At a smaller Jacksonville internet marketing company, it’s reasonable to expect that you’ll be working with the same person or team who pitched your business. With larger PPC agencies, your account will probably be turned over to a PPC specialist who will be your main point of contact and manage your campaigns on a day-to-day basis. There are no red flags with either arrangement, but you may want to ask to speak with the person who will work on your account. This is particularly useful if you’ve developed a short list of Jacksonville PPC agencies that all have similar qualifications. Your decision may then come down to the agency that feels like the best fit.

Any PPC agency that is worthy of your business will provide regular reporting, ideally every month. Reports shouldn’t leave you with any questions about how well your Google Ads campaigns are performing and should include metrics such as cost per click, cost per conversion, your ad positions, click-through rates, and much more.

If a digital marketing agency doesn’t put much importance on landing pages, look for a different PPC provider. Landing pages are where your target audience makes their decisions to either take action or hit the back button.

At Dagmar, we follow best practices that help ensure visitors take steps toward becoming your customer, such as:

• Consistency along the path from the ad copy the visitor saw to the messages they see on the landing page. Landing pages shouldn’t contain surprises.
• Clear language about your offer and especially about the benefits to the visitor.
• Easy-to-see calls to action that let visitors know exactly what to do next and what to expect after they take action.

Be sure to also ask internet marketing companies how they gather landing page performance data and how they use it to adjust the landing pages to improve conversions.

When it comes to success with Google Ads, knowing which keywords to exclude can be as important as knowing which to include. A prospective PPC provider should be experts on how your budget should be spent and how it can be wasted, and omitting negative keywords from a strategy is one of the main ways money can be wasted. You should expect your agency to keep a negative keyword list so that you never pay for clicks that are worthless and irrelevant. An example would be that you sell barbecue grills, but not barbecue sauce. We make sure to do research that yields both the keywords we should target and those we should exclude.

More than one new client realized that they did not own their previous accounts or the data that went with it. Steer clear of any internet marketing company that won’t allow your Jacksonville company to have complete ownership of your PPC accounts and data.

PPC is often chosen as a standalone service, but most Jacksonville businesses can benefit from additional digital marketing tactics. Even if you don’t plan to immediately add on more services, ask the agencies you’re talking to what else they have to offer. At Dagmar, many of our clients have both PPC and SEO services, each of which can be improved by the other. Both of those also depend on the state of your website, so ask if website development is on the agency’s list.

This is an important question and you’ll want to make sure you’re clear on the answers from agencies. Ask if they work with any of your direct competitors, and be ready to provide a full list of competitors and the specific geographic markets in which they compete. Because you’ll ideally want to have a PPC provider with a track record of success with companies similar to yours, you shouldn’t be concerned if the agency has clients in the same industry as yours in other markets. If the agency works with a direct competitor in your same market, there’s a definite conflict of interest that you should avoid.

Pay-per-click (PPC) can go by several names, including “paid search” or simply “Google Ads.” In short, PPC works like this: You run ads online and only pay for those ads when they’re clicked. Paid search ads are offered on more platforms than ever, including Google, Bing, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and more.

Paid search brings a lot to the marketing table, including:

• Brand awareness: Even when a PPC ad doesn’t get clicks, it still puts your company front and center online. The more your brand is encountered, recognition of your company gets reinforced.
• Targeting: We often say web traffic is nice to have, but the right traffic is what you want. Google Ads and other types of paid ads are set up with tools that allow us to zero in on just the leads you want. We can dial in a target audience by time of day, type of device, location, and more.
• Access: PPC provides a level playing field. Your small business can be seen right next to an international company on a results page and it doesn’t have to cost you a fortune to be there.
• Conversions: Online, every step that a user takes that moves them closer to becoming a customer counts as a conversion. When an ad takes a user to your landing page, you have additional opportunities to get your message across, keep them focused on a single goal, and increasing the chances that they’ll take action.

No, you don’t. Anyone can get set up to buy and run paid ads with the tools provided by the various platforms. Google, for instance, has all kinds of instructional videos and how-to guides if you want to take the DIY route. We certainly don’t discourage any business owner from managing his or her own PPC campaigns, but we do want them to fully understand what a successful campaign really takes.

Great returns on your investment take time—your time. The first phase is proper initial setup, including defining goals, doing keyword research, and analyzing your main competitors’ campaigns. Next is creating ads and writing and designing landing pages. Then, on an ongoing basis, you’ll need to pay attention to your campaigns, reviewing their performance and making adjustments so that you’re always lowering your costs and improving conversions.

There’s more on the to-do list but the above gives you a general idea of what goes into effective PPC. If you’d rather run your business instead of your ad campaigns, we’re here for you. We’d be glad to review the state of your current PPC efforts or tell you what kind of investment you may need to make to make it worth your while.

Not every company needs to run Google Ads, and we won’t hesitate to tell you if we think you won’t get a sufficient return on your investment. (Selling you a service you don’t need isn’t good for your company or ours.) If we do see that you can benefit from it, we’ll make sure you understand all of the ins and outs if you’re new to paid search marketing. If you’d like a free consultation, just let us know.

You should consider the same criteria you’d use to choose most types of service providers:

• Expertise and experience: Find an agency with plenty of experience and solid technical chops, and that keeps up to date with the never-ending changes in paid search. Your new agency needs to also be experts at writing the ads and creating the landing pages that successful PPC depends on.
• Custom solutions: PPC must be tailored to your business, to the product or service you sell, and to your marketplace. There’s no single, off-the-shelf package for doing paid search right.
• Reputation: Check online reviews and ask for references. An agency that’s hesitant to provide client references probably shouldn’t make your short list.
• Proof: Results are everything—ask for specific on the results the agency has gotten for its clients, especially a client that’s in an industry similar to yours or is structured much like your business. Getting this information from an agency is a must.
• Contracts: Will you be locked into an annual or open-ended agreement? At Dagmar, we offer month-to-month contracts that keep us accountable and give our clients plenty of flexibility if we’re not getting the results they need.

Speed is part of the beauty of paid search such as Google Ads, and one of the main differences from SEO. Ads can generate good results for you in just a few weeks, and those results should continue to improve over time if your campaigns are being managed by experts. We make sure you see the results we get for you every month via detailed reports, and we’re glad to review your campaigns with you anytime.