A PPC agency plans, builds and runs your paid ads, then keeps improving them. The real job breaks into seven parts: research and account structure, keyword and negative keyword management, writing and testing ad copy, bid strategy and budget pacing, conversion tracking, landing page feedback, and reporting. Most of that work is weekly, not monthly, and very little of it is visible from the outside.
That last point is why so many business owners feel unsure about what they are paying for. You see an invoice and a report. You do not see the 40 negative keywords added on a Tuesday, or the bid strategy that got paused before it burned a week of budget.
So here is the honest version. What the work is, how often each piece should happen, and the things a PPC agency cannot fix no matter how good they are.
What does a PPC agency actually do day to day?
The daily job is watching where money is going and stopping the waste. The weekly job is testing. The monthly job is deciding what to do next.
Below is each bucket of work, what good looks like, and roughly how often it should happen. If your agency is not doing most of these, you are paying for reporting rather than management.
Research and account structure
This is the setup work. It means learning what you sell, what a customer is worth to you, who you compete against in the auction, and then building campaigns that separate your best searches from your weakest ones.
Good looks like campaigns split by profit or by service line, not by whatever the account inherited. Bad looks like one campaign called “Search” holding 400 keywords. Structure work happens heavily in month one, then gets revisited quarterly or when your offer changes.
Keyword and negative keyword management
Adding keywords is the easy half. Blocking the wrong searches is the half that saves money. Broad match and Performance Max both pull in searches you never asked for, and someone has to read that report and cut the junk.
Good looks like a search terms review every week in the first two months, then every two weeks once the waste slows down. If nobody has added a negative keyword to your account in 60 days, nobody is reading the search terms.
Ad copy writing and testing
Responsive search ads let you load many headlines and descriptions, and Google mixes them. That does not mean copy stopped mattering. It means the raw material matters more, because Google can only combine what you gave it.
Good looks like at least two ads per ad group, headlines that name your actual offer and price position rather than generic claims, and a real test running at any given time. Copy refresh should happen monthly at minimum. You can pressure test your own headlines with our free ad headline tester.
Bid strategy and budget pacing
Most accounts now run on automated bidding, so the job is setting targets and feeding the system clean data, not typing in bids. Google’s Smart Bidding documentation covers how those strategies use conversion data to set bids in each auction.
Good looks like a target that matches your real economics, a learning period nobody panics through, and a budget that is fully spent by month end without being blown by the 20th. Pacing gets checked weekly. Bid targets get changed monthly, not daily, because changing them constantly restarts the learning.
Conversion tracking and measurement
This one is the foundation, and it is broken more often than anything else. If your tracking counts page views as leads, or double counts a form fill, then every bid decision the system makes is based on fiction.
Good looks like tracking that fires once per real lead, values assigned to different conversion types, and offline data sent back when the sale closes later. Google explains the setup in its conversion tracking guide, and we walk through the common failures in our post on Google Ads conversion tracking. Audit it at setup, then re check it every quarter and after any website change.
Landing page feedback
Some agencies build pages. Some only advise. Either way, the agency should tell you when the page is the problem, because ads cannot fix a page that does not convert.
Good looks like specific requests: match the headline to the ad, cut the form from nine fields to four, put the phone number where a thumb can reach it. Our guide to high converting PPC landing pages covers the elements that usually move the number. This is ongoing, and it should come up in every monthly call where conversion rate is flat.
Reporting and strategy calls
Reporting is not the work, it is the record of the work. A useful report shows spend, leads, cost per lead, and what changed, in that order. A useless one shows impressions and a green arrow.
Good looks like a monthly report you can read in five minutes plus a call where someone says what they are doing next and why. Quarterly, that call should be about strategy rather than numbers.
What should happen in month one versus month three?
Expectations go wrong when nobody sets a timeline. Here is the normal shape of the first year of a managed account.
| Area | Month 1 | Months 2 to 3 | Ongoing |
|---|---|---|---|
| Account structure | Built or rebuilt from scratch | Split out winners, pause dead campaigns | Reviewed quarterly |
| Search terms and negatives | Weekly review | Weekly review | Every one to two weeks |
| Ad copy | New ads written for every ad group | First real tests read | Monthly refresh |
| Bidding | Manual or maximize clicks while data builds | Switch to target CPA or ROAS | Targets reviewed monthly |
| Conversion tracking | Audited and fixed before spend starts | Values and offline data added | Re checked quarterly |
| Landing pages | Reviewed, problems flagged | First changes live | Tested as traffic allows |
| What you should expect | Data, not results | Cost per lead starts settling | Steady improvement, not spikes |
What this means for you: judge month one on whether the foundations got built, not on lead count. Judge month three on whether cost per lead is heading the right way. Judge month six on profit.
