13 Questions to Ask Your Next Pay Per Click Advertising Agency

Choosing a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) agency for managing your paid advertising strategy is a big commitment. Anyone can run campaigns on platforms like Google Ads, but selecting the right agency requires careful evaluation to ensure strong returns on your investment. That’s why knowing the 13 Questions to Ask before making your decision can help you identify the right partner and avoid costly mistakes.

This article highlights the most important questions to ask a PPC agency before making your decision. These questions will help you assess expertise, transparency, and overall approach, so you can choose with confidence.

#1: What Everyday Tasks Will Be Finished?

You need to know what your PPC management services agency is doing to manage your account on a daily basis. Ad performance varies from one hour to the next and maximising ROI requires constant optimisation. No agency can manage your account 24/7, however you want to know the steps they are taking every day to get the best results possible.

#2: Who Will Be The Day-To-Day Contact And Who Will Be Completing Actions On The Account?

You additionally want to know who could be managing your account and completing key actions: everything from keyword research and ad copy to bid settings and campaign optimisation. Are these duties being performed in-house by skilled PPC specialists or will a number of these jobs be handled by juniors and outsourced to freelancers?

Something else you’ll want to know is who your point of contact is. Are you assigned a dedicated account manager, who you may contact at any time or are you speaking to department managers, PPC advertisers, and so on. While you get in contact?

 #3: How Often Will We Have Calls?

Communication is crucial for this kind of working relationship and some conversations can’t be had over email. You will want routine phone or video calls with your agency to discuss goals, expectations as well as progress – probably every quarter or month, however this depends on how your company operates.

With enough reporting and electronic mail exchanges, you need not spend too much time talking over the smartphone, however you want an agency that routinely checks in to ensure your PPC management strategy is contributing to your business goals.

#4: What Reporting Will We Get?

Reporting is the most important exchange of data together with your Pay-Per Click advertising agency. The numbers should tell you the everything you need to know about the performance of your campaigns, formatted in a way that is clear as well as and easy to understand without any expertise in PPC advertising.

Before you hire an agency, get a breakdown of the reporting you’ll receive and how this could be presented to you. They need to be able to provide an explanation for which data points you will be presented with and what this tells you about overall performance – eg: what the impression share metric says about search visibility.

 #5: What SLAs Do You Have With Customers?

It’s constantly well worth asking about service level agreements (SLAs) with capability companies to apprehend the contractual obligations of both parties. This is in where the agency defines the limits of liability and responsibility for things like deliverables, contract termination and communication response times.

SLAs spell out your company’s responsibilities in particular phrases (eg: customer email messages ought to be responded to within 48 hours) but they tell you s lot about what you may expect from the services they deliver.

 #6: Experience Inside The Industry

In modern advertising, there are few organizations that simply offer PPC advertising and you wouldn’t actually want to work with one, considering how integrated it’s with search engine optimisation and other strategies.

That stated, a result of that is that a few organizations offer PPC services without necessarily having a great deal of experience. Maybe they provide it as a further, optional provider or they outsource it to freelance advertisers so that you can provide the full package.

So, make certain you’re getting an agency with proven expertise in PPC advertising, due to the fact this isn’t something you can do by half measures.

 #7: What Performance Metrics Will You Put In Place?

PPC overall performance is complex but your agency must be able of exhibit results in clear numbers. It’s their responsibility to explain which KPIs and metrics align together with your goals and illustrate success/failure. This allows you to take a look at reports and quick examine overall performance, compare outcomes and spot how matters are progressing over time.

 #8: How Do You Minimise Wasted Spend?

PPC advertising is a game of efficiency wherein the goal is to maximise the return on your investments. Every PPC strategy has wasted spend but your agency should do everything it can, to minimise this by means of optimising campaigns, budgets as

When you’re speaking to agencies, ask them to provide an explanation for how their approach wasted spend and try to get specifics. Find out approximately bid adjustments, targeting, automation and other strategies which could get the most from your price range.

 #9: What Automation Do You Use?

As mentioned before, no PPC organization can manage your account 24/7, however they don’t have to, if they use automation to keep things optimised around the clock. Google Ads has built-in automation settings and features but the top agencies also use their very own automation systems to optimise bids, reporting, analysis and a range of other tasks.

It’s not only a question of of consistent optimisation, however also automating repetitive tasks so your agency spends less time completing the same tasks over and again. Automation frees up time, so that every one of your agency fees are spent on meaningful actions, and not on plagiarised spreadsheets.

 #10: What’s Your Experience Of Automated Bidding?

Most PPC platforms have built-in automatic bidding settings and, while these can be useful, you surrender control over your bids as well as data visibility.

Some agencies have their very own automated bidding structures, which retain full visibility to campaign data and control over settings. There are pros and cons to both approaches, however the top PPC organisations use their own automation technology alongside built-in features and functions.

Getting A Bit More Technical

If you’re going through particular challenges together with your PPC, you might need to delve a bit deeper into the more technical side of campaign management to ensure that the agency has the necessary skills to help you overcome certain issues. Questions may consist of

#11: What’s Your Experience Of Overlaying PPC Data With External Data?

PPC organizations get plenty of data from platforms like Google Ads, however there’s a world of external data out there that agencies can access, too. The modern consumer journey is more complex than ever but big data allows us to understand it in great detail.

Purchase habits are affected by a wide range of external factors: weather patterns, political developments, sporting events, news headlines – and plenty more. For instance, we can access data from the Met Office to see how rainfall impacts the sales of specific products or customer spending.

 #12: How Would You Deal With A Decreasing ROAS When Using Smart Shopping?

If you’re an online retailer, Smart Shopping campaigns in Google Ads are something you will almost certainly be using. A common trouble you might experience with Smart Shopping campaigns is declining return on ad spend (ROAS) and your agency should have techniques in place to address this. So, if you’re trying to promote retail products through Google Ads (and probably to use smart shopping campaigns), raise this query with prospective agencies.

#13: Questions To Ask A PPC Agency To Analyze Smart Shopping Attribution Behavior

Smart Shopping campaigns bundle search, display, and remarketing into a single automated system, making attribution inherently opaque and difficult to validate. This lack of transparency increases the risk of over-crediting performance without understanding true incremental impact. Businesses should ask a PPC agency how they evaluate attribution beyond platform-reported data—what attribution models they rely on, how they measure incrementality, and whether they analyze channel overlap to identify cannibalization.