How to Choose a PPC Agency Without Buying a Sales Pitch

You are about to hand someone your ad accounts and a meaningful share of your marketing budget. Every agency on your shortlist will present well. The pitch is designed to make them look capable, and most of them are capable of something. Your job is to find out whether they are capable of your specific problem, and what happens if they are not.

The short answer: decide what work you are actually buying, ask every candidate for the same evidence, verify who will do the work and who owns the accounts, judge how they measure before you judge what they promise, and score them with weights you set before the first call.

Disclosure. This guide is published by Elite Créatif, a paid media agency that also offers fractional CMO services. We sell some of what this guide helps you evaluate. Use the same questions and scorecard on every agency you consider, including us. The last section covers situations where hiring any agency, ours included, is the wrong move.

Define the work you actually need to buy

“PPC agency” covers very different businesses. Some manage bids and budgets inside Google Ads and nothing else. Some also produce ad creative. Some build landing pages. Some set up tracking and reconcile platform data with your CRM. A few do all of it under one team. Comparing them without defining the job first is how buyers end up paying for capacity they did not need, or discovering in month two that nobody owns the landing page.

Media-only expertise, creative capacity, page work or a cross-funnel diagnosis

Work out which of these is your real constraint:

If the problem genuinely spans page, creative and media, an integrated team can reduce handoffs. If it does not, an integrated team is paying for parts you will not use.

What the internal team will continue to own

Write down what stays in-house: the offer, pricing, sales follow-up, approvals, brand decisions, CRM administration, maybe creative. An agency proposal is only comparable once you know where its responsibilities end and yours begin. A common failure is a proposal that assumes the client will supply landing pages or creative, while the client assumed the opposite.

Ask for evidence matched to your business

Case studies on a website are marketing. They can still be useful, but only if you can see what was measured, over what period, and what else changed at the same time.

Relevant cases with dates, definitions and baseline

For each case an agency shows you, ask:

• What was the business model, and how close is it to ours (lead generation versus ecommerce, average deal value, sales cycle, regulated or not)?
• What was the starting baseline, and over what dates was the result measured?
• How is the reported metric defined? A “lead” in one account may be any form fill; in another it is a qualified, booked appointment.
• What else changed during the period: new pages, new offer, more budget, better tracking, seasonality?
• Is the result from the agency’s reports, the client’s systems, or both?

A good answer often includes caveats. When several things changed at once, an honest agency will say no single change can be credited. When tracking was added, an honest agency will separate newly measured results from new demand. Be wary of a case that has a large percentage and no definitions.

A sample report and a decision the report changed

Ask for a redacted monthly report from a real account. Look for:

• One clearly defined business number, not a page of platform metrics.
• Spend, cost per result by campaign and by creative.
• Calls and forms reported separately if calls matter to you.
• A written explanation of what changed and why.
• A specific decision that came out of a report: a budget moved, a campaign cut, a page rebuilt.

If the agency cannot share a redacted sample, ask them to walk you through one on a call.

A failed test and what the team learned

Ask: “Tell me about a test that did not work.” Every active account has them. You are listening for whether the team defined the test in advance, recognized a loss or an inconclusive result honestly, and changed something because of it. An agency that has never had a test fail is either not testing or not telling you.

Credentials, reviews and certifications

Third-party reviews and platform certifications are worth checking, but they answer narrower questions than they appear to. Clutch’s PPC buying guide recommends reviewing third-party reputation and past work, and lists a team without current platform certifications as a warning sign (Clutch, how to choose a PPC agency, updated 2026-04-23, accessed 2026-10-01). A certification shows that someone passed a platform’s knowledge assessment. It does not show they can diagnose your account, and its absence does not prove poor work. Treat both as one input, then ask the people who will run your account to explain a decision they made recently.

Verify who does the work and who owns the assets

Named roles and continuity

Ask for the names and roles of the people who will work on your account each week, not the people in the pitch. Then ask:

• Who builds the campaigns? Who writes the ads? Who builds the pages? Who checks tracking?
• How many other accounts does each person handle?
• What happens if a key person leaves? How is the account handed over?
• Who do we escalate to, and how quickly will they respond?

Access and ownership

Clutch flags it as a red flag when a client is not given full access to its ad accounts or data (Clutch). Go further and get ownership in writing:

• Ad accounts are created under your business and billed to your payment method, with the agency added as a user.
• Analytics, tag manager, call tracking and CRM integrations sit in accounts you control.
• Landing pages, creative files, raw footage and copy belong to you, and you know where the source files live.
• Talent and music usage rights for any creative are documented, including how long you may run them.

