Top-rated PPC agencies in Melbourne for ecommerce brands, and what "top-rated" hides.
Ratings measure how happy an agency's clients were with the agency. They do not measure whether the ads made money. For an ecommerce brand those are different questions, and the second one is the only one that matters.
Short answer: the top-rated PPC agencies in Melbourne are the ones whose clients liked working with them, which is not the same as the ones whose campaigns were profitable. For an ecommerce brand, check four things instead: whether they fix tracking before spending, whether they report cost per order rather than ROAS, whether the fee is flat or a percentage of spend, and whether they will send traffic to a page you have not fixed yet.
Why the ratings mislead for ecommerce
An agency review is written by a marketing manager about communication, reporting and responsiveness. Those matter. But an ecommerce PPC account can be beautifully managed and unprofitable, because the leak is on the product page, in the shipping cost at checkout, or in a pixel that counts every purchase twice. None of that shows up in a five star review of the agency.
The four things that actually separate them
Tracking first, or campaigns first?
Ask what happens in the first two weeks. If the answer is launching campaigns, your spend will be optimised toward whatever the inherited tracking says is a conversion, which in the accounts we inherit is wrong more often than it is right.
ROAS or cost per order?
ROAS is a ratio and ratios hide problems. A four times ROAS on a product with a thirty percent margin loses money after shipping. Cost per order next to margin is the honest number. Ask which one the monthly report leads with.
Flat fee or percentage of spend?
A percentage of spend pays the agency more for a bigger budget whether or not it works. A flat fee scoped to your revenue stage removes that conflict.
Will they refuse to send traffic to a broken page?
A PPC agency that only touches the ad account will run profitable-looking campaigns into a product page that cannot convert, because the page is not their job. Ask whether they audit the landing page before spending. If the answer is no, the ROAS you get will be the ceiling the page allows, not the ceiling the market allows.
Melbourne, specifically
Melbourne has more ecommerce PPC agencies than any Australian city except Sydney, and most of them are good at Google Ads. The gap is rarely platform skill. It is whether anyone is accountable for what happens after the click. That is the question to ask, and it applies whether the agency is in Melbourne, Geelong or Sydney.
Questions owners ask
Do you run PPC for Melbourne ecommerce brands?
Yes, from Geelong, remotely, with the senior team in your accounts. Google Shopping, Search, Performance Max, Meta and TikTok, run to cost per order, with the landing page audited before the first dollar moves.
What is a good ROAS for an Australian ecommerce brand?
It depends entirely on margin, which is why we do not lead with it. A brand at seventy percent margin can be profitable at two times; a brand at thirty percent needs closer to four. Cost per order against margin is the number that transfers between businesses.
Is a flat fee really cheaper?
Usually, once ad spend passes a few thousand a month. A fifteen percent management fee on $20,000 of spend is $3,000 before any work is judged. A flat fee scoped to revenue stage does not move when the budget does.
Rather just get the answer for your business?
The free audit applies all of this to your market, your competitors and your numbers. Thirty minutes; the findings are yours either way.