Choosing a PPC company Seattle buyers can verify

Agencies with a verified published price

Building a Seattle shortlist from verifiable evidence

1. Write the scope once and send the same one to everybody. One page: platforms, monthly ad budget, target geography, what a conversion is, who supplies landing pages and creative, and reporting cadence. Identical inputs are the only way quotes become comparable, and the exercise usually reveals that you had not decided two of those items yourself.
2. Check the account ownership answer in writing. Ask directly whether the ad account, billing profile, conversion actions and analytics property will sit in your organisation. An agency owned account is a switching cost dressed up as convenience, and the time to discover that is before signing rather than during a handover when goodwill is already gone.
3. Ask who runs the account and how many others they carry. The senior name in the pitch is frequently not the person in the account. Ask for the day to day manager by name, their number of concurrent accounts, and who covers when they are away. An agency comfortable answering this is usually comfortable being measured on the rest.
4. Request a redacted monthly report before you commit. Reporting is the one deliverable you can inspect in advance. Look for what changed and why, not a dashboard screenshot. A report that explains the decisions taken last month and what will be tested next month is a reliable signal about how the account will actually be run.

Local buyers and national buyers need different firms

The Seattle metro is geographically awkward for local advertising. Travel times across the lake, up the corridor to Everett and south to Tacoma do not match straight line distance, and radius targeting drawn on a map produces clicks from people who will never make the drive. Agencies that work with home services, dental, legal and hospitality clients here know that and target by drive time and by the neighbourhoods that actually convert.

Business software and technology buyers have the opposite problem. Their audience is national or global, their search volumes are small, their click prices are high and a single closed deal can justify a quarter of spend. That work is about search term hygiene, offline conversion imports and patience, and it is a different skill from filling a service calendar. Ask each candidate which of those two jobs makes up most of their book.

The contract terms that matter more than the fee

Four clauses do most of the work. Ownership of the ad account and data. Notice period and what happens to work in progress during it. Whether creative, landing pages and tracking implementations transfer to you at the end. And whether the fee is tied to a written scope that can be changed without renegotiating everything.

None of these are unusual requests and a professional firm will already have answers. The reason to settle them at the start is that every one of them becomes contentious at exactly the moment the relationship is ending, which is when you have the least leverage and the most urgency. Buyers who get this right treat changing agencies as a permissions change rather than a project.

Reading a proposal without being persuaded by it

Strip every proposal back to four numbers: monthly fee, minimum term, what is included, and what is billed separately. Put those in a row per candidate. Most of the difference that felt meaningful during the calls disappears at that point, and what is left is usually a genuine difference in scope rather than in price.

Then look for the things nobody puts in a deck. What would they turn off in your account in week one. What do they think your biggest wasted spend is. What would make them tell you to stop advertising. Candidates who can answer those have looked at your situation. Candidates who cannot have sent you a template.

Questions people actually ask

Should I hire a specialist or a full service agency?

A specialist if paid search is the main channel and you have someone in house who can coordinate. A full service firm if you need search, landing pages and creative from one place and would rather not manage the seams. The failure mode of specialists is fragmentation, the failure mode of full service firms is a strong channel subsidising a weak one.

How do I tell in house delivery from subcontracting?

Ask which work is delivered by employees and which by partners, then ask for the names and locations of the people who will touch your account. Subcontracting is not automatically a problem, but undisclosed subcontracting means your feedback travels through a third party and the response time you were sold does not apply.

What does a fair notice period look like?

Thirty days is common and reasonable. Anything longer should buy you something specific, such as a lower fee or committed senior time. Watch for auto renewal terms that require notice months in advance, and make sure the notice clause says what happens to campaigns and reporting during the wind down.

Is it worth paying more for a senior manager?

Usually yes on complex accounts and rarely on simple ones. A single location business with one campaign type does not need a strategist, it needs consistent maintenance. A multi location or multi platform account with a meaningful budget benefits from someone who has seen the failure modes before, and that is worth paying for explicitly rather than hoping for.

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