What does a PPC agency actually do?

A plain-English look at the real work behind paid ads, what a good PPC agency owns, and the honest signs that you should not be spending on ads yet.

A PPC agency runs your paid ads. PPC stands for pay per click: you only pay when someone clicks your ad, not when it shows. The agency plans the campaigns, builds them, manages the spend day to day, and reports on what it brought back. Done well, a PPC agency turns an ad budget into a steady flow of enquiries. Done badly, it quietly drains the budget and shows you graphs that mean nothing.

This guide explains, in plain English, what the work actually involves. No jargon without a translation. If you want our own take on running paid campaigns, see our paid ads service.

The real work, step by step

People picture a PPC agency as someone who writes a few ads and switches them on. The writing is maybe a tenth of it. Here is the rest.

1. Strategy and goals

Before a penny is spent, a good agency asks what a result is worth to you. A booked call, a form fill, a sale: each has a value. From that you work backwards to a sensible budget and a target cost per result. Skip this and you are just buying clicks and hoping.

2. Keyword and audience research

On search, this means finding the exact phrases people type when they are ready to buy, and the phrases to block so you do not pay for the wrong clicks. On social, it means defining who sees the ad: their interests, their location, the businesses they follow. Good research is the difference between reaching buyers and reaching browsers.

3. Account and campaign build

This is the plumbing. Setting up the ad account, structuring campaigns and ad groups so the budget flows where it should, and adding the tracking that tells you what worked. A tidy build is easy to manage and easy to read. A messy one hides waste.

4. Ad copy and creative

The words and images people actually see. On search that is headlines and descriptions written to match what someone searched. On social it is the image or video that stops the scroll. Most accounts run several versions at once so the platform can favour the ones that perform.

5. Bidding and budget management

You are in an auction every time your ad could show. Bidding decides how much you are willing to pay for a click or a result, and the platforms now do a lot of this automatically using their own data. The agency sets the targets, watches the spend, and steps in when the machine drifts. This is the daily job that a "set and forget" account never gets.

6. Landing pages and conversion tracking

The click is only half the deal. It lands on a page, and that page either turns the visit into an enquiry or wastes the spend. A good agency cares as much about the page as the ad, and it sets up conversion tracking so you can see which clicks became real leads, not just visits.

7. Ongoing optimisation

No account is finished on day one. Week by week you cut the keywords and audiences that waste money, lean into the ones that work, test new copy, and adjust budgets. The gains compound. An account left alone for three months almost always gets more expensive per result, not less.

8. Reporting

Plain numbers that tie back to your goals: spend, leads or sales, and the cost of each. Not a wall of clicks and impressions designed to look busy. If a report does not answer "what did I get for my money", it is not a report, it is decoration.

The platforms, and what each is for

Most UK campaigns run on three places. They do different jobs.

• Google Ads is for intent. Someone is already searching for what you sell, so you put your offer in front of them at that moment. Microsoft Ads works the same way on Bing and often costs less per click.
• Meta ads (Facebook and Instagram) are for discovery. People are not searching, they are scrolling, so you create the demand with a strong image or video aimed at the right audience.
• A mix of both is common: search to catch people ready to buy now, social to build awareness with people who will buy later.

Which one fits depends on whether people already look for what you offer. We talk through the right channel on a quick call rather than pushing whatever we run most.

What good looks like, and what bad looks like

The market is full of agencies. A few signals separate the honest ones from the rest.

Good

• Transparent on spend. You see exactly what went to the platforms and what is the agency fee. No bundling the two to hide a markup.
• You own the account. The ad account is in your name. If you leave, you keep the history, the data and the learnings.
• Real metrics. Leads, sales and cost per result, tied to revenue. Not clicks and impressions dressed up as success.

Bad

• Vanity metrics. Reports full of reach and impressions that never mention what it cost to get a customer.
• Locked accounts. The agency owns the ad account, so leaving means starting from zero. This is a trap, not a service.
• Vague spend. One lump figure with no split between ad spend and fee. If they will not show you, assume the worst.

For a wider view of the market, our guide to the best PPC agencies in the UK walks through how to compare them.

When paid ads do not make sense yet

We would rather tell you this now than take your money. Paid ads are not always the right move.

• The maths does not work. If your margin is thin and a customer is worth very little, the cost per click can wipe out the profit before you start. Some keywords are simply too expensive for the return.
• The budget is too small. A few pounds a day rarely gathers enough data to learn from. You spend, you get a trickle, and nobody can tell what is working. Below a real monthly floor, ads underperform.
• The site is broken. If your landing page is slow, confusing or does not work on a phone, you are paying to send people to a leak. Fix the site first, then turn on the tap. This is where our web development work usually comes before any ad spend.

If any of those apply, the honest answer is to wait, fix the foundation, or grow through other channels first. A good PPC agency tells you that. A bad one takes the budget anyway.

What it costs to have an agency run it

Two numbers matter: the ad spend that goes to the platforms, and the management fee that goes to the agency. They are separate, and any agency worth using shows them separately. For the full breakdown on the search side, see our guide to Google Ads management costs in the UK.

The short version: you set the ad budget and keep control of it, and you pay the agency for the work above. The right spend is the one where each customer costs less than they are worth to you. Everything in this guide exists to push that number in the right direction.

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