What is the Best Adwords Management Solution For Your Business?

The excerpt below is taken from the free white paper "12 Questions You Should Ask a PPC Management Company Before You Hire Them!".

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Question #3 - What type of PPC management company are you?

This question is really where the rubber hits the road. There are so many different types of management solutions out there that you can’t even count them on one hand. Some management solutions are better suited for smaller companies and some are better suited for larger companies. Some management solutions aren’t really complete solutions but are parts of a solution being passed off as a complete solution. And, some aren’t really solutions at all – like commodity services where the company buys PPC traffic for you without any real thought of optimization or results improvement (stay away from these). Here is a quick breakdown of the more common Pay Per Click management solutions.

“The One Man Show” This can be the best of solutions or one of the worst, depending on who you work with. “One Man Shows” are companies that are very small in size – somewhere between 1 and 3 people. In this situation most likely the person you talk to on the phone will also be the person who services your account. If you are a small to mid-sized company, this can be ideal. Typically, these types of operations have much lower overhead so their fees are much more reasonable. And, if you find a good one, you may be able to get a bona-fide Adwords Expert to work on your account for a very reasonable rate.

Things to watch out for with this type of setup are, first, that they have the resources / capacity to take on the scope of the job you need them to do (if you are representing a larger company with very complex PPC management needs, you may need to work with a larger PPC company). Second, if you are considering a small shop, make sure they have adequate experience (at least 2 years) and have worked with (and had success with) businesses that are similar to yours (not necessarily industry, but business processes).

“The Moonlighter” This is a company that offers PPC management but not as a core service. Web designers, web developers, advertising and marketing companies, and other web related professionals often try to offer PPC management as an add-on service. Beware! This almost never works out well.

What you will typically end up with is a provider who is charging you their regular rates (for something they do quite well – say web design) for something that they don’t do well at all. Often what happens in working with service providers of this nature is you pay a premium for the service and end up getting very little result because the person you are working with does not understand the fundamentals of PPC advertising or the potentials for optimization. If you are going to work with any PPC management company, make sure they are truly experienced experts in Pay Per Click management and have the scars to prove it.

“The Automated Solution” What this generally means is they will optimize and manage your Pay Per Click account using some miracle software they created. There are many, many different types of software that can aid in the process of account management and optimization (some of which are pretty amazing) but none are stand-alone. Any person who tries to sell you on the idea that their miracle software solution is a replacement for skilled human management is a salesperson just trying to sell you something. Don’t believe it.

Don’t get me wrong–we have seen (and we employ) software that really excels at certain aspects of account optimization. For example, keyword bid optimization. If you have an Adwords account, you spend $10,000 or more per month, and do at least 15 transactions per day, there are some software services that can do some pretty amazing things as far as finding your optimal bids for profitability and the like. But, what these super software services can do is still limited compared to what a fully trained and experienced real human brain can do in conjunction with the best software. What you want to find is a really skilled optimizer who will help you put all of the fundamentals of your PPC account in place and then at the appropriate time (for lower volume accounts this may never happen) employ the exact right software to take your account to the next level. Never purchase software (or software as a service) alone as a PPC management solution unless you are a PPC expert yourself.

“The Fortune 500” You can recognize this type of company because their websites are typically plastered with logos from high profile Fortune 500 type companies they have worked with. The language they use on their website is typically quite obtuse and sometimes intimidating to small and mid-sized business owners. These companies tend to be larger in nature and their prices tend to be higher. Some of these companies are truly at the top of the game when it comes to PPC management and some of them are the worst of what is out there.

Many of them are nothing more than advertising agencies with an online marketing twist. They treat internet marketing as a commodity service where they see their role as providing a myriad of ways to buy traffic but with very little thought given to true accountability, results tracking or the return you could make on your investment.

If your business (or the company you work for) has a very large or complex PPC advertising presence, you may well want to work with a larger PPC management company. But it is definitely buyer beware. Just because a service is expensive does not mean they will deliver a good result. Just because they have worked with Coca-Cola or some other Fortune 500 company does not mean that they really have the know-how to help you get a good return on your PPC investment. If you are going to work with a larger company (and again there are several excellent ones), make sure you put them through all of the questions in this report and don’t settle for vague answers. Also, make sure that you get to talk to someone whose desk is well outside of the sales department before you sign on.

