I’ve always hated the word ‘marketing’.

It’s such a broad and all encompassing term. People who design logos for five bucks on the internet and people who conduct million dollar customer research for fortune 500 companies both can (and often do) call themselves marketers.

Ironically, one of the first lessons of marketing is to own a specific niche. Looks like most of them aren’t following their own advice.

As someone who’s been on both sides of the table when it comes to hiring a marketing company, I’ve pretty much seen it all. I’ve personally hired some of these, competed against others, and been responsible for cleaning up the mess others have made.

Here are the three big categories of marketing firms to stay away from if you want to get any sort of return on your marketing budget

1. “Big Marketing”

These firms have a 10-30 year history and a list of clients that include successful corporations you will recognize. They almost always live in big cities and typically have really nice offices stocked with dozens of well-dressed young professionals who can all deliver a textbook three-pump handshake with a confident smile.

They are every bit of the advertising company you expect if you watched the show Mad Men. They probably do excellent work for their corporate clients. So why should you stay away from them?

In a nutshell, companies like this are extremely expensive and not focused on immediate ROI. Those gorgeous offices? Those slick, young urban account managers? Coming out of your retainer, which I have seen as high as $10000 per month to start out (excluding ad budget).

For the most part, these companies do not deal with small business owners like yourself that are paying for marketing and their mortgage out of the same checking account. They interface with big companies who have marketing expenses as a line item in their quarterly budget. They work with people who have a salary that will not go away if the campaign isn’t profitable.

An important distinction to make is that these companies exist to spend budget. If you’ve ever done time in the corporate world, you know that a budget that doesn’t get spent is reduced the following period. These companies will spend the entire budget, every time, regardless of whether the second half was bringing in pennies on the dollar compared to the first.

They also focus on fuzzier campaigns like branding and awareness, which can work well for big companies over the span of years or decades, but are not likely to turn a profit within the first months (or years) of your relationship.

2. Jack-of-all-trades digital shops

Let’s start with a brief history lesson.

The first web agencies started up in the late 90s as the internet became mainstream. At the time, having a website was all that you needed to be visible, since there wasn’t any competition. These web designers were happy and so were their clients.

Things started to change. Google launched this cool product called adwords in 2000 with 350 advertisers. If you knew that there was such a thing as adwords before 2005, you were basically in the top 5%. Clicks were dirt cheap and you didn’t have to be particularly good at anything besides showing up to get a return for your clients. The design agencies added “PPC” to their services list.

Adwords started to get tough. As more people came in, the “ham and eggs” agencies that were just setting up adwords accounts got flushed out. It became an arms race between the serious advertisers that continues to this day

SEO started to get big. Again, things were less competitive. You could do easy things like stuff keywords in the code of your page and show up for whatever search you wanted. The design agencies added “SEO” to their services list.

Google realized tricks like this and made it harder, and SEO people figured out tricks to beat the new rules. It became an arms race that continues to this day.

Starting to get the picture? We could keep going for trends like social media, content marketing, and others. Something new comes up, people jump on because it’s trendy, and then the market passes them by.

Almost every “full service digital marketing agency” older than 5 years follows a similar path. As you progress you’ll find ones that got their start in SEO or social, but the reality is the market for any service online is hyper-specialized and competitive.

Here’s another dirty little secret – many times they have no such expertise in house. Platforms like upwork and elance allow “full service agencies” to take work that is way out of their specialty, and subcontract it out to freelancers (more on this later).

When it comes to managing a PPC budget, you CAN’T have someone who is half in the game. You need to treat your PPC budget the same way as your treat your life savings (because as a small business owner, it comes from the same pool).

You wouldn’t want your financial adviser to catch up on the markets part-time, right? You want someone who eats, sleeps and breathes finance. It should be the same with PPC.

3. Ex-agency PPC freelancers

There are a number of ex-agency guys (big marketing or otherwise) that end up striking out on their own to become PPC freelancers. Within the agency, they were probably responsible for managing the adwords account with the support of a web designer for landing pages (if any) a designer for banner ads and a copywriter for ad copy.

Taking someone like this out of their support network is extremely dangerous. Because they are extremely good at the wrong part of the equation.

The yin and yang of lead generation is paying for traffic, and converting that traffic in to leads and business. To get this to work, you need everything from market research through adwords, ad copy, landing pages and analytics to work together in harmony.

Taking adwords out as a single piece basically gives you the ability to send google money. Unless they happen to also be a killer conversion expert and copywriter (extremely rare), you are basically paying for the privilege of spending money faster.

The thing that is particularly insidious about this kind of freelancer is that they usually have a really good reputation with google. They usually have google certifications in adwords, and might have awards. I once worked with a top 5% adwords advertiser that have literally been flown out to Google Headquarters for awards – and gotten HORRIBLE results.

Why? Google defines success by increasing ad spend, and these people are effective at doing that. The google certification is to generating returns as your business as a driver’s license is to competing in formula 1 racing. It’s a first step, but no guarantee of performance.

So what SHOULD we look for?

I’ve laid out a lot of dirt from behind the scenes in this article, but there is hope if you want to hire out for PPC. Look for these three things when it comes to hiring out for your PPC needs.

1. Specialization – have an agency that focuses on online advertising specifically. No web designers that throw it as an add-on or SEO shops that do the same.
2. Size – Big companies make you pay their overhead. You are also less likely to work with someone who has a personal stake in the success of your campaign. A proprietor of a small shop cares a lot more about your success than a faceless college grad who is going to make their $32k salary managing 150 accounts regardless of whether 20 of them fail or not
3. Understanding of direct response and copywriting principles – Where I’ve been impressed by my competition, it’s usually people who come from a copywriting background. This is the core skillset of getting people to convert to clicking an ad or giving you a call, and if they learn traffic like PPC it can be a dangerous combo. The only problem is that they usually know it, and copywriters with the juice can get extremely expensive.

I hope this was a helpful guide. If one person can read this and avoid a costly investment of time and money into one of the three types above, we can feel good.