How to Choose an SEM Agency: What to Ask Before You Sign

SEM stands for search engine marketing. This guide is mainly about search advertising in Google Ads and is written for you if you are choosing an agency for the first time or switching. Most of what follows applies just as well to a freelancer as to an agency.

My recommendation is to decide what your advertising should achieve before you meet any agency. That way you can give everyone the same brief and compare their answers directly.

Decide what you are buying

Search marketing consists of two parts that are often bought separately.

• Search engine optimisation (SEO) is about appearing in the regular search results without paying per click. It takes time and costs work on your website and content.
• Search advertising means you pay for ads in the search results, usually per click. You steer it with keywords and bids and can start and stop whenever you like.

Decide whether the agency should do both or just one. If it is doing both, ask who is responsible for what.

Answer a few questions before the first meeting

Write down your answers to these questions before you contact any agency.

• What should the advertising lead to? Write it as a business goal in terms of enquiries or sales per month and what a new customer is worth to you.
• How much can you spend on ads per month, and how much on the agency?
• What is tracked today? Check whether purchases and enquiries are counted as conversions in Google Ads.
• What has not worked before? It is worth mentioning in the meetings.
• What can you do yourselves? If you write copy or build landing pages in-house, you may only need help with the account.

Where to find agencies and freelancers

In my experience, a recommendation from someone in the same industry is the safest way in. Ask other marketing managers who they use and what they are happy with.

Google also has its own directory of agencies with Google Partner or Premier Partner status. There you can filter by region and by the certifications the agency holds.

A freelancer often suits smaller accounts where you want one person who knows everything about your account. An agency has more people and copes better with holidays and sick leave. That makes it more important to know who actually does the work.

Look for agencies that do the following from the first contact.

• They show results in terms of enquiries or sales when they talk about previous assignments.
• They tell you who will work on your account.
• They explain how they charge without you having to ask.
• They ask about your business before they talk about campaigns.

What to check with every agency

• Who owns the account and the data. My recommendation is that the Google Ads account and the payments profile are in your company's name. The agency gets access through its manager account and you keep admin access yourselves. That way you can remove the agency's access whenever you want and the history stays in the account. The same applies to Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager.
• How the agency charges. Two common models are a fixed fee and a percentage of ad spend. With a percentage, the agency earns more when you spend more, and that incentive is worth knowing about when the agency proposes a higher budget. With a fixed fee, the agency's income is not affected by the budget.
• Who does the work. Ask who works in the account each week and meet that person before you sign. The person who sold you the assignment is not always the one who runs the campaigns.
• Termination. Check the notice period and that the account and campaigns stay with you when the collaboration ends.
• Experience of similar assignments. Ask for examples from clients in your industry or with a similar business. Ask how the figures in the examples were measured.
• The Google Partner badge. The badge means the agency meets Google's requirements on three points. The agency's manager account must have an optimisation score of at least 70%, and its clients must together have spent at least USD 10,000 on ads over the last 90 days. At least half of the people who manage accounts must be certified in Google Ads. The optimisation score is Google's estimate of how well the accounts are set up. It rises both when the agency applies Google's recommendations and when it dismisses them after a review. The badge therefore shows that the agency meets Google's basic requirements. What the agency can do for you is best seen in its results from similar assignments. Premier Partners are the top 3% of agencies in the country in Google's annual assessment.

Questions to ask in the meeting

• Who will work on our account, and how many other accounts does that person have?
• How do you charge, and what is included?
• How do you check that conversions in Google Ads are tracked correctly before you start changing the account?
• Which bid strategy would you choose for us, and why?
• How often do you review what people searched for when they clicked, and how do you exclude searches that do not fit?
• Do you apply Google's recommendations automatically or review them first?
• What will you do in the first 90 days?
• Can we see a report you send to a client today?

How to lay the foundations for the collaboration

• Write down the goals. Set goals in terms of enquiries or sales and decide what a conversion is worth to you.
• Give the agency the right access. Invite the agency to Google Ads and Google Analytics with the access level it needs and keep the admin role yourselves.
• Share your sales. The agency needs to know which enquiries became customers to be able to steer towards the right keywords. You can bring your sales into Google Ads as conversions so that bidding learns which clicks led to business.
• Agree how you follow up. Agree how often you meet and who approves larger changes such as new campaigns or a higher budget.
• Decide what can be tested. Set aside part of the budget for trying new campaigns and ads, so that tests do not eat into what already works.

Reporting should follow your business goals

The report should show what matters to the business. Clicks and impressions explain what has happened but do not tell you whether the advertising pays off.

A good monthly report contains the following.

• The number of enquiries or purchases and what each enquiry or purchase cost.
• Revenue relative to ad spend if you sell online.
• The change from last month and from the same month last year.
• Which keywords and ad copy bring in business and which only cost money.
• What the agency has changed and what it plans to do next.

Also ask how conversions are counted. If every click on your phone number counts as a conversion, the figure in Google Ads will be higher than the number of calls you have actually received. So compare the report with your own figures for enquiries and sales once a quarter.