How to choose an ecommerce PPC consultant

Choosing an ecommerce PPC consultant is not only a question of platform certifications or a list of services. The important questions are how the person diagnoses the account, how they handle measurement and product data, how directly they communicate, and whether their working style fits the decisions your team needs to make.

Most of the questions buyers ask in a first call are the wrong ones. Years of experience, certifications, and client logos are weak signals, because they say nothing about how someone thinks when an account is confusing. The questions below are the ones whose answers actually vary between a good fit and a bad one.

Ask how they start

A thoughtful consultant should ask about margins, inventory, goals, customer value, tracking, promotions, the catalog, and the account history before promising a result. If the first conversation is only about spend and a target ROAS, the diagnosis may be too narrow for ecommerce work.

Listen to the ratio of questions to claims. Someone who spends the first call describing their process is selling. Someone who spends it asking about your margin structure, your stock position, and what you have already tried is diagnosing. The second is what you are hiring.

Ask what they actually own

Clarify who will audit, build, edit, monitor, report, and communicate. In an agency, understand the handoff between the person selling the engagement and the person doing the work. In a solo practice, understand availability, response time, and how decisions are documented.

• Who makes account changes and who reviews them?
• Who owns feed and tracking coordination when the issue is outside the ad platform?
• How often will reporting and recommendations be reviewed?
• What happens if the account needs a pause, rebuild, or change in scope?

The handoff question matters more than it sounds. A common pattern in agency engagements is that the senior person who diagnosed the account and won your trust is not the person who touches it afterward. That is not automatically bad, but you should know it before signing rather than discover it in month three.

Ask about account ownership before you need the answer

Find out whose Google Ads and Merchant Center accounts the work will happen in, and what you keep if the relationship ends. The answer you want is that the accounts are yours, the historical data stays with your business, and nothing has to be rebuilt from scratch if you part ways.

Work done inside someone else's manager account, with tracking that belongs to them, is a position you do not want to be in when you decide to leave. It is worth asking plainly and worth getting the answer in writing, because almost nobody volunteers it and it is expensive to discover late.

Ask how they measure performance

The consultant should be able to explain primary conversions, value quality, attribution, brand demand, new-customer context, margin, inventory, and the limits of platform reporting. You do not need identical dashboards across systems, but you do need definitions that support a decision.

The strongest signal here is whether they volunteer the limits. Someone who explains that platform-reported conversions will not match your store, and why, and how they handle that gap, is someone who has dealt with the problem honestly. Someone who presents platform ROAS as truth has either not looked or is not telling you.

The ecommerce PPC tracking guide covers the checks worth asking about, and what a useful report should explain covers what you should expect to receive.

Ask how they handle Google, Microsoft, and feeds

The right channel mix depends on the account. Ask when they would recommend Search, Shopping, Performance Max, Microsoft Ads, a feed correction, or no new channel at all. The answer should include operational capacity and evidence, not just a desire to add more activity.

A good answer includes a case for doing less. If every question about expansion gets an enthusiastic yes, you are talking to someone whose incentive is more activity rather than better outcomes.

Understand how they charge, and what it rewards

A percentage of ad spend ties the fee to your budget rather than to the work or the result, which creates a quiet incentive to recommend spending more. A flat fee set by account complexity removes that. Neither model is dishonest on its own, but you should know which incentive you are buying and satisfy yourself that it points the same direction as your goals.

Ask what happens to the fee if the right recommendation is to reduce spend for a quarter. The answer tells you a great deal.

Look for clear communication

Good communication is not a high volume of updates. It is a shared understanding of what changed, why it matters, what is uncertain, and what happens next. Ask for an example of a recommendation that did not work and what the consultant learned from it.

That last question is the most revealing one in this list. Everyone has recommendations that did not work. Someone who cannot produce an example is either inexperienced or managing your impression, and both are worth knowing about before you hire.

Check the fit on working style, not just competence

Plenty of engagements end for reasons unrelated to skill. A brand that wants a weekly call and a consultant who works asynchronously will both be frustrated regardless of results. A team that wants a partner questioning the strategy and a consultant who executes instructions will misread each other constantly.

Ask directly how they prefer to work, how quickly they respond, and what a normal month looks like. A consultant who is clear about their model, including its limits, is easier to work with than one who agrees to everything in the sales conversation.

My services page explains the engagement model, and About Derek explains how I work. If the questions fit, contact me about your account.