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We now spending over $15k a day across the UK and US. What style of agency or agency should we be using?
Hey,
We sell a very popular interior design product. We now spend over $15k a day and want to make sure we are with the right agency. We are heavily reliant on pmax.
What size agency should we be with?
Any agency recommendations?
Is there any benefit going internal?Thanks,
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1 Reply
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At your spend level you can definitely go with someone in-house. The big benefit being you have someone who is focused on your brand 40 hours / week. The key will be hiring someone who understand PMax and Google Ads at a deeper level to know what levers to pull. With any in-house hire, you want to make sure they writing down their processes and knowledge, that way when they leave one day. There is a base of knowledge for someone else to access. The bigger issue with an in-house hire can be all that knowledge going out the door one day. We have our [2023 PPC salary survey](https://www.reddit.com/r/PPC/comments/11xi72k/ppc_salary_survey_2023_final_report/) to help you understand what salaries can be for getting someone in-house.
If you are going to go with an agency, ask your network if they have recommendations. Always trust your gut and walk away if it says so. Make sure any agency you do work with, runs ads out of your ad account and you have admin access to anything they create/set up for you. You want to make sure you can take your data and knowledge one day if you go in-house or move to another agency down the line. Relationship rarely last forever.
An agency on the medium to small size might work better as you would potentially be a bigger client within their roster of clients, which means you will get better attention. Going with a national or an agency part of a holding co, can mean you are just another client for them. Bigger is not always better if they only hire and put junior people on your ad account. You want to understand who will be on your ad account and what experience they have overall and especially managing ad spend at your level. It is just as easy to burn money when you are small as when you are this size.
Having said that. The agency should ask you about your marketing and business goals:
* What is your revenue goal for 2023
* What is your CPA / CPL target
* What is your AOV or LTV
* Who is your ideal customers?
* What makes them ideal?
* Anything I should know about your customers that might be uniqueSome questions you should ask the agencies you are talking with. Once you have narrowed down the work that needs to be done.
* What is your on boarding like
* What sort of reporting do I get and how often
* Will you audit my account before starting work
* What is your philosophy for building out and managing ad accounts
* Do you write ad copy or is that my jobYou want to try and find out if they have standard operating procedures (SOPs). If they don’t… walk away. You can even ask to see them on a screen share. The questions above are from a comment I wrote last month when another brand asked a similar question where I laid out how I think about hiring and what it has been like being on both sides of the table.
One other thing you want to think deeply about before talking with agencies or going in-house is [what work do you need done](https://www.reddit.com/r/PPC/comments/11lswf0/comment/jbeggmx/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) within paid ads but across marketing as a whole. Answering those questions will help inform what sort of hire you need. Rarely do brands just need help with paid ads. There are lots of other areas of marketing that impact paid advertising.
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At that level of spend, you may look at mid-weight or even large agencies. That’s half a million dollars per month in ad spend, which means the agency will assign an account manager and a media buyer to your account, as well as any other ad hoc services you may need, such troubleshooting tracking, building creatives, etc. These are difficult to come by with one person, as good marketers/media buyers focus on one or two platforms/services/skills at most.
What you can do instead is hire a head of digital marketing who has a good grasp on everything digital and knows how to manage agencies and supervise their work. That person will also have the capabilities to evaluate agencies and pick the right one. Grab a listing of the top 10 agencies in your area/country and shoot them a message. Ask for their rates, experience with similar businesses, examples of good results, etc. The head will communicate daily/weekly with the agency, and the agency will take care of the implementation and technical shenanigans.
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Don’t get an agency, I have never found a good one. Get someone in house and structure their pay so they get incentives or bonuses for certain profit levels.
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I think it is a fallacy to go with a large agency just because of large spend. Myself I’m a 3-person agency (my brother and myself plus one person for development + design help) and we manage(d) large accounts of up to roughly your spend ($400k+ a month).
The reason we can handle large accounts albeit being just 2 is that we are completely eCommerce focused. All our ad spend goes exclusively to eCom, we spend all day in Google Ads, Analytics and Merchant Center and know our way around the most popular shop systems (most clients use Shopify but also others).
