Hire PPC agency shortlists built on published evidence

Agencies with a verified published price

How to hire a PPC agency without guessing

1. Write one scope and send it to everybody unchanged. Platforms, monthly ad budget, geography, what counts as a conversion, who supplies landing pages and creative, reporting cadence, and the review date. Identical inputs are the only thing that makes quotes comparable, and writing it usually forces two decisions you had been avoiding.
2. Ask for the disclosed minimum in writing first. The smallest engagement and shortest term a firm will accept removes more candidates than any other question and takes one email to answer. Treat any published starting fee as a floor for the narrowest possible scope rather than an estimate of what your programme will cost.
3. Settle account ownership before anything else is agreed. Ad accounts, billing profiles, conversion actions, analytics properties and tag containers belong in your organisation with agency staff added as users. This single term decides whether leaving later is a permissions change or a rebuild, and it is trivially easy to agree at the start.
4. Define the conversion and who verifies its quality. Form fill, qualified call, booked demo and closed deal are four different targets and the bidding optimises toward whichever one it can see. Name the one that matters, agree how it reaches the ad platform, and name the person on your side who checks quality each month.

The four facts that sort a long list

Published pricing tells you whether a firm is comfortable being compared. A disclosed minimum tells you whether you are in their market at all. Named clients with visible work tell you what categories they have actually operated in, which matters far more than a logo wall. And a clear statement about in house delivery versus partners tells you who your feedback will reach.

None of these are quality judgements and we do not present them as such. They are simply facts a buyer can verify without a sales call, recorded consistently so that comparison is possible. The firms that publish the most are not automatically the best, but they have removed a step of friction from your process, and in a market where the default is opacity that is worth noticing.

Fee shapes and the incentive each one creates

A percentage of ad spend aligns the agency with growing budgets, which is fine while growth is the goal and awkward when the right answer is to spend less. A flat retainer is easy to budget and quietly rewards spending less attention on the account as it matures. Performance based components sound ideal and depend entirely on both sides trusting the conversion data, which is exactly what tends to be contested.

There is no clean answer, only a clean process: pick a shape, write the scope it covers, state the floor, and set a review date. Then compare candidates on the same scope rather than on headline monthly figures, and ask each one how many hours a month your fee represents and at what seniority. That question changes more shortlists than any other.

What a good first ninety days looks like

Month one is almost always audit and repair: fixing conversion tracking, pruning search terms, restructuring campaigns and establishing the reporting. It usually looks unimpressive and it is the most valuable month if it is done properly. Ask candidates what they expect to change in week one, and be wary of anyone who promises growth before they have seen the account.

Month two is where changes begin to show and month three is the first honest read. Agree on day one what will be reviewed at the end of the quarter, what result would justify continuing, and what result would mean stopping. Engagements that drift are rarely bad from the start, they are engagements where nobody set a date to look.

Questions people actually ask

What should I expect to pay for management?

Management fees vary with account complexity, platform count and the seniority of the person running it far more than with your ad budget. Rather than benchmarking a number, compare candidates on an identical scope and ask what monthly hours the fee buys. A cheap fee on a complex account usually means a junior manager and a long queue.

Should I hire an agency or a freelancer?

A freelancer suits a single platform account with a clear owner on your side who can direct the work. An agency suits multi platform, multi location or fast changing accounts where coverage and surge capacity matter. The freelancer risk is availability, the agency risk is that the named senior person in the pitch never touches the account.

How do I check an agency's claims?

Ask for a case where results were disappointing and what they did about it. Ask for a reference from a former client rather than a current one. And ask them to walk through a live account structure on a call, redacted if necessary, because the ability to explain real decisions is difficult to fake.

Can I keep my existing account structure?

Usually yes, and a good agency will not rebuild for the sake of it. But expect a serious candidate to propose consolidation or pruning where the structure is fragmented, and to explain the tradeoff: rebuilding resets some learning while leaving a bad structure caps performance. Ask them to quantify the disruption before agreeing.

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