How much of this work is worth paying for?
The fair test is simple. Add your ad spend and your management fee together, then divide by leads. If that total cost per lead is lower than what you were getting alone, management is paying for itself.
For context, the all industry average cost per lead on Google Ads Search was $66.69 in 2026, with an average cost per click of $5.42, according to WordStream’s 2026 benchmarks covering 13,474 US search campaigns. Use that as a rough sanity check only, because your industry can sit far above or below it.
Fees vary a lot by model and by spend level. We lay out the normal ranges in our guide to Google Ads management pricing.
What can a PPC agency not do for you?
Plenty. Being clear about this up front saves everyone six wasted months.
- Fix a bad offer. If people do not want what you sell at the price you sell it, more traffic just finds more people who say no faster.
- Fix a broken sales process. If leads sit unanswered for two days, the ads are not the problem. Speed to first call moves close rates more than almost anything in the ad account.
- Make an uncompetitive price competitive. If you are 40% more expensive than the three results next to you and you do not explain why, clicks will not save you.
- Produce results in week one. Automated bidding needs conversion data before it works well. The first 30 to 60 days usually cost more per lead than the months after.
- Guarantee a position or a cost. Nobody controls the auction. Anyone promising a fixed cost per lead is guessing or selling.
- Sell into a market that is not searching. If nobody types your product into Google, search ads are the wrong channel and a good agency will say so.
Should you hire in house instead?
Sometimes yes. In house wins when you spend enough to justify a full salary and your account needs daily attention from someone who knows your business deeply.
A rough line: once you are spending well into five figures a month on a single platform, a dedicated hire starts to make financial sense. Below that, you are paying a full salary for a job that takes ten hours a week. In house also wins when your product is complex or compliance rules are strict.
An agency wins when you need several skill sets at once, search, shopping, social, tracking and landing pages, and cannot hire five people. The worst option is the half version: a generalist who handles ads for a few hours a week between other duties. That is how accounts drift.
How do you tell a good PPC agency from a bad one?
Ask what they will do in the first 30 days and listen for tracking. If conversion tracking is not the first thing they mention, they will be optimizing toward noise.
Then two quick filters: ask who actually touches the account, since the person who sells is rarely the person who works, and insist on keeping ownership of your own account and data. We cover the rest of the vetting questions in our guide on how to choose a Google Ads agency.
Common questions
What is the difference between a PPC agency and a Google Ads agency?
A Google Ads agency works on one platform. A PPC agency usually covers paid search plus Meta, Microsoft Ads, shopping and sometimes paid social video. If most of your demand comes from search, the difference may not matter much to you.
How long before PPC management shows results?
Expect 30 to 60 days before cost per lead settles and around 90 days before you can judge the account fairly. The first month is mostly building and collecting conversion data, which automated bidding needs before it performs.
Do PPC agencies charge a percentage of ad spend?
Many do, though flat monthly fees and hybrid models are just as common. Percentage models are simple but they reward spending more, so check what happens to the fee if the right answer is to cut budget.
Does a PPC agency write my landing pages too?
It depends on the agency. Some only advise, some build. Either way the page has to be part of the conversation, because Google scores it as part of your ad rank and it decides whether a click becomes a lead.
Can a PPC agency work with a small budget?
Yes, but the smaller the budget, the narrower the plan has to be. Below roughly $1,000 a month in ad spend you will not gather enough conversions for automated bidding to learn, so the account has to focus on a handful of high intent searches.
Want to see what your account is missing?
If you are not sure which of these buckets is being handled in your account, the fastest way to find out is to look. Our Google Ads management team can review your setup and tell you which piece is costing you the most right now, whether that is tracking, negatives, structure or the landing page.
No pitch and no obligation. Get in touch and we will walk you through what we find.
