When it comes to choosing a PPC agency, working with the right size and structured ecommerce agency with a team of professionals can make a significant impact on your success. In this article, we’ll explore key factors to consider when selecting an ecommerce agency that aligns with your business goals and needs. We aim to help you make an informed decision and avoid past negative experiences.
What is PPC for?
This question may seem strange, since PPC is widely used in the current digital age, but it’s important to see what the ultimate purpose is. The point is that PPC is just a tool. Its goal is to increase the return on investment (ROI) of your PPC campaigns. That is, you use it to generate revenue and profit. At its best, you see it as an investment, not an expense.
To achieve this goal, it makes a big difference how much turnover, conversion, and money your campaigns bring you. The fact is, if your total marketing funnel is considered to be 100 units, PPC management accounts for no more than 50 of that. The success of your PPC campaigns depends on the coherence between your site and your ads, the conversion rate of your website, your value proposition, pricing strategy, and other factors, which together form your overall marketing funnel.
We’ve come to the realization that a competent PPC expert (or agency) alone, no matter how much effort they put in, cannot ensure favorable outcomes for your business if they don’t have an impact on your entire marketing funnel.
The main weakness of functional PPC agencies
And here we come to the main drawback of the functional (which focuses solely on PPC management) agency. They have no impact on many of the factors that affect PPC campaigns.
In the lack of strategists, UX designers, sometimes copywriters and creative professionals, we have at our disposal only the settings of Google, Facebook or TikTok. It’s like playing football without being able to see the entire field – without a comprehensive view of the game, you may miss important opportunities to score.
Above a certain company size, it should be expected to have someone in your agency who is responsible for overseeing the following areas as well.
Customer acquisition strategy
Is copywriting, visuals and targeting of the ads in line with the brand’s target persona, i.e. is there a brand personality? It is important that the users you drive to the site feel a consistent messaging and branding between your ads, website or blog posts.
If one is written by Agency X, another is managed by Freelancer Y, and you’re scrambling to get the third one together internally for lack of time, it may not be successful. If the user doesn’t feel comfortable on your site, it is unlikely that the user will make a purchase or take the desired action.
Website user experience/converting ability
How do you feel when you go to a retail store for example? Everything is where it needs to be, product placement is predictable, customers can easily navigate through the store that has a good chance of ending in a purchase. This is the feeling your website should convey to users. But if it’s not planned by a specialized designer, there is a chance that your site will have the ambience of a corner shop rather than a well-designed store.
Marketing psychology cannot be underestimated, which can even account for a significant portion of the conversion rate if applied correctly.
However, the managers of a PPC agency cannot be expected to give competent advice in this field either, as their expertise lies in other areas. What is needed is a UX designer and software to measure and analyze user behavior on the site and find solutions.
Landing page optimization (LPO)
The conversion rate of an online store can be increased not only by providing a great user experience but also by constantly changing the look and wording of the page. But how can you make changes that can be accurately measured for their impact on the conversion rate?
That’s where the Landing Page Optimization toolkit and a team of experts comes into play that can bring this to life for you. The team should include a campaign manager, designer, developer, copywriter and, even better, a project manager to coordinate the processes.
By using a well-developed methodology and relevant software, the team can test your site week after week, creating a parallel reality. With the help of software, incoming traffic can even be split in the middle and directed towards different versions of the page, allowing for significant results that can guide your decision-making.
A truly bad setup
It’s one thing to have no strategist or UX designer in a PPC agency. But when you don’t have a copywriter or a graphic designer, you’re in big trouble. If, with a turnover of a couple of million euros or more, you think it’s a good idea to have only campaign managers making up your marketing team, who will ask you to do all the copywriting and banners, then please reconsider your approach.
This is an unsustainable campaign management model when your agency relies completely on you to provide copywriting and design work. If you don’t send the text, which prevents others from working, and therefore the expected figures won’t be reached, then who will be to blame? Unfortunately, it will be you.
Not to mention the fact that you’ll be doing the project management in addition to writing the texts and banners. Are you sure you should be doing that instead of running the company or the marketing department? I don’t think so. At least, none of the companies I know who are doing well and growing nicely, do it that way.
I do hope that I’ve managed to highlight some points that you may not have thought of at first when deciding to hire a PPC agency and outsource your paid campaigns. In conclusion, it’s important to remember that in today’s interconnected marketing landscape, no single element can be tackled in isolation.
And now – story time
At the beginning of my career, I started with just PPC agency services. I know exactly how difficult it is when it’s not the PPC field that causes the problem.
And yet, our business interest required us to try to hold out as long as possible and pass the responsibility on to the client (as we would continue to get paid the monthly fee). However, business ethics would have required otherwise. So, unless you want the agency to face such a dilemma, you should choose a full-funnel ecommerce agency from the beginning that can cover that particular marketing funnel.
All in all, in recent years it has become much harder to get good results with PPC alone. A number of factors have come into play that are necessary for a successful marketing campaign and sustainable business growth. This article has attempted to highlight these issues. I am confident that you have gained new information that will help you make better decisions in the future when choosing your digital marketing service provider.
