How to Choose a PPC Agency in the UK

Choosing a PPC agency in the UK comes down to a few things: whether they understand your numbers before they touch your account, whether they can show you results that turned into actual customers, whether you keep ownership of everything, and whether they are willing to tell you that paid ads are the wrong answer. Paid search takes 44% of a UK digital ad market worth more than £40bn (IAB UK, 2026), so plenty of agencies will happily spend your money for you. Fewer will ask whether you should be spending it yet. This guide covers what a good PPC agency actually does, what to ask before you sign anything, what fees are reasonable, and the signs that should end the conversation. It is written from doing this work, including the times we have told a business to fix something else first.

The short version: pick a PPC agency that starts with your economics rather than your keywords, reports in enquiries and sales, gives you full ownership of your Google Ads account, and is honest about what paid media can and cannot do. Expect either a flat retainer or roughly 10% to 20% of ad spend, and walk away from anyone guaranteeing a cost per lead before they have seen inside your account.

What does a good PPC agency actually do?

A good agency starts with your economics, not your keywords. Before it builds anything it should know what a customer is worth to you, what your margin is, and how many enquiries you can realistically handle in a week. Without those three numbers nobody can tell you whether a £40 lead is a bargain or a disaster, including the agency.

Once that is clear, the work itself is fairly unglamorous:

• Conversion tracking that reflects reality. If Google is counting form views or phone-number clicks as sales, every decision after that is built on a bad number. This is the first thing worth checking and the thing most often broken.
• Account structure and search terms. Keeping your ads in front of people who want what you sell, and cutting the searches that only look relevant.
• Ads and landing pages. The click is the cheap part. Where people land decides whether you get a customer or a bounce.
• Bidding. Picking a strategy that suits how much conversion data you actually have, then leaving it alone long enough to learn.
• Reporting in money. Cost per enquiry, cost per sale, and whether the account is paying for itself.

When we audit a new Google Ads account, the same problem turns up more than any other: budget going to searches that look related to the business but never turn into anything, usually because broad match was left to get on with it. That is rarely a strategy failure. It is usually nobody opening the search terms report often enough.

Green flags and red flags at a glance

What should a PPC agency cost in the UK?

There are three common pricing models, and none of them is automatically the right one.

A monthly retainer is a flat fee regardless of what you spend. It suits smaller budgets, because a percentage of £1,500 does not pay for anybody's time.

A percentage of ad spend usually sits somewhere between 10% and 20%, falling as budgets get bigger. It is simple to understand, but it quietly rewards the agency for spending more of your money, so it works best alongside an agreed target cost per sale.

Performance-based fees sound appealing and are harder than they look. They only work when conversion tracking is genuinely accurate and both sides agree in advance what counts as a result.

Most agencies also set a minimum, because below a certain spend there is not enough data to manage anything properly. If your budget is under roughly £1,000 a month, the honest advice is often to run it yourself for a while and put the fee into the ads instead.

The number that matters is not the fee on its own. It is the fee plus the wasted spend. A cheaper agency leaking 30% of your budget on bad searches costs you a great deal more than a dearer one that does not.

What should you ask before you hire one?

Ask things that reveal how they think, rather than what they sell.

• What is a customer worth to me, and what does that make a sensible cost per lead?
• Can you show me an account like mine, and what changed in it?
• How is my conversion tracking set up, and do you trust it?
• Who is in my account day to day, and how many other accounts do they manage?
• Do I own the Google Ads account, and can I take it with me?
• What would make you tell me to stop spending?

Those last two matter more than people expect. You should own your Google Ads account outright, in your own business name, with the agency given access to it rather than the other way round. If they build your account inside theirs, you lose your entire conversion history the day you leave, and that history has real value.

What are the warning signs?

Be wary of anyone guaranteeing a cost per lead or a return on ad spend before they have seen inside your account. Nobody can promise those, because they depend on your margin, your competition and your website, none of which they have looked at yet.

A few others worth taking seriously:

• No interest in your tracking. If nobody asks how you currently measure a lead, they are not going to be measuring one either.
• Reports full of clicks, impressions and click-through rate. Those are inputs. You are buying outputs.
• Everything is a package. Bronze, silver and gold tiers usually mean the work was standardised before anyone looked at your business.
• Long lock-ins. Good paid media earns its renewal every month.
• They never say no. An agency that agrees with every idea you have is not advising you.

Is paid advertising even the right first move?

Sometimes it is not, and a decent agency will tell you so.

Paid ads buy attention for exactly as long as you keep paying. That is genuinely useful when you need customers this month, when you are testing whether an offer works, or when a season is short and you cannot wait for organic search to catch up. It is a poor fit when your margins are thin, when your website does not convert the traffic it already gets, or when you have no way of knowing which enquiries turned into money.

We have told businesses to fix the site first and come back later. One plumbing business we did organic search work for turned their paid ads off during that work and had the calendar filled from organic within about three months. That is not an argument against paid advertising, and it will not be the right call for everyone. It is an argument for knowing which problem you are solving before you pick a channel. If what you actually need is something more durable, that is the case for SEO instead.

Working that out first is the whole reason Think First exists. It is a workshop, developed with a University of Strathclyde Inspire fellowship, that establishes where growth is realistically going to come from before you commit budget anywhere. If you already know paid is right and want to get on with it, our PPC service is the place to start, and our rundown of the best PPC agencies in the UK is worth a look while you build a shortlist.

How do you know it is working?

Watch three numbers, in that order, and give each of them time.

Is the tracking honest? Before anything else, check that a recorded conversion is a real enquiry. Plenty of disappointing accounts are not underperforming. They are being measured badly.

What does an enquiry cost? Once the tracking is trustworthy, cost per lead becomes the working number. It should settle after a few weeks and then improve as the account gathers data.

What does a customer cost? This is the only one that pays the bills, and it needs your sales figures, not just Google's. An agency that never asks for them cannot tell you whether the campaign is working.

It helps to know where the wider market sits while you judge your own account. Across 13,474 search campaigns running between April 2025 and March 2026, average cost per lead fell for the first time in five years, and conversion rates improved across 87% of industries (WordStream, 2026). That dataset is US-based, so treat it as direction rather than a UK benchmark. Even so, if the market got more efficient and your account did not, that is a fair question to put to whoever runs it.

On our side, the clearest paid result is MCD Gas, a gas and heating business whose Google Ads we run alongside their website and wider marketing. Graeme's review sums it up better than we would: "Paul is always available, delivering fast, effective support. They built a professional website, launched a successful Google Ads campaign, and now handle all my marketing with precision and care." Nothing about that account is clever. The numbers behind it just get looked at every week.

The bottom line

Choosing a PPC agency in the UK is mostly about finding someone who will be straight with you. Ask what a customer is worth before you ask what the fee is. Check who owns the account. Judge the work on enquiries and sales rather than clicks. And take seriously anyone prepared to tell you that paid ads are not your problem, because they are the ones thinking about your business rather than their retainer.

If you want a straight answer on whether paid advertising is the right next move, have a look at our PPC service or get in touch. If you would rather settle the strategy before spending anything, that is what Think First is for.