6 Reasons to Hire an Agency for Your PPC Advertising Management

Most anyone can do Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, but not everyone can do it well. Most clients hire our PPC agency after realizing this first-hand, usually after experiencing overwhelm and frustration after campaigns spend too much money without the desired return.

It’s not that PPC is an ineffective marketing tactic. It’s a great way to see marketing ROI within a short timeframe. On average, businesses see $2 of revenue for every $1 spent on Google Ads. However, experience, bandwidth, and other factors can limit PPC success.

Before you hire a PPC agency, you need to understand how an agency can support your in-house marketing team and how that translates to ROI.

This article offers six key reasons to hire a PPC agency to manage your PPC strategy. First, let’s clarify what PPC is and how PPC experts can help.

What is PPC, and why is it important?

PPC, also known as the cost-per-click (CPC) model, is an online advertising model where an advertiser pays each time a user clicks on their ad.

PPC, or pay per click, is a type of marketing where you pay every time someone clicks on your ad. – Local Business PPC: 14 Quick Tips To Boost Local Conversions

The model is offered primarily by search engines (e.g., Google) and social networks (e.g., Facebook and LinkedIn), with Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and Twitter Ads being the most popular platforms for PPC advertising.

Yes, a PPC agency will create your ads, but they’ll manage many other elements along the way.

PPC pay models

The amount each click costs differs, determined by a flat rate per click or a bid rate determined by an automated online action. The flat rate is self-explanatory, with the advertiser paying a flat rate per click.

Keywords with a high traffic volume, buying intent, or industries with expensive services or products will cost the most. – PPC Bid Management Guide: 40 Key Tips to Boost Conversions

The bid rate is a bit more complex.

In this model, each advertiser defines the maximum they are willing to pay for an advertising spot. The publisher (such as Google or LinkedIn) then conducts an automated auction whenever a visitor triggers an ad spot. The ad platform typically decides the winners by rank rather than the maximum bid.

The Google Ads auction…determines how your ad will rank in the blink of an eye. How? Using the following factors: max cost per click, quality score, ad format, ad extensions, and bid modifiers. – Google Ads Bidding: How to Spend Less & Outperform Competition

Therefore, in the bid rate model, posting a high bid won’t ensure you get the ad spot. Instead, the relevance of your content is just as important as the bid if you want the ad spot.

In addition to creating your ads, a PPC agency will manage all of these elements for you–the relevance of your ad, the bid strategy, keyword or audience targeting, bid modifiers, an ads quality score, ad testing, etc..

Benefits of PPC 

PPC can be scary. After all, you are paying per click, which can be expensive if your keyword targeting is ineffective.

Despite the risks, PPC has a few distinct advantages compared to other direct marketing channels:

• Direct targeting to potential customers – proper keyword usage or audience targeting, you can spend your budget advertising to searchers interested in your offer. Obviously, this is far more effective than advertising to everyone, including unqualified users.
• Visibility on the SERP – search ads on Google or Bing take up the top of the first search engine results page. That means even when users don’t click on your ad, your ad impression (or spot) is still being viewed above organic results.
• Quick(er) returns – the combination of targeting and visibility often means PPC has a quicker ROI than, for example, SEO, which may take 6 months or more to yield results.

In summary, paying per click can be scary if you’re doing it wrong. But when fully optimized, PPC can generate reliable returns in a short timeframe.

Why should I hire an agency?

Just explaining what PPC is and how it works often reveals enough complexity to convince many that they should hire an agency with PPC specialists. But if you aren’t yet convinced or would like more information, we have six game-changing benefits of working with a PPC agency to share.

1. Experience and expertise 

The easiest way to get a head start on understanding PPC and what it can do for your business is to work with an experienced agency with proven PPC specialists with specific PPC expertise.

Instead of troubleshooting unexpected issues and wasting ad spend up front, a PPC agency doesn’t have to work with a learning curve. They already have the systems, knowledge, and personnel to circumvent common pitfalls and just get the work done.

