Once brands decide to start a PPC program, they often want to get moving immediately.
However, there are a few things they either haven’t thought of or need a reality check before they’re truly ready to spend money wisely.
When those brands come to our agency, there’s a list of questions I like to ask to help us build a roadmap – and set expectations. (If you’re a brand, it’s a very good idea to ask these internally before you bring on a partner.)
1. What are your goals for a PPC program?
This is a fairly straightforward question that, more often than not, gets an answer like “We want customers,” “Drive sales” or “Boost revenue.”
That’s all well and good, but answers like that lead to a very necessary set of follow-up questions to make sure all sides are on the same page.
Dig deeper: How to create a roadmap for your PPC clients
2. What’s the conversion event that leads to an opportunity (or sale)?
Coming at this from a B2B angle (since ecommerce usually goes right to sales), we’re looking to learn the action that puts users close to the conversion. Something like “request a demo” or “sign up for an audit” or “book a free consultation.”
There are other ways to get people into the funnel with a softer, often content-related offer. Still, it’s good to know the marketing ultimate goal before the lead gets handed off to the business development team.
3. What happens after the first conversion?
This question really helps you identify work to be done before any PPC money can be spent.
If you’re an agency and being held to revenue goals – and you’re being a responsible business partner – you absolutely need to ask this question because much of what happens after the conversion event above will be out of your control.
For B2B/SaaS companies and B2C lead gen companies, it’s what happens after someone takes an action that will either bring good leads through the funnel or not.
This means post-conversion site experience, email follow-ups, lead qualification, expected time for sales to contact leads, etc.
Hiccups at any one of those stages will curtail the business impact of your PPC campaigns.
Even for ecommerce companies bringing in sales, the post-conversion experience is huge.
From fulfillment communication to retention strategies, you’ll usually help the brand identify ways to stretch their PPC dollars farther, LTV-wise, with some work upfront.
4. What’s your tracking set-up?
This is also a big question that, more often than not, identifies some pre-work to do with tagging, tracking, UTM parameters, etc., that will make sure our campaigns are pulling in the right data for attribution purposes.
Clients who haven’t given this much thought yet might need a quick tutorial on the state of cookies and browser-side tracking.
If you see a blue-sky opportunity to build something from scratch, I highly recommend avoiding dependency on third-party cookie tracking and setting up server-side tracking instead to make sure your client is capturing valuable first-party data from the jump.
Dig deeper: Advanced analytics techniques to measure PPC
5. How advanced is your CRM set-up?
Messy CRMs can create significant challenges for PPC teams. These include difficulties with:
Attribution.
Tracking the impact on pipeline and revenue.
Using advanced techniques like offline conversion tracking (OCT).
Without a clean CRM, it’s harder to teach platforms like Google, Meta, and LinkedIn how to target the right users effectively.
Brands with messy or incomplete instances would do all parties a service by addressing their CRM before opening the PPC floodgates.