Why Outsource your PPC Advertising?

Adwords is a great system, it’s nicely laid out, logical and user friendly, far more so than some of its competitors. The downside is that people wrongly assume that because the programme is easy to navigate, it will be easy to build a campaign that performs well. Most of the time, this proves to be a costly and expensive assumption.

Almost every new client that makes a PPC enquiry with us has initially tried to handle the process themselves and found that they wasted a lot of time and in some cases, an awful lot of money for little reward.

But why is this? Why do we get better results than someone who knows their industry inside out, using a system that should be straight forward? Well, there are numerous reasons, but here’s a few of the main ones…

1. Competition: There was a time when running a PPC account was relatively easy, very few people were doing it and a top three position could be attained without too much hassle. Those days are over. Now that almost all the players in many industries are on Adwords it has become a lot harder to get an edge. Harder, but far from impossible. Through creative use of programmes like analytics, professional companies are able to see gaps in the market and exploit them. The only thing is, it takes time and expertise.

2. New Developments: The Pay Per Click landscape shifts so quickly that it can be hard to keep up, especially if you don’t know it’s changing. Since it’s all we do all day, and we love it, we tend to be more up to speed than your average punter, having read all the relevant blogs, articles and press releases there are.

3. Access to Google: The way Google is structured makes it very hard for a member of the general public to get hold of anyone who works there if they have a complaint or question. If there is anything like a public helpline for Google neither I, nor anyone else at the Top Click Media have ever come across it. However, the situation is different for bigger agencies like us – we get a direct dial number that connects us to a dedicated customer services representative over at Google’s European HQ in Dublin. This means that if the automated Google algorithm does something untoward with an account, like give poor quality score for no reason, (which does happen) we can get someone to look into the situation straight away, rather than shouting and crying at our laptop screens.

4. Experience: Every PPC account is different, though there are definitely parallels that can be drawn. For instance, an experienced account manager might notice that there are specific strategies that you know work for selling low ticket items, so your approach to a site selling cheap costume jewellery and one selling key rings might be very similar, even though they are very different products.

5. Value for money: Most business owners work very hard indeed and don’t tend to have time to pour over accounts on a daily basis. This means that they are not able to respond to sudden changes in the market, such as a strong competitor entering the fray, until several days later when they’ve missed out on possibly hundreds of clicks.

6. Keywords: I can’t tell you the number of clients who’ve come to me with campaigns that are losing money hand over fist because they’ve chosen impossibly vague broad match keywords. Seriously, I’ve seen stuff like ‘London’ and ‘Football’ used. These keywords will burn through your money at a horrifying rate and worst of all, they are probably nowhere near specific enough to actually lead to conversions. It might seem obvious but practically every client I’ve ever had with an existing account has had at least one of these toxic keywords. Often they could have saved thousands if they’d just come to us in the first place.

The main thing to remember is that PPC accounts can take up a lot of time and a heck of a lot of money if not handled correctly. If you take one on and you don’t know what you’re doing you’ll probably end up paying out hugely in irrelevant clicks, probably more than you’d spend on a PPC consultant’s fee.

Related posts:

1. Updates to Google Conversion Metrics (Part 1)
2. Why does Google use Quality Scores in Ad Auctions?
3. Getting the best ROI from Adwords using Google Analytics (part 3)
4. Getting the best ROI from Adwords using Google Analytics (part 2)
5. Fresh controversy for Google?
6. Getting the best ROI from Adwords using Google Analytics