Most of the damage from hiring a ppc agency is done before anyone writes an ad. It is done in the contract, in the account ownership, and in the reporting everyone agrees to look at. Those three decide whether you can tell good work from bad, and whether you can leave if it turns out to be bad.
The list below is what we would want settled if we were the client rather than the agency. Some of it is uncomfortable to ask for. All of it is reasonable, and an agency that refuses any of it is telling you something useful.
1. Who Owns The Ad Account
This is the single most important question and it is asked least often. If the agency runs your campaigns inside their own manager account, then when the relationship ends you can lose the conversion history, the audience lists and the learning the algorithm has accumulated. You start from zero somewhere else.
The arrangement to insist on: the account is created under your billing, in your name, and the agency is granted access to it. You keep everything if they leave. Setting that up costs nothing at the start and is close to impossible to unpick later.
The same applies to the tracking. Analytics property, conversion tags and any tag manager container should be yours.
2. What The Fee Is Actually Buying
Percentage-of-spend pricing is the industry default and it contains an obvious problem: the agency earns more when you spend more, regardless of what the spending returns. That does not make it dishonest, and it does mean the incentive points away from telling you to cut a budget.
Flat monthly fees remove that tension and introduce a different one, since a flat fee earns the same whether the account gets an hour of attention or twenty. Neither model is wrong. What matters is that you understand which pressure you are buying.
- Ask what happens to the fee if you halve the budget, and what happens if you double it.
- Ask how many hours a month the account realistically gets, and who does them.
- Ask whether creative production, landing pages and tracking work are inside the fee or billed separately. This is where quoted prices and real invoices usually diverge.
3. Who Actually Works On It
The people in the pitch are frequently not the people in the account. That is normal in any agency, including ours, and it only becomes a problem when nobody says so.
Ask directly: who logs into this account week to week, how many other accounts do they hold, and how long have they been doing it. A capable specialist with twelve accounts will beat a brilliant strategist who looks at yours once a month.
The pitch team is rarely the delivery team anywhere. What matters is whether they will tell you honestly when you ask.
Olivia Grant, Head of Paid Media, Media @ Marsons
4. What Counts As A Conversion
This is where reporting quietly stops meaning anything. If a conversion is defined as a page view on a thank-you page, a form abandonment, a phone click that lasted two seconds, or an email enquiry that was obviously spam, then the number in the report will rise while your revenue does not.
Agree the definition before launch, in writing, and make it something your finance side would recognise. A qualified enquiry. A booked call that happened. A sale. Then insist that the reported figure uses that definition and nothing looser.
If the agency resists tightening the definition, that is worth more information than anything in their case studies.
5. What The Reporting Will Not Show You
Standard platform reporting is built to make the platform look effective. It attributes generously, it counts view-through conversions, and it reports on the traffic it sent rather than the money you made.
- Ask for cost per qualified enquiry, not cost per click or cost per conversion.
- Ask for the share of spend going to brand terms. Bidding on your own company name produces excellent-looking numbers and usually buys clicks you would have received free.
- Ask for search term reports rather than keyword reports, because the gap between the two is where wasted spend lives.
- Ask what was tested last month and what the result was. An account with no losing tests is an account nobody is testing.
6. The Exit
Read the notice period, and read what happens on the last day. A ninety-day notice period on a monthly-billed service is a long time to pay for work you have already decided is not working.
Confirm in writing that on exit you keep the ad account, the tracking setup, the landing pages, the creative assets and the historical data. If landing pages sit on the agency’s own subdomain, they may vanish with the relationship, taking their conversion history with them.
7. Whether You Should Be Running Paid At All
The question nobody in a pitch will ask you. Paid search buys attention immediately, which is genuinely valuable, and it stops the moment the budget stops. If your margins cannot support the cost per acquisition in your category, no amount of optimisation fixes that, and a good agency will tell you so in the first conversation rather than the sixth month.
It is also the wrong first move when your site cannot convert the traffic it already receives. Sending paid clicks to a page that converts at half a percent is an expensive way to discover a problem that a week on the landing page would have solved.
A Short Version
Own the account. Understand which way the fee model pushes. Know who is doing the work. Define a conversion the way your accountant would. Ask for the metrics the platform does not volunteer. Read the exit clause. And be willing to hear that paid is not your best next spend.
If you are weighing up agencies at the moment, we are happy to look at what you have been quoted and tell you which parts are standard and which are worth pushing back on, including when the honest answer is that the agency you are already talking to is fine.
Weighing up a PPC agency?
Send us the proposal and the account structure. We will tell you plainly what is standard, what is worth negotiating, and whether paid search is the right place for the budget at all.
