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
Most business owners learn this 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.
The 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.
This 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 or just inattentive, your budget evaporates 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 $1,000/mo for fully managed PPC on ad budgets under $5,000. Run them yourself and the channels are metered with your compute.
Percentage 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.
Performance-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.
Hybrid: 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.
The 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.
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. Account structure directly affects Quality Score, which affects how much you pay per click.
Keyword 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.
Ad 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.
Bid strategy. Whether using manual bids or automated bidding strategies, your manager should be actively monitoring and adjusting based on performance.
Landing 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.
Conversion 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.
How much did we spend? Total spend, broken down by campaign. You should see where every dollar went.
What did we get? Total conversions, cost per conversion, conversion rate. The metrics that connect spend to business results.
What 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.
What 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.
What's the plan? Based on the data, what changes are planned for next month? A good manager always has a next move.
If your current manager sends you a report that's just screenshots from Google Ads without analysis or a plan, you're paying for a forwarded email.
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.
How 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.
Do 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.
What'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 and stays hands-on.
Can 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.
What 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 raise your skepticism.
They 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.
They 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.
They don't ask about your business. If the PPC manager hasn't asked about your margins, your customer value, your sales process, or your competition, they're going to manage your ads in a vacuum. Good PPC management is informed by business context.
Long-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; lock-ins exist for the ones who aren't sure.
You can't reach them. If it takes a week to get a response to a question about your own advertising budget, something is 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.
Size 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.
Start 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.
At askotter, fully managed PPC is $1,000/mo flat, and self-managed the channels are metered with your compute, with no percentage of spend and 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 aim to earn your business every month.
The right PPC manager turns your ad budget into a predictable customer acquisition machine, and the wrong one turns it into an expensive experiment with no controls. Choose carefully.