Hiring an ecommerce PPC agency? Ask these questions first

What should an ecommerce PPC agency actually do?

An ecommerce PPC agency plans, buys and reports your paid search, Shopping and paid social, usually Google Ads, Performance Max, Meta and TikTok, and it answers for revenue rather than clicks. For a brand selling £100k or more a month, the job is to grow profitable revenue across every channel at once, without one channel buying credit from another.

That definition rules a lot of agencies out before the first call. If the proposal is built around impressions, clicks or platform-reported return on ad spend, you are being sold activity. The questions below are the ones we would ask if we were on your side of the table. They come from taking over accounts that other teams ran, and from seeing the same problems in almost every one of them.

Who will actually run the account?

Ask for the name of the person who will be in your ad accounts every day, and ask how many other accounts that person runs. The pitch is often given by a director and the work handed to a junior once the contract is signed. That is the single most common reason a good first meeting turns into a disappointing quarter.

The answer you want is a named media buyer who stays on the account from the start, who you can speak to directly, and who explains every budget change in writing. That is how we staff paid media at RedPxl: one named buyer from start to finish, in a shared group chat with your team, with no account manager sitting between you and the person pressing the buttons.

Which number will they answer to?

Each ad platform reports the sales it thinks it caused, and the platforms overlap. Add up what Meta, Google and TikTok claim in a month and the total is often larger than the revenue those ads could have driven. An agency that reports platform return on ad spend (ROAS) can look successful while your business stands still.

The better measure for most brands is blended return, also called marketing efficiency ratio (MER): total store revenue divided by total ad spend across every channel. It cannot be inflated by one channel claiming another's sales. It does move with seasonality, pricing and organic demand, so we read it alongside new-customer revenue and margin. We wrote about why every account answers to one number, and we publish how we measure every figure on this site.

What will they find when they open your account?

A good agency should be able to tell you what is wrong before you sign, from read-only access. When we take over an established Google Ads account, the same patterns come up again and again, and each one costs money quietly:

• Too many campaigns, so spend is split so thinly that none of them gathers enough data to learn from.
• Brand and non-brand search mixed together, so people who already typed your name make the whole account look more efficient than it is.
• A weak Shopping feed, with thin titles, missing product attributes and no product grouping by margin, which caps what Shopping and Performance Max can do.
• Bidding to platform metrics, so the account optimises for the conversions it reports rather than for revenue and margin you can bank.

Ask any agency you are considering to walk you through what they would change in your account in the first month, and why. Specific answers are a good sign. A slide of generic best practice is not.

Who makes the creative?

On Meta and TikTok, the creative now does most of the targeting. The platforms find the audience; the ad decides who stops scrolling. An agency that buys media but waits on your team for new ads will run out of things to test within weeks, and results will stall for reasons that have nothing to do with bidding.

Ask who briefs, shoots and edits the ads, how many new concepts they expect to ship a month at your spend, and how they decide what to make next. The best answer ties new creative to what the account data is saying. Our Creative Studio sits in the same team as paid media for exactly this reason, and we have written about how to spot creative fatigue on Meta before it shows up in your costs.

Who owns the accounts and the data?

Your ad accounts, pixels, analytics property, Merchant Center feed and product catalogue should all belong to your business, with the agency given access. If an agency runs your ads from its own accounts, you lose the history when you leave, and history is what lets a new team avoid repeating old mistakes.

Check the notice period and what happens to campaigns, audiences and creative files when the relationship ends. A confident agency makes leaving easy, because it expects to keep you on results rather than on contract terms.

What should the first 90 days look like?

Nobody can promise a number in the first week. What an agency can promise is a clear order of work. For a typical takeover on a store selling £100k or more a month, ours looks like this:

1. Weeks 1 to 2: access, a full audit, and tracking checked end to end, including first-party conversion signals (Meta's Conversions API, Google's enhanced conversions) so the platforms are learning from real orders.
2. Weeks 3 to 4: restructure. Fewer, larger campaigns, brand separated from non-brand, and the Shopping feed rebuilt around margin.
3. Month 2: a steady rhythm of creative tests, with budget moved towards what is working and every change explained in writing.
4. Month 3: scale what has proven itself, and report against the blended number agreed on day one.

If an agency cannot describe its first 90 days this plainly, it is likely to work it out as it goes, at your expense.

Which red flags should end the conversation?

Any one of these is reason enough to keep looking:

• Guaranteed results, or a return figure promised before anyone has seen your account.
• Reporting built on platform ROAS alone, with no view of total revenue.
• Ad accounts set up in the agency's name rather than yours.
• A pitch team you will never speak to again once the contract is signed.
• Long lock-in contracts with no performance review built in.

Where RedPxl fits

RedPxl is an ecommerce growth agency in Canary Wharf, London. Our paid media team runs Meta, Google and TikTok for fashion, FMCG and supplement brands selling six figures a month and up, alongside our own web, retention and creative teams, so the ads, the site and the follow-up are planned as one system. Across the brands we have worked with, that adds up to £102m of client revenue influenced.

If you would like a straight read on your account, send us the numbers you have and we will tell you plainly whether we are the right team for it.