“The Really Low Cost Provider” There are quite a few of these around. Their general promise is that they will provide you with a “premium” level service for about 1/4 the cost of what other companies charge. Some of these companies have pretty slick websites and everything looks great on the surface. But, you have to go below the surface. If you look more closely at most companies who are offering a deal like this, it is almost always an offshore service where your actual optimization work is performed by someone in India or some other third world country.

There are some things that can be done effectively offshore in countries like India, and there are some things that are total disasters. Trying to have any company that is not made up of native English speakers (yes I know in India many grow up speaking English but it’s not the same – trust me) optimize your Adwords account is almost always a total disaster. In particular with India I have never seen this work out well.

My recommendation would be that you only work with a PPC management company that is located within the US and whose optimizers are all native speakers of English. This is where most of the best companies are and if you are a US-based business, companies in the US are best suited to understand your needs. If you are based in the UK or other places in Europe, there are likely some really great companies in your country – you may want to check these out first before choosing a US company.

To sum up, beware of any company making big promises for a very low cost (or even a high cost) and that is not located in a first world country. I have nothing against the third world but for the most part this is not where good Adwords management is happening right now.

“Have Google Optimize My Account” Clients ask me about Google’s optimization services a lot. Depending on your account spend, Google offers two levels of account “optimization services” (notice the quotes). If you are a small spender, they will run your account through their automated service which will spit out some algorithmically inspired optimization suggestions which in general have very little value (if you are curious give it a try and see for yourself).

The second level of service in general is only offered to businesses with higher monthly spends. One of Google’s Pay Per Click “optimization specialists” will provide you an optimization program for free (Yahoo! and MSN also provide their version of this type of service). Sounds great right? Well, don’t get your hopes up too high. I have never seen one of these optimization plans that was worth much more than “free”. Reason being is this plan is created by some kid just out of college who has minimal training in how the Google system actually works except for a few memorized optimization techniques which seem to repeat over and over. More importantly, these optimizers seem to have no real understanding of how business works or how to get your account to make you more money.

In a best case scenario, what you generally end up with is an account that works the same way it did before but you spend more money (which really seems to be the underlying purpose of this service as far as Google is concerned – to find ways for you to spend more – not necessarily make more revenue or profit for your business).

You have to be realistic about what this service is and what it is not. It is not a “free” substitute for a skilled optimization company. Don’t get me wrong — I’m not down on these Google teams (our company has a dedicated agency team and they have been extremely helpful). But you have to know what they are good for and what they are not good for. They are great for answering routine questions and helping resolve issues when they come up. They are not so great at optimization or helping you figure out how to make more money.

“You Pay Us and We’ll Pay the PPC Engines” These types of providers are a dying breed but there are still enough of them out there that it is worth mentioning here. The “glitz” of their program is they offer you a complete end-to-end Pay Per Click management solution where they will see to it that you get “coverage” in all the major search engines. All you have to do is pay them a monthly fee (sometimes flat and sometimes variable) and they will do the rest.

The problem with this type of setup is you never actually get to see your PPC accounts and there is very little transparency. One of the amazing revolutions that PPC advertising has brought about is a tremendous amount of transparency and accountability to the online advertising process. You can see exactly where and how your money is being spent.

What happens all too often with this “turnkey” type of solution is basically you have no control or accountability for how your money is being spent. In the worst of scenarios you end up being held hostage by the company because if you decide to go with another provider you can’t take your Pay Per Click account with you.

So, if you are dissatisfied with their service, to switch companies, you have to leave your account behind (which you have probably paid them a pretty penny to set up for you and you may have collected a lot of valuable data) and you have nothing left to show for your investment. This setup almost never works out well for the advertiser. Avoid it at all costs. You should always maintain ownership and access to your PPC accounts. Never give up this control to a management company.