They’re not just great for shortening lead time, though. The expertise of a PPC agency often translates to significant ROI.

For example, launching a successful PPC advertising campaign requires the optimizations of several variables for conversion, such as audiences, search queries, devices, etc. Anyone can set up an ad campaign, but knowing how to optimize everything from account structure to bid management comes down to experience you may not have.

By letting PPC experts optimize ad account details, you have time to keep bigger marketing goals on track.

Finally, agency experience will extend to testing and progress tracking. We gather and analyze data to create effective ad campaigns, conduct thorough keyword research that drives clicks and conversions, and test multiple ad variations to find what resonates with your customer. Then, we ensure you get custom tips, analyses, or feedback during a regular meeting.

Have questions about what an agency specializes in? Simply ask! At Linear, we only work with brands we know will benefit from our help. We’ll let you know if we have the relevant expertise that applies to your business type or industry.

2. Greater return on investment

We’ve already mentioned ROI several times, but it’s pretty critical. After all, you aren’t paying per click to have zero conversions.

Running a PPC campaign can drive traffic to your website, or a specific landing page, hopefully leading to sales and revenue growth. Statista research shows a median ROI of 23% for search ads and 16% for display ads. With an agency, your ROI can be much higher.

Of course, the expertise and resources available to an agency mean less wasted ad spend, lead time, and inefficiency up front.

But they’ll also have an arsenal of industry and platform-specific tactics to increase your return on ad spend, simply because they’ve racked up thousands of hours testing them across a wide variety of accounts before yours.

A few we’re familiar with include:

• Restructuring ad accounts to run specific intent campaigns
• Running brand campaigns on Google and retargeting valuable audiences using Facebook Ads
• Using tactics like The Wedge Method to convert leads on high-friction offers

Curious about maximizing your ROI by hiring a PPC agency? Have them run an audit of your ad accounts and see what they recommend!

3. Professional copywriting and design

If you’ve ever hired a copywriter, then you know it’s not an easy task. Many people can write, but few can write well, and even fewer are ad copy experts. If you use freelancers, it’s even harder to maintain consistent messaging and quality – this also applies to freelance PPC specialists.

An agency knows this and likely has an in-house copywriter with the experience and expertise needed to write PPC ad copy that converts clicks into sales.

For instance, Google search ads have a short character limit. Writing a creative and engaging ad within a small character limit takes time! An expert ad copywriter will be able to optimize the character limit to persuade the user to click your ad to learn about your product or solution.

They will know the right words to use to drive demand and effective language for conversion. And because they work for an agency, they have more practice and gain experience quicker than if you had an in-house copywriter writing a variety of content types.

Finally, many advertising platforms also have guidelines for copy that an average copywriter may need to be made aware of.

If your copy doesn’t adhere to the platform’s guidelines, the ad could be rejected, resulting in wasted resources.

A PPC agency will be aware of the advertising policies that govern a platform’s ads, from ad formats to copy content restrictions, and have a copywriter who knows how to create relevant, specific ads that fit within the various platforms’ specifications.

4. Optimized keyword selection

One of the most significant components of a successful PPC campaign is choosing the correct keywords to bid on.

After all, The pay-per-click model is primarily based on keyword usage. Online ads (or sponsored links in a search engine) only appear when a user searches a keyword or phrase related to that of the ad.

When starting with PPC, it’s challenging to identify keywords that target your ideal audience and even harder to narrow those to the ones that best represent your product or solution.

Furthermore, research and data software can be costly – costs that may not be reasonable for an in-house marketing team.

An agency will have the expertise and experience to select the right keywords, know how to adjust down the road for more efficiency, and have all the tools and software necessary to audit, test, and manage your ad account.

This will save you money up-front by avoiding keywords that mistakenly target low-quality leads (people who aren’t interested in buying, signing up, or subscribing).

5. Landing page design and optimization

A good agency knows that your ads are just the first part of the advertising equation.

