How to Evaluate PPC Management Services (Before You Sign)

The wrong PPC manager costs you more than no PPC at all.

Why PPC Management Matters More Than PPC Budget

Here's a truth most business owners learn the expensive way: a well-managed Google Ads account with a $1,000/mo budget will outperform a poorly managed account with a $5,000/mo budget. Every time.\n\nThe difference is waste. A poorly managed account spends money on irrelevant searches, sends traffic to weak landing pages, doesn't use negative keywords, and never tests ad copy. You might as well be throwing the money out a window. A well-managed account ruthlessly eliminates waste, targets the right keywords, sends traffic to the right pages, and continuously optimizes based on data.\n\nThis makes choosing the right PPC manager one of the most important marketing decisions you'll make. The manager controls where every dollar goes. If they're good, your budget works hard. If they're bad, your budget evaporates. If they're lazy, your budget sits there doing nothing while you pay both the ad spend and the management fee.

Fee Structures: What to Expect and What to Avoid

Flat fee: The manager charges a fixed monthly rate regardless of your ad spend. This is the most transparent model. You know exactly what management costs, and the manager has no incentive to inflate your budget. Common range: $500-$2,000/mo for small businesses. askotter charges a flat $600/mo for PPC management on ad budgets under $5,000.\n\nPercentage of ad spend: The manager takes 10-20% of your monthly ad budget as their fee. If you spend $3,000 on ads, they take $300-$600. The problem: they're incentivized to increase your ad spend whether or not it's productive. The more you spend, the more they earn.\n\nPerformance-based: The manager charges based on leads or conversions generated. Sounds great in theory. In practice, it creates perverse incentives. The manager might chase quantity over quality, generating cheap leads that never convert to customers. And defining what counts as a "lead" always becomes contentious.\n\nHybrid: A base fee plus a percentage of spend, or a base fee plus a performance bonus. This can work if the terms are clear and the incentives align with your goals.\n\nThe cleanest model for small businesses is flat fee. You know the cost. The manager's incentive is to make your ads perform well so you stay a client, not to inflate your spend.

What Your PPC Manager Should Own

Account structure. Your campaigns, ad groups, and keywords should be organized logically. One campaign per service or product category. Tightly themed ad groups. This isn't just organizational preference. Account structure directly affects Quality Score, which affects how much you pay per click.\n\nKeyword management. Your manager should actively research new keywords, pause underperforming ones, and continuously expand your negative keyword list based on search term reports. If your keyword list hasn't changed in three months, your manager isn't managing.\n\nAd copy testing. Multiple ad variations should always be running. Headlines, descriptions, and extensions should be tested systematically. Data tells you what resonates. A manager who runs one ad per ad group isn't testing.\n\nBid strategy. Whether using manual bids or automated bidding strategies, your manager should be actively monitoring and adjusting based on performance. Not just setting a target and walking away.\n\nLanding page feedback. A good PPC manager cares about what happens after the click. They should recommend landing page improvements, flag high-bounce-rate pages, and help you create conversion-focused pages for your ads.\n\nConversion tracking. If your conversions aren't being tracked properly, everything else is guesswork. Your manager should set up and verify conversion tracking for phone calls, form submissions, and any other actions that matter to your business.

Reporting Standards That Show Real Work

A useful PPC report should answer five questions clearly.\n\nHow much did we spend? Total spend, broken down by campaign. You should see where every dollar went.\n\nWhat did we get? Total conversions, cost per conversion, conversion rate. The metrics that connect spend to business results.\n\nWhat changed? Which keywords improved or declined? Which ads were paused or launched? What negative keywords were added? What bid adjustments were made? This section proves that active management happened.\n\nWhat did we learn? Insights from the data. "Mobile traffic converts 40% better than desktop for plumbing keywords, so we shifted 60% of budget to mobile." "The new headline test improved CTR by 15%." This is the strategic value you're paying for.\n\nWhat's the plan? Based on the data, what changes are planned for next month? A good manager always has a next move.\n\nIf your current manager sends you a report that's just screenshots from Google Ads with no analysis, no insights, and no plan, you're paying for a forwarded email, not management.

Questions to Ask Before You Sign

Who will manage my account day-to-day? You want a name. Will it be the person on the sales call, or will your account be handed to a junior team member? Both can work, but you deserve to know.\n\nHow often do you review and optimize? Weekly optimization is the minimum for active management. Monthly is not enough. If they review your account once a month, that's one hour of management for your monthly fee.\n\nDo I own the Google Ads account? This is critical. Some agencies create the account under their own management and you lose all history if you leave. Your account should be yours, with the agency added as a manager. If you leave, you keep your account, your data, and your Quality Score history.\n\nWhat's your approach to automated bidding? Smart Bidding and other automated strategies can work well, but they're not set-and-forget. A good manager uses automation as a tool, not a replacement for active management.\n\nCan I see the search terms report? This report shows the actual searches that triggered your ads. It's the clearest indicator of whether your targeting is tight or wasteful. If a manager won't share this, wonder why.\n\nWhat happens in the first 30 days? You should get a clear onboarding plan: account audit, tracking verification, keyword research, account restructuring, and initial launch timeline.

Red Flags in PPC Management

They guarantee a specific cost per lead or ROAS. No one can guarantee these numbers. They depend on your industry, competition, landing pages, and market conditions that change daily. Promises of specific results should make you more skeptical, not less.\n\nThey don't mention negative keywords. Negative keyword management is one of the most important parts of PPC optimization. If it's not part of the conversation, the manager either doesn't understand PPC or doesn't do the work.\n\nThey recommend starting with a huge budget. A good manager starts conservatively, gathers data, optimizes, and then scales. Someone who wants you to spend $5,000/mo out of the gate either doesn't care about your money or earns a percentage of spend.\n\nThey don't ask about your business. If the PPC manager hasn't asked about your margins, your customer value, your sales process, or your competitive landscape, they're going to manage your ads in a vacuum. Good PPC management is informed by business context.\n\nLong-term contracts with high minimums. PPC management should be month-to-month or have short minimum commitments. A confident manager knows you'll stay because the results are good. A nervous one locks you in because they're not sure.\n\nYou can't reach them. If it takes a week to get a response to a question about your own advertising budget, something is very wrong.

Making the Right Choice

The best PPC management comes from someone who understands your business, communicates clearly, manages actively, and is transparent about what they're doing and why.\n\nSize doesn't determine quality. A solo practitioner who manages 15 accounts actively can outperform a large agency where your account is one of 500. What matters is attention, expertise, and alignment of incentives.\n\nStart with a trial period. One to three months at the agreed rate, with clear KPIs. If the manager is doing good work, you'll see it in the data and the communication. If they're not, you can leave without a long-term commitment hanging over you.\n\nAt askotter, PPC management is $600/mo flat. No percentage of spend. No long-term lock-in. You own your Google Ads account. You get monthly strategy calls and transparent reporting that shows exactly what was done and what it produced. And if the results aren't there, you can leave. We'd rather earn your business every month than lock you into a contract.\n\nThe bottom line: the right PPC manager turns your ad budget into a predictable customer acquisition machine. The wrong one turns it into an expensive experiment with no controls. Choose carefully.