Choosing a PPC agency is hard because the work is invisible from outside the account and every candidate can produce a screenshot of something going up and to the right. This page is what we would ask if we were hiring one, what should worry you, and the two situations where we are the wrong firm for the job.
2007
The year Web Moves started. It is still the same people running it.
7
Years the average client stays, with no long-term contract to hold them
8.81 x
Average return on ad spend across the accounts we manage
2010
When we published the warning signs quoted further down this page
Most of these are designed so that a good answer is uncomfortable. An agency that has never lost an account, never had a bad quarter and never talked a client out of something is describing a sales process rather than a practice.
It should be you, in your name, with your billing on it. If the agency runs your ads inside its own account you cannot take the history with you when you leave, and the history is what the bidding has learned from. Ask this first, because the answer is a fact rather than an opinion.
A percentage of media spend rewards them for spending more of your money. A flat fee does not. Neither is dishonest, and only one of them puts your interests and theirs on the same side of the table when the question is whether to increase the budget.
The most useful question on this list. You are not looking for a bad month, you are looking for whether they have a report that contains one and an explanation that does not blame the market for everything. Every account has quarters like that.
A firm worth hiring has a version of "that channel will not work for you" ready before you ask. If everything you suggest is a good idea, you are buying enthusiasm rather than judgment.
Ask for the name of the person, not the size of the team. A great deal of agency PPC is a senior person in the pitch and an automated rules engine afterwards, and the accounts where that has happened are recognizable within about ten minutes of opening them.
If the answer does not involve looking at it before proposing anything, stop. Every recommendation they make will rest on that data, and in the accounts we inherit it is wrong more often than it is right.
In a small category two clients bidding against each other is a genuine conflict, whatever the assurances. This was worth asking in 2010 and it is worth asking now.
A real answer names an audit, a tracking check and a structural decision. A vague one about strategy and alignment usually means the first month is a discovery exercise you are paying a retainer for.
Four of these we published in 2010 and have not had to revise. The rest are newer and come from the automation era, where the failure mode is different: the account looks busy and nobody is thinking.
Neither is in anybody's gift. Both are set by an auction and by your competitors' budgets, and a guarantee means either a hedge buried in the contract or a bidding strategy that will buy the promise at any price.
Our 2010 post put this first and it has aged perfectly. A firm that is any good at buying attention on search does not need to interrupt you to find clients.
Twelve months of green arrows means the metrics were chosen after the fact. Ask what was reported in the worst month and see whether the shape of the report changes.
Vagueness in this discipline is almost never about protecting a method. Every serious practitioner is working with the same public platform and the same public documentation, and the advantage is in the judgment rather than in a secret.
It is a genuinely strong campaign type and it is also where an agency hides. Ask what is excluded from it, how the asset groups are structured, and how they see product-level performance inside it. Silence there is diagnostic.
Neither is a unit of work. Both are units of a spreadsheet, and a scope built from them will be met whether or not anything improves.
One post from March 2010, quoted as published. It was written about hiring an SEO or PPC company and it has not needed a revision since, which is either a compliment to the writing or an indictment of the industry.
Companies that promise you a #1 Google ranking
Item two on our 2010 list of things to watch out for. The paid version of the same promise is a guaranteed ad position or a guaranteed cost per lead, and it is the same claim about an auction nobody controls.
When you choose a PPC company, make sure it doesn't work for your competitors too.
Still the right question, and the honest answer in a small category is sometimes that they do. What matters is whether they tell you before you ask.
If your PPC company uses unfair means like cloaking to get you a higher rank, fire them at once.
The tactic named here is dated and the principle underneath it is not. The modern equivalent is an agency that will not show you what is inside a Performance Max campaign, or that runs your ads through an account you do not own.
And you should definitely demand references and check up on them.
Worth adding one thing to this in 2026: ask for a reference whose account got worse for a quarter, and ask that client how it was handled. Anybody can supply a happy reference from a good year.
Around 700 posts, published since 2003
Read the archiveA page about choosing an agency, written by an agency, is worth reading only if it costs the author something. These are the two we turn down or hand on, and both are matters of fit rather than of principle.
Some advertisers, particularly at large budgets in fast-moving retail, want daily hands-on work and a team sitting on the account. We run a monthly loop with weekly attention on the paid side, which suits most businesses and genuinely does not suit that one. If that is what you need, hire for it.
We will look at the landing pages, the tracking and the conversion path and say what we think, because that is where a large part of paid performance actually lives. An agency that will run the ads and leave the rest alone is a legitimate thing to want and it is not what we are.
The questions above are easier to ask once you know what the work is.
What a managed month contains, how the fee is structured, and the four problems we find in almost every account we are handed.
/ppc-management/The hub: what decides the price of a click, the five paid surfaces, and one real month of an account reported in full including the numbers that went the wrong way.
/ppc/Paid and organic side by side, and the five questions that decide how a budget should be divided between them.
/search-engine-marketing/Shaun O'Brien
Owner, Selby Acoustics
Shaun was John's client
Phil Leahy
Founder, MedCart Marketplace & Retail Global Events
Phil was John's client
Matthew Kligerman
Building Dirt — AI land development platform
John was Matthew's client
Send them to us as they are written above, or better, send them to us and to two other firms and compare what comes back. If our answers do not read better than theirs, you have learned something useful for the price of an email.
