Seattle is an expensive place to buy clicks. The buyer mix runs from software companies chasing enterprise demos to home services firms working a radius across Puget Sound, and both compete for attention against very well funded advertisers. That means two things for anyone hiring a paid search provider here. Small mistakes cost real money quickly, and the difference between an agency that manages an account and one that merely maintains it shows up in the invoice long before it shows up in a report. The good news is that paid search is the most auditable service an agency sells, because the platform data is yours and it does not lie.
Fee models, and which one aligns with you
There are three common shapes and each has a bias you should understand before choosing. A percentage of spend is simple and standard, but it rewards a provider for spending more, so pair it with a clear performance target or you will find budget recommendations arriving reliably every quarter. A flat monthly fee is neutral on spend and is usually the better fit once your budget is stable, though the provider then has an incentive to spend as few hours as possible, which is why you should ask how many hours a month it buys and from whom. Performance pricing tied to leads sounds ideal and is the hardest to get right: it requires an agreed definition of a lead, clean tracking that both sides trust, and a rule for what happens when lead quality falls while lead count rises. Whichever you pick, ask what happens to the fee if you pause spending for a month, and ask whether the fee covers landing page work or whether that is billed separately. Most disputes in paid search start with a task nobody agreed was in scope.
Own your accounts, always
Before any strategy conversation, settle ownership. The ad accounts, the analytics property, the conversion tracking and the tag setup should be created under your ownership with the agency granted access, never the other way round. Agencies that hold accounts on your behalf can generally point to a legitimate operational reason, but the practical effect at the end of a relationship is that your history, your audience data and your learning periods stay with them, and a new provider starts from zero in a market this expensive. Get it in writing. While you are there, ask who owns the landing pages, the creative and the phone tracking numbers. This is also the moment to check the reporting arrangement: you should have direct, permanent read access to the platform accounts themselves, not just to a monthly dashboard. An agency confident in its work has no problem with a client who can see the raw account, and a provider that resists that access has told you something you cannot learn any other way.
What a competent first ninety days looks like
Expect the first weeks to be unglamorous. A good provider audits what exists, fixes conversion tracking before touching anything else, and finds out what actually happens after the form is submitted, because a paid programme optimised toward form fills that never become customers is a machine for spending money efficiently on the wrong thing. Then comes structural work: pruning queries that waste budget, rebuilding the account around how you actually make money rather than around the platform's defaults, and matching landing pages to what the ad promised. Meaningful performance change usually starts in the second month and compounds from there. Be suspicious of a provider who launches a rebuilt account in week one, and be equally suspicious of one who reports only on impressions and click through rate. The report that matters leads with cost per qualified enquiry and, where you can supply it, revenue. When paid search runs alongside an organic programme, insist that both sides of the reporting use the same lead definition, because most confusion in blended engagements comes from two teams counting differently.
Seattle specifics worth raising in the first call
Ask any candidate how they handle the geography. The metro sprawls across water and the ship canal, drive times are unpredictable, and a service business bidding on the whole region will pay for clicks from people it cannot profitably reach. A provider who asks about your service radius and your crew or sales capacity before proposing a budget is thinking about your economics. Ask, too, how they handle seasonality: this market has pronounced weather and holiday patterns in home services and retail, and a budget spread evenly across twelve months is leaving money on the table in both directions. For technology buyers the questions are different but the principle holds: ask how they will handle long sales cycles where the click and the closed deal are two quarters apart, and what proxy they will optimise toward in the meantime. Finally, ask what they would do with half your proposed budget. The answer separates providers who have a plan from providers who have a spend.
Questions people ask about ppc agency seattle
What is a reasonable management fee?
Percentage of spend is the most common model and the rate typically falls as budget rises, since a larger account is not proportionally more work. What matters more than the rate is what it includes. Get a written list: account management, creative, landing pages, tracking setup, reporting and meeting cadence. Two quotes at the same percentage can differ by half the work involved.
Should the same agency do both paid search and organic?
It can work well, since query data from paid search tells you what to write organically and organic pages make better landing pages. The risk is depth: few small agencies are genuinely strong at both. Ask who does each, meet both people, and insist the two report against one shared definition of a lead so you are never comparing two different counts of the same month.
How much budget do I need to start?
Enough to gather data faster than the market changes. In an expensive metro that means a budget which produces a meaningful number of clicks per week on your core terms, not a token amount spread across many campaigns. If your budget only supports one tight campaign, say so and ask the provider to prove they can make one campaign work before widening. Good ones will agree.
How do I know if the account is being actively managed?
Look in the account yourself. Platform change history shows what was altered and when. A managed account shows regular, purposeful changes: query exclusions, bid and budget adjustments, new ad variants, landing page tests. An account with no changes for six weeks while an invoice arrives monthly is maintenance billed as management, and the record settles the question without an argument.