After someone sees your ad and clicks on it, they get redirected to a page on your site. You get billed for the click–but what happens now?

Hopefully, they “convert” by submitting a form, buying your product, or booking your service. But they probably won’t unless you send them to an optimized landing page.

Like writing ad copy, there are a lot of different elements that go into creating a landing page that converts. And of those elements, a PPC specialist will work with design to include page elements that encourage your leads to convert.

Elements of a landing page that can be optimized can include:

• Headline and body copy
• Colors of text and backgrounds
• Images
• Calls to action
• Forms and phone numbers
• Button size and color
• And many more

The agency you work with will be able to apply insights they’ve gained from previous clients, industry best practices, and data from your accounts to create landing pages that support your goals and work within your budget.

6. 100% focus and support 

We’ve all been there–there are always projects or details you wish you could complete, but just don’t have the time for.

If you use your in-house marketing team, their attention has to be split between all your marketing channels.

It’s not that you don’t want to be testing ad variations or running campaign audits to optimize your PPC campaign. There are simply other business-critical tasks you have to keep an eye on.

Agencies get that. And it’s their job to focus on the mini-but-mighty PPC details, so you don’t have to.

A major perk of having an agency laser-focused on your ad accounts is that they can consistently track and fine-tune your campaign based on performance data. If short-term results are lackluster, your PPC specialist can pivot and adjust before it becomes a problem.

Furthermore, a PPC agency will manage your budget effectively to get the most out of your campaigns. By knowing what you want to spend and your overall marketing goals, they can track results and deliver insights you can apply across your business.

Outsourcing the work to an agency can help ensure nothing is missed and no corners are cut in the rush of getting another campaign or deliverable out the door. The agency will make sure all elements are in place to produce the best results possible, helping your business grow and supporting revenue growth.

Any reasons I shouldn’t hire a PPC agency?

If you have the budget, need, and desire to grow your business using paid advertising, there are not many reasons you shouldn’t hire an agency to manage your PPC. But we can tell you that you shouldn’t hire an agency that cannot show how they’ve benefited previous clients.

Make sure you do your due diligence! Consider

• Industry-relevant work: ask for case studies or examples of past successes they’ve had with clients in a similar field or business type as you! If their specialty is B2C eCommerce, and you want to generate leads for your SaaS company, that agency may not be the best fit for you.
• Pricing vs. deliverables: as with anything, the price may be low, but you get what you pay for! Budget buys may initially feel nice, but they won’t offer the same service value, attention, or expertise that a reasonably-priced agency might.
• Inflated promises: be wary of any agency advertising exponentially high ROI. Unless they happen to know something no other agency does, chances are their ROI claims are unfounded or exaggerated. If a metric stands out to you, one of their experts should be able to break down the deets on how they achieved that result.

There is no replacement for the value an experienced agency can bring to the table when building or scaling your PPC program. You need clicks to convert. Otherwise, PPC isn’t doing its job for you. And if the PPC isn’t working, you’re wasting valuable resources that you could direct to other channels.

Final thoughts on hiring a PPC agency

When you ask, “Can I do PPC myself?” Now you know, in theory, you can. But in practice… working with an agency is the way to go. In review…

1. Agency experts let you skip the PPC learning curve and the pitfalls and wasted ad spend
2. Increase ROI as a result of data-backed tactics and advertising resources
3. Create brand-compliant, coordinated ad creative at-scale
4. Optimize keyword research and audience creation
5. Create high-converting  landing page designs to drive down your cost-per-acquisition
6. Dedicated support and usable testing insights

While we have tremendous respect for organizations running their PPC program in-house (and often solo), we’re big believers that, eventually, it makes sense to bring in more hands. Particularly hands with specialized advertising resources and the bandwidth to dig into the data, test and improve the account, track progress, and improve conversions on the back end.

Curious about what your team could accomplish while collaborating with PPC agency experts? Request a free PPC growth proposal and find out!