Should You Hire a PPC Agency?

PPC advertising is hard. Even when it’s working, it’s still hard. You have to put in countless hours optimizing your ads, bids, campaigns, landing pages and website.

Inevitably, at some point in every marketer, marketing director and business owner’s career, there comes a point where everyone asks themselves, “Isn’t there an easier way to manage my PPC campaigns?”

Well, the easy answer is, “Yes.”

As with everything in life, there’s always someone you can pay to do the things you don’t want to. The real question isn’t, “is there an easier way to manage my PPC campaigns?”, it’s “what is the best way to manage my PPC campaigns?”

Now, while we’d love for the answer to that question to be “hire Disruptive Advertising”, we also recognize that hiring us isn’t the best move for every business. For some businesses, hiring someone internally will be the right option. For others, hiring a freelancer to keep an eye on things is a better choice.

And for many businesses, the best solution is to hire a PPC agency like Disruptive Advertising.

But how do you know whether or not hiring an agency is right for you? To help you answer that question, let’s take a look at a few reasons why you may—or may not—want to consider hiring a PPC agency.

1. Are You Already Making Money?

To be honest, a PPC agency won’t save your business. PPC agencies are great at optimization, not origination. If you’re hiring a PPC agency because you have a great business idea and you want someone to make it work, you’re going to be sorely disappointed.

While the account managers at an agency like Disruptive have a ton of skills and tricks up their sleeve, most of those tricks work best for businesses that are already established. We generally don’t take on new clients unless they’re either in an industry that we know really well…or have made at least $150,000 in revenue.

Before they hit the $150,000 revenue mark, most businesses are still in get-scrappy-and-figure-things-out mode. When you’re in that mode, you don’t really know what works. Is PPC a good marketing channel for your business? Maybe, maybe not.

Hiring a PPC agency to manage an unproven channel just increases the risk associated with experimenting with that channel. All of a sudden, you’re not just risking money on a new PPC campaign—you’re also risking the money that you’re paying someone to manage your campaigns.

Most of the time, if a business can’t make their PPC at least slightly profitable without an agency, they won’t be able to make them profitable with a PPC agency, either.

Where a PPC Agency Thrives

If, however, you’ve proven that your PPC campaigns work…and you just don’t want to work on them anymore, hiring a good PPC agency can be a great way to go. Or, if your campaigns work, but you want someone with more experience to make them work better, hiring a PPC agency can be a great way to take your campaigns to the next level.

Anytime you hire someone, the benefits they provide your business need to equal or outweigh how much you’re paying them. That’s true whether you’re hiring a cashier or a PPC agency.

So, if you’re thinking about hiring a PPC agency, ask yourself: what benefit do I expect to get from hiring a PPC agency? If the answer is something unrealistic like, “I need a PPC agency to make my campaigns work…and if they can’t do it, our business is going to go under”, that’s a recipe for disaster.

On the other hand, if it’s something reasonable like “I want to double the revenue we’re getting from our PPC campaigns, but I don’t have the time or skills to do it myself”, then hiring a PPC agency like Disruptive is probably a great option to consider.

2. What Skills is Your Business Missing?

It’s hard to be an expert in everything. Most people tend to be good at one, two or maybe a handful of things. Unfortunately, running and marketing a business usually requires a whole suite of skills—many of which you might lack.

If Facebook Ads are what makes your business go and you happen to be a Facebook Ads guru but you’re struggling in other areas of your business, you probably don’t need to hire an agency—you need to hire someone to manage the rest of your business.

If, however, you’re like most business owners/marketers and either need help with a marketing channel that you haven’t mastered or just want someone to take marketing off of your plate, a PPC agency can be a good way to go.

Where a PPC Agency Thrives

The advantage to hiring an agency is the fact that for less than it would cost you to hire one person, you can get the skills of a whole team of marketing experts. For example, our clients don’t just get Facebook Ads help, they also get access to Google Ads expertise, website optimization, email automation, analytics implementation and more.

For businesses that would rather not (or can’t afford to) hire an entire marketing team, a PPC agency can be the ideal middle-ground. Sure, an agency might not be quite as effective as a dedicated marketing team, but you get almost all of the same benefits at a fraction of the cost.

3. Do You Need New Ideas?

When you’re trying to market the same business day-in and day-out, it can be easy to get stuck in a rut. To make matters worse, because your experience is limited, you may not even be aware of some options that could really help your business.

This is where a good PPC agency really shines.

PPC agencies are full of marketers who are great at what they do and have a wide range of experience working with different ad types, campaign strategies and business goals. They know what works and what doesn’t and can often see all kinds of creative solutions you might never come up with on your own.

In addition, this wealth of experience keeps them at the top of their game. They usually have a good pulse on which new tactics are worth trying and if they work in an agency that encourages collaboration like Disruptive, they can bounce ideas off of a variety of other experienced marketers…without even getting up from their desks.

So, even if you feel fairly confident in your own marketing skills, if you feel like your PPC campaigns are stagnating, bringing in a good agency can be a great way to revitalize your marketing and get things headed back in the right direction.

3. Are You in a Highly Competitive Industry?

The more competitive your industry is, the more important it is to find an edge. One way to do that is to take advantage of the special relationship PPC agencies have with advertising platforms.

Even if you spend thousands and thousands of dollars a month on Facebook Ads or Google Ads, you’re still just a drop in the bucket to those platforms. The success or failure of your campaigns doesn’t mean a whole lot to them.

A PPC agency, on the other hand, they care about—a lot. Disruptive manages tens of millions of dollars of ad spend every month, so Google, Facebook, Bing and the rest of the ad platforms want to make sure that we have as good of an experience with their platform as possible.

As a result, we get all sorts of special perks that individual businesses never get access to. Here are just a few:

• Early access to Alpha and Beta programs. Often, we’re able to provide our clients with access to new marketing options prior to their general public release (think extended headlines, RSLA campaigns, Gmail sponsored promotions, etc).
• Even more eyes on your account. Since ad platforms want us and our clients to succeed, they assign some of their own top people to oversee our client’s accounts. That way, they can ensure that our accounts are getting the time, love and attention they need. In addition, these reps provide additional ideas and insights from their internal data that the general public does not have access to.
• Faster support. Anyone who’s tried to contact Google or Facebook about problems with their account knows that it can be an uphill battle to get your needs met. Thanks to our partner status with various ad platforms, we can quickly get a real person on the phone to address policy concerns, irregularities in accounts and many other support items.

Now, if you’re happily chugging along in a low-competition niche, these perks may not matter to you. But, if you’re in a highly competitive niche, getting early access to a new feature or advertising advice directly from Google can give you a huge leg up on the competition.

Conclusion

So, should you hire a PPC agency? It all depends on you and your business. In this article, we’ve talked about a lot of reasons why you might want to hire an agency…and a lot of reasons why you might want to pass.

To be honest, if you’re running a successful business that’s currently producing decent revenue with online advertising, talking to an agency like Disruptive might be the best decision you make this year. If this sounds like you and you’d like to talk to us about what we can do to help you make more money with less effort, click here to let us know!

However, if you haven’t proven your business model, don’t understand how to effectively market to your target audience or are looking for someone to save your business, hiring an agency is likely to be an exercise in frustration. Could things work out? Sure, there’s always a chance, but more often than not, you’ll wish you’d invested your money elsewhere.

What do you think? Is hiring a PPC agency right for you? Do you agree with this take? Have you tried hiring an agency before? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.