Seattle PPC companies compared on published evidence

Agencies with a verified published price

How to shortlist a Seattle PPC company

1. Decide which Seattle you are buying for. Write one sentence describing your buyer: a regional homeowner within a twenty minute drive, or a software buyer anywhere in North America who happens to be sold from Seattle. Those two briefs need different accounts, different landing pages and usually different agencies, and stating it first stops you comparing candidates who are not competing for the same job.
2. Filter on the disclosed minimum before anything else. Ask every candidate in writing for the smallest monthly engagement and shortest term they will accept. This removes more names from a list than any other question and takes one email to answer. A published starting fee is a floor for the narrowest scope, not a forecast, so ask what it covers and what falls outside it.
3. Ask who owns the ad account and the conversion data. The account, the billing, the conversion actions and the analytics property should be in your organisation with agency staff added as users. Anything else turns a change of agency into a rebuild and hands your historical performance data to the departing party. Get the answer in the contract rather than in an email.
4. Agree what a conversion is before the first invoice. A form fill, a qualified call, a booked demo and a closed deal are four different things, and the difference decides whether the bidding is aimed at anything useful. Define the one that matters, define how it gets back into the ad platform, and name the person on your side who will confirm quality each month.

What Seattle agencies publish, and what they hold back

Our index records what each agency has chosen to put on its own site: a published price or price range, a stated minimum engagement, named clients with visible work, the platforms they manage and whether they say the work is delivered in house. None of that is a quality judgement. It is a record of what a buyer can verify without a sales call, and it is remarkable how much it varies between firms of similar size.

The pattern worth noticing is which firms publish a minimum. An agency that says out loud that it does not take engagements below a certain level is doing you a favour, because it saves both sides a discovery call. Firms that publish nothing at all are not necessarily expensive, but they are asking you to spend an hour to learn a number, and when you are comparing several candidates that hour adds up quickly.

What actually moves the price in this market

Three things dominate. First, account complexity: the number of campaigns, locations, languages and platforms, because each one adds maintenance rather than just budget. Second, whether creative and landing pages are inside the fee or billed separately, which is the most common source of quotes that look different but are not. Third, the seniority of the person on the account, which is almost never stated and is worth asking about directly.

Fee shapes carry biases you should name out loud. A percentage of spend rewards spending more, a flat retainer rewards spending less attention, and a performance component only works when both sides trust the conversion data. Whichever shape you pick, compare candidates on an identical written scope rather than on headline monthly numbers, and ask each of them how many hours a month your fee represents.

The questions that separate the shortlist

Ask who will actually be in the account week to week and how many other accounts that person carries. Ask to see a redacted example of the monthly report you will receive, because reporting quality is visible in advance and correlates with everything else. Ask what they would turn off in your account in the first month, which is a fast test of whether they have looked at it.

Finally, ask what happens at the end. A clean exit means you keep the account, the conversion history, the landing pages and the creative, and the agency's access is removed. Getting that in writing at the start costs nothing and is the single most useful clause in the contract.

Questions people actually ask

Do I need an agency based in Seattle?

Only if local market knowledge is doing real work for you, which it is for home services, healthcare, hospitality and legal, where the geography of the metro genuinely affects targeting. For a software company selling nationally, location is close to irrelevant and you should widen the search to whoever has the strongest evidence in your category.

What is a realistic minimum ad budget?

It depends far more on your click prices than on your ambition. In competitive local categories a budget that buys only a handful of clicks a day cannot produce a readable result within a quarter. Work backwards: estimate a click price for your main terms, decide how many conversions you need to judge the test, and check whether your budget buys that many clicks.

Flat fee or percentage of spend?

Both work when the scope is written down. A percentage suits accounts where spend will grow and the workload grows with it. A flat fee suits stable accounts and makes budgeting simpler. What matters is that the fee is tied to a defined scope, that the floor is stated, and that neither side is guessing what is included.

How long before I can judge the engagement?

Set the review at the end of a full quarter and agree the criteria on day one. The first month is usually restructuring and tracking repair, the second month is where changes start showing, and the third is the first honest read. Judging on month one data mostly measures how broken the account was when it was handed over.

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