PMAX is all about testing Asset Groups, creatives, audiences but at the same time not ignore everything else. Shopping, Search and Discovery usually still matter **a lot**, especially on the days where PMAX might have huge hiccups.
The “issue” with most large agencies is that they take a fairly large ad spend cut like 7-12%, which, at your level, makes no sense. Sure, you won’t find a real expert charging $2k a month for an account your size, but spending multiple 5-figures on ad management is ridiculous as well.
I won’t deny that some large agencies have highly dedicated teams for large spenders (in the eyes of a bunch of agencies you are “large”, in the eyes of others you might be medium), but it’s difficult to tell upfront. If you are unlucky you spend half a million dollars a month and pay a multi-5-figure fee and get 2 interns handling your account (real-life stories of 8-figure clients of mine).
In other words – the most important part in my opinion is specialization (eCom has a totally different set of challenges than lead gen) and **not** sourcing your work out to beginners, interns, overseas freelancers etc.
Good luck!
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Check Solutions8. They manage around 10M monthly and have a good repo in Google ads. They have mastered the performance max. You can check their YT channel.
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We have worked with a couple of high ticket interior design agencies including one that did the interiors for the most expensive villa ever sold in Dubai. This campaign was purely lead based but we do have a good understanding of the interior design space.
Can you DM the url pls? I will have a look and get back to you.
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In-house is probably the way to go because you can probably afford someone full-time, but if you’re really set on hiring an agency for various reasons, it’s going to sound bad but it’s not about the size, but the attention they can give.
Large agencies can be famous for burning and churning unfortunately.
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Really great responses. I would add know **who** is on your account no matter in-house or agency. Sometimes the folks that win business on agencies don’t run it. They need to know your business and be really skilled at the same time.
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I’m an in house employee. I consult on the side but not for ppc. Every in house job I get, the first thing I do is I hire http://www.BrettOdey.com
Right now I’m with a company that does a billion in revenue a year. Brett lowered our CPA by 15% which is a lot for a company our size. Our owners (big PE firm) is having me (I manage the marketing budget) spend up to levels we could never have done without him.
I reply to people on this thread 1-2 times a month recommending him. I have no idea why nobody has ever reached out to Brett.
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Sent DM!
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Depends on your media mix. If you aren’t working on your media and/or producing your own, then it would be beneficial if you partner with a media agency. The reason is that you will need to keep generating demand for PMAX to capture.
Other than that, a freelancer is your best bet since you really don’t want people learning on your ad spend. Something that one in-house would more likely do.
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Hope it helps
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Go internal, and maybe get the internal person a small agency to help them with the operative side of things.
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We work with Orange Social (https://orange.sc/en), they are a mid-sized agency with decently low fees and surprisingly great performance and design quality. We’ve been working for them for 5 years and not once I felt the need to look for a different agency.
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You’d benefit by having somebody in-house at that level of ad spend. However, you can quickly get into trouble if you hire the wrong person or they suddenly leave. We pick up some clients like that at my agency and spend months sorting out the mess.
If you only want to outsource PPC you can probably look for a solid small to mid-size specialty agency but still have somebody in-house that oversees your digital to coordinate everything. Don’t rely on somebody that doesn’t know anything about PPC to oversee this for you.
If you have other marketing needs you want to outsource such as SEO I’d go for a larger firm that offers a full-service range, i.e. creative, branding, content marketing, performance marekting and maybe even traditional media if that’s a thing for you (radio, tv, print).
Here’s an article I wrote about this: [https://www.tenthousandfootview.com/ppc-agency-vs-freelancer-vs-diy/](https://www.tenthousandfootview.com/ppc-agency-vs-freelancer-vs-diy/)
The best tool for finding a great agency IMO, is [Clutch.co](https://Clutch.co)… probably the only reputable directory around.
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I’m biased, but I’ll give you my answer…
I would say go with a medium sized agency focused on media buying. Don’t go with a super large agency that claims to specialize in everything.
An agency who will come to the table with highly skilled media buyers and a solid creative team who understand what ads will convert. Meaning, just because an ad looks pretty doesn’t mean it will convert. This applies more to paid social though.
If you’re using PMax and getting great returns, maybe it’s not worth it to rock the boat. Idk.. You could also hire in-house or find a contractor based in the US or UK.
Good luck! Keep scaling!
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