Insights — Demand Generation & PPC — 3 min read
PPC Agency vs Sales-Led PPC Management
An agency is measured on the metrics it can control. The problem is that none of them are revenue.
Most PPC accounts are competently run. Impressions rise, cost per click falls, reports arrive on time — and the business still cannot say whether the spend produced customers.
The incentive problem
An agency is accountable for what happens up to the form submission. Everything that decides whether that submission becomes revenue — qualification, response time, quoting, follow-up, closing — sits outside its remit and often outside its knowledge.
What changes when sales owns the brief
- Keywords are chosen against the accounts and sectors the business actually wants to win.
- Ad copy qualifies buyers rather than maximising clicks.
- Landing pages answer the objections the sales team hears every week.
- Lead quality is judged against the pipeline, not against a volume target.
- Follow-up is treated as part of the campaign, because commercially it is.
Nobody in the ad account can tell you why the quote wasn't followed up. That is where most of the money goes.
This is not an argument against agencies
Good agencies are worth having, particularly at scale. The point is that somebody must own the whole journey from search to sale. Where nobody does, both sides can perform well and the business still sees no return.
What to ask before you appoint anyone
- 01What will you measure, and does it include qualified opportunities?
- 02How will you find out what happened to the leads you generate?
- 03Who writes the landing pages, and who signs off the commercial message?
- 04What would make you recommend we spend less?
The last question is the useful one. Anyone unwilling to answer it is managing a budget rather than a business.
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