choose wisely!
Once again this week we have come across someone who has suffered at the hands of a less than professional PPC agency, the client is a business servicing the home improvement sector, they run a geo-targeted campaign around one city and have been charged £1,000 per month including fees.
The client contacted us in a state of distress, they were annoyed at how things were running and the attitude of their current ppc management agency. For their £1,000 per month spend they don’t own the AdWords account, have no access to it and have to trust the PPC agency as to how much has been spent out of the £1,000 they are billed each month and that they are targeting all the relevant keywords at good cost per click prices.
There is no conversion tracking in place so even the PPC agency don’t know which keywords are converting, they won’t tell the client how much they are spending specifically and on which keywords, in fact they have no clue as to even how many keywords are being bid on. The ppc agency say they spend £600 on clicks and take £400 in ppc management costs, totalling a set fee of £1,000 per month.
This isn’t the right way for a good client and ppc agency relationship, there is zero transparency and despite spending many thousands of pounds over the last few months the client doesn’t even own the AdWords account so is now faced with starting from scratch with us, it’ll won’t be a problem for us to start from scratch but it will but it’s never as good as having historic data to work with, although in this instance we don’t imagine it’s going to take too long to catch up as it’s such a tightly focussed, geo targeted campaign.
We often see some other ppc agencies have been adding a margin on each click as well as their standard ppc management fees, these dodgy ppc agencies make a good wedge of extra profit by keeping the merchant from having access to the AdWords account so ensure that you do have access and you check the AdWords spend for accuracy, if you can’t see how much you’ve been spending then you may be paying more than you should be.
Not all agencies that set up accounts in their own name and deny clients access are misbehaving but we can’t think of a single valid reason for not having transparency or ensuring the AdWords account belongs to the client. At best it’s a case of them not wanting anyone clumsily hoofing around in there and at worst it’s leverage/blackmail to keep the merchant with the ppc agency due to the perceived cost and hassle involved with setting up from scratch and it’s also a great way to boost profit by tweaking the cost per click figures.
The moral of the story here if you are a merchant is to ensure that you have access to the AdWords account and that it’s your account, in your name and you regularly check that the AdWords spend matches the billing amounts.
There are some fine PPC agencies out there so if you aren’t happy with any aspect of your current ppc management then it’s time to kick your agency into line or start looking for a new one, just beware of how things are set up from the start and it leaves you in good shape to move on easily at minimum cost and hassle.