Offboarding

Ask how the relationship ends before it starts. What notice is required? What gets handed over, and in what format? Will the agency remove its own access, transfer tracking numbers, and leave documentation of account structure and conversion settings? An exit plan is not pessimism. It is the clause that protects every other clause.

Evaluate measurement before promises

Most agencies will tell you what they expect to achieve. Fewer will explain how they will know whether it happened. Ask:

• What will you count as a conversion, and how do you define a qualified outcome for a business like ours?
• How will you reconcile platform-reported conversions with our CRM, booking system or sales data?
• How do you track phone calls, and how do you decide which calls count?
• What can your tracking not see, and how will the report show that uncertainty?
• What data will you send back to the ad platforms, and how do you make sure it complies with platform policy and applicable privacy law? This matters most in healthcare and other regulated categories.

A confident projection with no answer to these questions is a sales number, not a plan.

Also ask how they would audit an account in your category. General rules break in regulated or unusual markets. In a specialty pharmacy account we manage (unnamed at the client’s request), a third-party reviewer recommended cutting the most expensive keywords and adding generic copay terms. The account data showed those keywords were where nearly all converting searches entered, and the copay terms had already been tested and attracted people looking for manufacturer assistance programs instead of a pharmacy. A good candidate agency will ask what you have already tested and what happens to leads after the form before it recommends a cut.

Compare commercial terms and exclusions

Price only means something when the scope matches. For each proposal, get these in writing:

• Fee model: retainer, project, hourly, percentage of spend or hybrid. Each rewards something different.
• What the fee includes: number of campaigns, pages, creative assets, reports and meetings.
• Production: included, quoted per shoot, or excluded.
• Media spend: billed directly to you by the platforms, or passed through the agency.
• Tools: call tracking, page builders and reporting software, and whether they are marked up.
• First term, notice period and change control.

Our pricing guide covers fee models and a total-cost worksheet in detail.

For transparency, our own terms (as of October 1, 2026): every engagement starts with a $4,500 Marketing Audit and 90-Day Plan; retainers begin at $12,000 per month and cover page, creative and media; production is built in when the account needs it, and a shoot is either quoted separately or folded into the retainer; media is paid directly to Meta and Google from client-owned accounts; the client owns every account, page and asset; and we ask for a three-month minimum, because that is roughly how long the work takes to show, then month to month with 30 days’ notice. See the FAQ for the current version.

Use a fair selection scorecard

Set the weights before the first sales call so the best presenter does not set them for you. The weights below are blank on purpose. A company with strong internal creative will weight creative capacity low; a company with no tracking will weight measurement high.

Weighted scorecard (blank)

Score each agency against the “strong answer” column, multiply by your weight, and add. Then check the result against your instinct. If they disagree, find out which criterion is driving the gap.

Evidence-request list to send every shortlisted agency

1. Two cases from comparable business models, with dates, baseline, metric definitions and what else changed.
2. A redacted monthly report from a current account.
3. One test that failed or was inconclusive, and what happened next.
4. Names and roles of the people who would work on our account, and their current account load.
5. Your standard contract terms: fee model, inclusions, exclusions, first term, notice, ownership and offboarding.
6. How you would track and qualify calls and forms for us, and what you could not measure.
7. A list of third-party tools and costs we would pay.

Interview checklist

• Walk me through the first 30 days. What do you need from us, and by when?
• What would make you recommend we spend less, or not hire you?
• Who will I talk to every week? Can I meet them now?
• How do you decide a campaign or creative is not working?
• What is the most common reason clients leave you?

Know when not to hire an agency

Sometimes the right answer is no agency at all, or a different kind of help.

• Your internal team has the capacity and the skill. If you have an experienced media buyer, an agency may add cost without adding judgment. A specialist consultant for periodic review may be enough.
• You need one narrow skill. A tracking fix, a landing-page build or a batch of edits is often better bought from a freelancer or specialist with a defined scope.
• The offer is unclear. If you cannot say what you sell, to whom and why someone should choose you, no media buyer can fix that. Work on the offer first.
• Operations are not ready. If calls go unanswered, leads wait days for a reply, or capacity is already full, more traffic will expose the problem rather than solve it.
• Budget is too small for the fee to make sense. When the agency fee is a large share of total spend, a freelancer or a well-trained internal person is usually the better economics. Our own model, for example, is built for companies with roughly $10M to $200M in revenue, usually spending $25,000 or more per month on media. Below that, we are unlikely to be the right fit.

If you are not sure which of these applies, buying a defined diagnosis before a monthly commitment is a reasonable middle step.

Use the same questions with every shortlisted agency, including Elite Créatif. If the fit is right, review the Audit scope, and see who would work on your account on the People page and the published Work.