The fastest and easiest way to grow your agency is to have a new service to sell your current client base. Your best clients look to you as a trusted advisor and implementer, so if you recommend a new service, they’re more likely to jump on board than a cold prospect.
Agencies that bolt-on a new service can see a 5-6 figure jump in revenue in their first 6-months all with recurring management fees that increase your total agency value.
Specialised auto repair agency that added PPC services with a white label partner. In just 5 months they added $30,500 in new business and $14.8k in MRR – functionally 2x’ing their investment.
An extra 5-6 figures at your agency sounds great…
…but there’s one problem…
Adding a new service requires new subject matter expertise. Most agencies stop here because they think that means they either need to
- Learn & master a new skill
- Load up on staff to cover the skill gap
There is a third, and in my very biassed opinion, better option:
Working with a white label provider to do the fulfilment for you.
When you work with a fulfilment partner you can get the boost in revenue with no spike in overhead costs, no loss of time hiring and managing new employees, and no wasted time learning that marketing skill you’ve been avoiding!
If “Option 3” sounds good, here’s everything you need to know to start offering PPC at your agency, even if you’re 100% brand new to Google PPC.
❐ Productize Your PPC Setup Offering
This step is always overlooked. Most agencies will start offering PPC to clients without any regard to how much work needs to be done to launch high performing campaigns at scale.
A well designed Google PPC campaign setup requires the following:
- Onboarding call with the client
- Account audit
- Solid campaign structure
- Ad headlines and body copy
- Retargeting ad designs
- High converting landing page design & copy
- All analytics & call tracking, and conversion tracking setup and tested
- Reporting dashboards
All of these things take time to do and require a cost associated with each. Here’s a useful pricing sheet that breaks down PPC services PLUS what you should charge for other agency services.
At the very least, you should show a flat fee for an account setup and use the items listed above in the “what’s included” section.
Due to the sheer volume of work-to-be-done in the setup process, you can charge between $1,600 – $2,200 just to set up an account for a client.
For reference, the going rate for a landing page build can be as much as $1,250, so productizing the offer makes this a no-brainer for the end client.
❐ Productize Monthly Management
No agency gets rich setting up new PPC campaigns. The real money is in consistent monthly management.
However, after a few months of management some clients might start to believe they can do this whole Google PPC thing on their own.
The best way to answer The Bob’s question, is to lay out exactly how you manage an ad account each-and-every month. Here’s what to include:
- How often you’re in the account
- The types of ads and campaigns you’ll be running
- The frequency of ad tests
- The frequency of campaign tests
- Account tweaks & adjustments (what & when)
- Bids
- Audience
- Search query
- Whether you’ll run split tests on landing pages and how often
- Frequency of review meetings & updates
- Whether you’ll review conversion quality, e.g., form submissions & phone calls
The more you can document the time and effort required to keep campaigns running efficiently, the less likely a client will consider bringing it in-house.
❐ Set Performance Expectations
Now your client knows everything that’s required to run a good campaign, it’s time to start talking more about performance and expectations.
The fact is, your client doesn’t care about marketing metrics. We think concepts like impression share, click through rates, and all the other leading indicators are interesting…BUT the client only cares about one thing:
Revenue
So to win business, especially PPC business, you’re going to need to do a little research to speak to how you’ll be able to influence revenue.
To do this, you’re going to need:
A. Client’s Average Customer Value
You need to know what a customer is worth to the business before you can recommend any kind of budget. If the cost is too low, Google PPC may not be the best for them. Not everyone is poised to have success with Google Ads and you don’t want to hurt the client relationship by offering a service that doesn’t work for their model.
B. Client’s Current PPC Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)
You want to be able to compare previous performance. Be sure the comparison is like-like. The cost to acquire a customer on Google will differ from Facebook. You also want this number so you can compare it to your team’s performance. No point pitching something where you can’t improve performance.
C. Current Cost Per Lead (CPL)
For the same reason you want to know the CPA, you want to know the CPL. You’ll also have some clients & prospects where the lead is their defined conversion, so this just makes sure you’re speaking their language.
D. Lead to Customer Conversion Rate
If you’re doing PPC for lead gen, this is essential. You can use this in an upcoming calculation to convince the client on how your efforts translate to their bottomline.
E. Benchmark CPL in their industry/niche
Benchmarks help tell you what “Good” looks like. At InvisiblePPC, we have performance estimates for 64+ niches, no need for research if you specialize with these types of clients. These figures are a great conversation starter about how you can improve the performance of an account.
F. Minimum Budget to See Results
If a client isn’t willing to spend enough on ads, they certainly won’t want to pay a monthly management fee for a prolonged period of time.
The absolute functional minimum budget per month varies, but if they aren’t willing to spend at least $1k/month, the client won’t be sticking with PPC in a meaningful way.
Here’s a quick formula to figure out the ideal starting monthly budget.
- Get the Average cost per click (CPC) for their main keywords
- Multiply the CPC by 30. This will give you more than enough clicks per day to provide meaningful data
- Multiply the product by 30 (assuming 30 days in a month)
Say a client’s keywords are averaging at $2.50/click. That means for meaningful data they’d need to spend ~$2250/month on ads.
WARNING: Don’t fall into the “Test” trap. Most prospects will propose using a smaller budget, with the caveat that they’ll increase it when they see “performance” The problem is, if they don’t spend enough early on…they’re likely not going to see the performance to justify an increase in spend!
G. Commitment to Process
This is a biggie. Clients love the idea of Google PPC because performance can happen quickly, it’s a highly visible channel, & there’s a lot of control.
Because of these reasons, it’s easy for a client to have unreasonable performance expectations early on. It’s critical for you to set the stage early and make it abundantly clear that PPC isn’t a silver bullet, it’s just an additional acquisition channel. Like all channels, it takes time to see consistent, scalable results.
We recommend you get a client to commit to 3-months of PPC management, at minimum. From there you can either move them month-to-month or sign them up for an additional 9-months. Many of our partners do the latter.
We recommend you get a client to commit to 3-months of PPC management, at minimum. From there you can either move them month-to-month or sign them up for an additional 9-months. Many of our partners do the latter.
So once you have all of that, it gets really easy to sell. Just fill in the blanks on this pitch below:
❐ Pick a White Label Fulfilment Partner
This is 100% the self-serving part of this article. If you made it this far, it’s because you’re looking for a way to add a new service offering at your agency without breaking the bank.
A white label fulfilment partner is one of the most efficient ways to add a new service…but only if you pick the right partner. Here are the things you want to ask prior to working with a White Label Partner.
- What’s included during setup?
- Ad creative?
- Landing Pages?
- What are you doing in the account each month?
- How often will you meet with me or my team?
- What happens if I have a question? How long until I get an answer?
- How long has the team been running Google Ads?
- How do you get access to the ads account?
- IMPORTANT: If they say they need to create a new ads account, run!
- Are all of your team members employed by you or contractors?
- Do you work with end clients too?
- How long have you worked in [insert industry/niche]
- What sort of performance can I expect in [insert industry/niche]
