Ah Yes. The age old question: "Should I outsource my PPC Management, or do it myself?"As a 20 year old Connecticut, New York, and Boston based digital marketing firm, we've seen hundreds of business owners try to handle their own Google Adword and PPC campaigns without the guidance of a PPC professional.
The reality of PPC management is that it's incredibly difficult, very deep, and obfuscated by Google intentionally. Compounded by the fact that competition among business classifications can be tough, unless you have someone that really knows that they are doing handling your campaign, you are going to waste countless hours and huge amounts of money, while making a tremendous number of mistakes. The learning curve here is not to be understated.
Poorly run PPC campaigns end up wasting time (how do you quantify THAT loss?), the marketing dollars you are putting towards your campaigns, and most importantly add to the cost of lost opportunity by missing out on potential new clients! Running a Google Adwords campaign and running a successful one are two very different things.
So why should you outsource your PPC management? Because the company you hire to run your paid search campaigns understand all of the following:
Experience Managing PPC for YOUR industry
While experience alone should not be the reason you hire someone to manage your PPC, it is important that someone has extensive experience running successful paid search campaigns. Even more important is experience within your specific industry. ALL industries have their unique qualities and nuances, and though the contrasts may seem small, they can add up to huge differences in cost and conversion rates, making the gap between a campaign and a successful campaign even wider. Regardless of your industry, you can be sure it’s highly competitive (do any of us have fewer competitors than we did 5 years ago?) When a single keyword can cost up to hundreds of dollars, are you ready to bet that you will really know what you are doing?
Think I'm exaggerating? Take a look at Google’s suggested bid amount for the search term “West Palm Beach Criminal Lawyer”. Not exactly cheap, right? (Hint: It's upwards of $400 per click!)
While plenty of your competitors may spend $25,000-$50,000 a month (and more) on Google Adwords, most companies probably don’t have that kind of budget. So how do you compete with companies that have huge budgets? Outsource it to a firm that works smarter instead of more expensively. A firm that understands where the opportunities are, and can run a gap analysis on what keywords your ads show up for (or don’t show up for!)
Testing, Testing, and More Testing
While selecting the right keywords is important, it's just as important to continually optimize your ads to get the best possible click-through rates while continually lowering your cost per click. Will you be A/B testing? Do you even know what A/B testing is? Will you conduct A/B testing on your landing pages as well as your keywords? Do you even NEED landing pages? How will you install conversion tracking? Will something as simple as a different header or ad copy help improve conversions? How about a different image? You don’t know unless you test! And most importantly, where will you find the time to change your ads, your keywords, and your actual bid dollar amounts 30 times a day to maximize your ROI?
After Testing, MEASURING!
All of the data is there, but will you know what questions to ask?What is working and not working?
Which of my ads perform the best, and at what time during the day is it worth bidding a little more?
Which pages of my site convert best?
Does video hurt OR help conversion?
How does my site compare to your competitors?
Invaluable insights can be gained through understanding the data, but only of you know what questions to ask, and how to measure for them.
Perhaps you are a business owner or marketing professional who realizes you shouldn’t be running paid search campaigns yourself but are considering hiring someone in-house to manage this for you.
ImageWorks, LLC | Paid Search Management
The decision to outsource a paid search campaigin becomes easier the more you learn, becuase you start to understand the complexity of the process. Once you've gauged your interest in working with a partner to take your campaign to the next level, it's important to know how to find a reputable company. ImageWorks incorporates a proprietary bidding algorithm (our secret sauce), with a team of exceptional, seasoned startegists, graphic designers, and copywriters. If you are currently running a paid search campaign and would like an evaluation to discover any 'holes' in your strategy, we'd be happy to help!
