How Do You Tell If Your PPC Agency Is Any Good? (Archive, 2021)

Recorded in 2021 during Simon's s.media agency era and published as part of a dated historical record. It reflects the market then, not current advice.

Why is the PPC agency model flawed?

It's Simon from s.media, and I want to talk to you about how we can help your business. I've got 20 years' experience in PPC, I've had an MCC account for pretty much all of that time, and I've worked with clients spending as little as £250 a month through to clients spending £100,000 a month.

Yes, there are a lot of good agencies out there — there are obviously great people running PPC campaigns. But as far as I see it, the industry is fundamentally flawed, because you've got a lot of agencies that are genuinely lazy: they want to take a fee from you, spend 15 or 20 minutes a month on your account, run the reports, do very little work — and that means you're not getting the strategy or ideas you should be getting as a business. Usually these businesses have a team of young execs fresh out of uni who just don't have the depth of experience needed for the insight, the strategy, or even to look at the data properly.

A great deal of the campaigns these agencies run are flat and boring — no excitement, no real creativity. Just keywords that get searched, here's the ad. It's not that they deliberately do this; they don't know the latest techniques in Google Ads, they don't know how to run programmatic properly, they're not using YouTube, they're not splitting campaigns into single-keyword ad groups, and they're not building any emotion into the ads. A lot of them do a decent job — but there's always room for improvement, and it's easy to see why businesses have sprung up that can take a fee, do 15 to 20 minutes' work a week, and earn hundreds of pounds for it. Nice work if you can get it. It's not fair on the client.

What does 15 minutes of work for £800 a month look like?

I've seen lots of examples of this, and one comes to mind where I was genuinely appalled. A lot of people don't realise you can see the audit log of the work that's actually been carried out on your Google Ads account. We went into a client's account and clicked into the log. There were automations running on roughly a daily basis making some adjustments to bids, some fundamental errors — negative keywords weren't being taken out — and I could tell that this client, who was spending £800 a month with their agency, was getting about 15 minutes of actual work: somebody sat in front of the account making basic adjustments.

They were sending the client a lovely shiny report every month — but no suggestions for improvement. I asked the client: what has the agency said to you over the last few months about changing the strategy? What new techniques are they using? And the client just said, "I don't actually, genuinely know what they do."

To my mind, you should be working with a partner who gives you those suggestions, who wants to take your business forward, who is trying to drive you a good return on investment — and who makes continual improvement. Don't get me wrong: if somebody makes a fundamental change to your business through 15 minutes of work, that's absolutely worth paying for. But that was not the case here. These were basic adjustments a junior could have made.

What should you expect from a good agency?

What I've described is a worst case, but there are quite a few agencies out there like that — and then there's the middle ground: people genuinely spending a few hours on your account every week, but never coming to you with suggestions, the latest techniques, or better ways of working. We don't expect a client to understand every nuance inside an account. But it's fair to expect us to explain why we're making changes, how we're keeping you ahead of your competition, how we're driving a better cost per acquisition, how we're building brand awareness — and to show you that on a weekly basis.

So the question I have to ask is: is your current agency taking the PPC out of you?

Why s.media, and what do the audits include?

Apart from my 20 years of experience, I've got an amazing team around me — including my business partner Andy, who has worked for some of the top agencies in the UK. I've had big e-commerce businesses of my own, I've worked client-side and agency-side, and we now run accounts for celebrities, household-name brands and many SMEs: coaches, e-commerce, B2B services, apps, lead generation, financial services, estate agents, dentists, weight-loss products, to name a few.

Over the last couple of years we've been building our IDAR system — intelligence-driven ad results. Some people would call it AI; it's not AI, it's programmatic with human intelligence built over the top, developed from 20 years of working on PPC and scripting in adjustments to optimise campaigns. One B2B client recently got an order worth £900,000 off a spend of £8,000 over four weeks.

A free audit gets you: ideas on spending your budgets more efficiently, a view on whether your existing agency or internal team is doing a good job, how long they're actually spending on your account each month, and the growth opportunities in your accounts. The in-depth audit adds a fully documented review of the account and its spend, cutting-edge improvement ideas, sight of the IDAR system and the traffic it could generate, ways to 10x your traffic on the same budget, and projected acquisition costs once the suggestions are in place.