Knowing how to choose a PPC agency for accountants matters more than it should, because the pitches are close to identical. Most agencies show the same case study format, the same platform badges, and the same promise of measurable growth. Independent reviews of the sector make the same observation: agency proposals look alike, and most reporting stops at surface metrics rather than business outcomes.

Paid search for accountancy is unusual for two reasons. First, the searches that matter are commercially valuable to a lot of firms at once, so competition for a small set of terms is heavy and click costs sit far above consumer averages. Second, the buying cycle is longer than a click. Someone searching for a limited company accountant in March may open three tabs, request two quotes and decide in April. If your tracking stops at the form fill, you will misread the whole campaign.

This guide sets out how to run the selection as a procurement exercise. It covers what an agency genuinely controls, how to test sector knowledge quickly, how fee structures change incentives, what reporting to require, and what needs to exist in your practice before paid traffic is worth buying at all.

Before you compare providers, separate the parts of the process the agency owns from the parts you own. Most disappointing campaigns fail in the second group.

Inside the agency's control

• Keyword selection, match types and the negative keyword list
• Bidding strategy, budget pacing and campaign structure
• Ad copy, extensions and testing cadence
• Geographic and schedule targeting
• Conversion tracking setup, if you commission it

Outside the agency's control

• What happens on the landing page after the click
• How fast someone in your firm responds to the enquiry
• Whether your pricing and positioning suit the enquiries arriving
• Whether the enquiry is followed up more than once
• Your close rate on a first call

This split is worth writing down before any meeting, because it changes the questions you ask. An agency that only wants to talk about the ad account is describing half a system. One of the more common complaints from UK practice owners is agencies blaming the client when performance drops. That blame is sometimes fair and sometimes an evasion. You can only tell the difference if the boundary was agreed at the start.

The practical test: ask a prospective agency what they would need from you for the campaign to work, and what they would do if you failed to provide it. A good answer is specific about response times, landing page control and access to outcome data. A vague answer here usually means a vague relationship later.

Every agency will say they have worked with professional services firms. That claim is cheap. Sector knowledge in accountancy paid search shows up in what somebody excludes, not what they buy.

Ask what they would block

Search terms around accounting are full of expensive irrelevance. Students looking for courses, people wanting free templates, software comparison searches, job seekers, and other practices researching competitors all click. An agency that has run accountancy accounts will answer this fluently and mention negative keyword lists as an ongoing task rather than a setup job.

Ask how they separate service lines

Someone searching for help with a late self assessment return and someone searching for an accountant for a growing limited company are different buyers with different values to your practice. If both land on the same generic page, your cost per client will look worse than it needs to. The answer you want describes campaigns and landing pages mapped to service lines and client types.

Ask about geography and platform choice

Most UK accountancy demand on paid search runs through Google, and that is where budget should start. Microsoft Advertising is worth testing later, since click costs are usually lower and the audience skews towards business users on Microsoft defaults. An agency that opens with a multi platform plan before the core Google account is profitable is spreading budget rather than concentrating it.

Ask what they would not do

Broad match with automated bidding on a small budget, no call tracking, and display network expansion left switched on are all quick ways to spend money with little to show. An experienced operator will name at least one thing they refuse to do early on.

You cannot judge value on the fee alone, since you are not told what the fee buys in hours or seniority. What you can judge is the incentive the model creates.

Percentage of ad spend

The agency earns more when your budget rises. That is fine while the account is scaling profitably and awkward when the honest recommendation is to spend less. If you use this model, agree in writing what happens when cost per acquisition rises above your threshold.

Fixed monthly management fee

The incentive shifts towards efficiency, because the agency's income does not move with your budget. The risk is under servicing once the account is stable. Ask what work is included each month and what triggers a review.

Performance based or hybrid

Attractive in principle and difficult in practice for accountancy firms, because the qualifying event is usually a lead rather than a client. Paying per lead pushes volume upwards and quality downwards unless the definition of a qualified lead is tight and agreed by both sides.

Compare like for like

Practice owners regularly report paying an agency more than the agency is putting into the ad account. That is not automatically wrong on a small budget, since the work involved does not shrink to match, but it should be a conscious decision. Before signing, write down the total monthly commitment, the split between management and media, the contract length, the notice period, and who pays for landing page work. Then compare providers on those five lines rather than on the headline management figure.

Most agency reporting stops where the agency's visibility stops. Impressions, clicks, click through rate and cost per conversion are all real measurements of a real thing, and none of them tell you whether the campaign added revenue to your practice.

The four numbers that matter

1. Cost per qualified enquiry. Qualified means it fits your service lines and location, judged by you rather than by the agency.
2. Cost per booked meeting. This exposes whether enquiries are being followed up and whether the traffic is serious.
3. Cost per signed client. The number that decides whether to continue.
4. Average recurring fee of clients acquired. A campaign producing cheap one off compliance jobs and a campaign producing monthly retained clients can look identical on the first three numbers.

How the data gets back

None of this works unless outcomes flow from your practice back into the reporting. In most firms that means a CRM where enquiry source is recorded automatically, calls are tracked, and won clients are marked with a value. Where that link is missing, agencies fill the gap with modelled figures, and accountants are quick to notice when reported returns do not reconcile with the client ledger.

Ask about attribution honestly

A prospect may click an ad, leave, search your firm name a week later, and call the office. Ask any agency how they treat that case. The answer you want acknowledges the ambiguity and explains their convention rather than claiming precision that no ad platform can deliver.

Paid search is the fastest way to test demand, since a campaign can be live within days while search visibility takes months to build. Speed is also the problem. Buying traffic into a practice that cannot convert it produces quick, expensive evidence of a conversion problem.

A page built for the search, not your homepage

The page should answer the exact query, state who you work with, show what happens next, and make enquiring take under a minute. Sending paid clicks to a general homepage is the single most common reason accountancy campaigns underperform. When we rebuilt a firm's site around conversion rather than content, monthly visitors rose four times over and the practice took ten to fifteen enquiries in the first month, three of which became clients.

A response process measured in minutes

People comparing accountants usually contact more than one. If your first reply arrives the next working day, you are often replying second or third. Automated acknowledgement, then a human call, is the minimum standard.

A qualification step

Not every enquiry deserves a diary slot. One firm we work with runs an automated screening layer on the enquiry form so the partner's calendar only carries opportunities worth the hour. That single change alters the economics of paid search, because your cost per meeting stops being dragged upwards by enquiries you were never going to take on.

Onboarding that can absorb the volume

If eight new clients a quarter would break your onboarding, fix that first. Acquisition that outruns delivery costs you referrals and retention.

Treat this as a short procurement process rather than a series of sales calls. Five steps, usually completed inside three weeks.

Four patterns account for most of the failed accountancy paid search engagements we see.