Auto dealers get bombarded with calls for appointments and sales pitches. Every PPC company has their own angle as to why you should hire them. When interviewing a PPC agency or company, here are 5 great questions to ask them:

1. What level of reporting access will you give me? Ideally you want to be able to see your account in the actual Google MCC that the provider has. (MCC = Master Client Center) The reason this is vitally important is because it is the only way to see your actual ad spend. It is what Google has actually collected on your behalf. There are no other “reports” that a company can give you which will show “actual” budget spend.

2. Can I provide you with authorization to use my corporate credit card for the Google AdWords charges? If the company won’t show you your account in the MCC, this question will certainly determine transparency of the PPC company. The answer should be a resounding YES! In the billing section of the Google MCC, the company has the ability to enter any credit card information they wish. If a PPC company says no to either or both, you should be suspicious about your spend dollars as you will have no way to actually inspect what is being spent.

3. Can you share the past three months of your reports for 5 like brand dealers? Knowing the name/location is not really important but you want to see how they company is doing over a period of time. Specific items to look at would be what is their CTR (Click Through Rate) 2-3% is average. A high performing agency would be between 4 and 8% on the CTR. Also look at the average position of the ads. With only 4 boxes now, you want to be in the 1 or 2 position on average.

4. What is the experience level of the person I am going to work with. We see on a regular basis, companies who hire very junior people to be “account managers”. The monitor a computer program and just regurgitate the data on the reports.

5. Will you create custom landing pages to land the traffic on? You will get a much higher quality score if the company lands traffic on custom pages as opposed to Search results pages of the inventory.

You will be making a significant investment with your ad spend and you want to be sure that senior level management are working with you and showing month over month increases in leads, phone calls, impressions and click through rates.