Outsourcing your Adwords campaign to a PPC Management Agency can be extremely beneficial to your online business in many ways. It will enable you carry out other marketing efforts, free up your time that you would be spending on Adwords and provides you with the assurance that you are putting your faith into a company that is competent in dealing with your PPC campaign. As a PPC consultant I have heard many tales of businesses having bad experiences with existing PPC management agencies, mainly due to the lack of transparency and not receiving regular updates and feedback from the Adwords management company. At Essential Marketer we have coined a different approach to PPC management. We keep clients informed of exactly what we are doing for them on a monthly basis and we will track and monitor your PPC management like a hawk. We also provide realistic, achievable results for you to measure against. In this article I will explain why some PPC management agencies will not always be 100% open and honest when it comes to looking after you Adwords account.
Am I Able To track Progress?
I am a firm believer in ensuring that clients should be able to track the performance of their Adwords campaign themselves. This is vital to ensure that you are bidding on the correct keywords and that your Adwords management agency understands your business needs. There are a range of different options when it comes to sharing the progress of the PPC account. My favorite and the one that I use the most often is an MCC account (My Client Centre). It is important for you as the client to have access to the account because you need to ensure that the campaign is performing and generating you some sort of revenue, the only way of checking this is manually doing this yourself. Even if you don’t fully understand PPC you are still able to view which ads are live and what campaign we have set up, that’s what I call transparency.
Does Your PPC Management Agency Talk Budgets?
Have you and your PPC management agency discussed budgets and targets with you? Each individual campaign that you are running needs to have a specific budget associated with it and you will need to know what sorts of things to expect from these budgets and also agree daily and monthly budgets with your Adwords management company. This is where you will have to talk conversion and profit margin. You might for example have a budget of £500 per month which equates to a daily budget of £12.50. You will need to ask your PPC management agency whether this is enough or what you will expect to see from this. It can, however, be difficult to associate budgets with conversions and click throughs but a good PPC management consultant will be able to explain the ins and outs of budgets and targets, either way you need to get this agreed initially.
Do They Write Killer Ad’s?
The crucial ingredient behind any great PPC campaign is great advertising; without this your ad just becomes another mundane ill fitted ad that will not get you the click throughs you deserve. This also fits into how much your current PPC management agency knows about your business and products, do they know your price range, USPs, or promotions? If this is not the case then how on earth would they know what sort of things to include in your ads. It is very important that your Adwords management company knows as much information as possible when it comes down to your business products and services. This enables them to create fantastic ads and ensures that you stand out against your competitors. Another point to consider here is checking to see how often they are changing different elements of your ads. It could be that one week they do not include your promotion but the next week they do, this could improve your click through rate slightly but that change had some weight behind it, going back to my favourite quote: “Those who embrace change succeed, those who stand still perish.”
Do You Receive Performance Updates?
You need to make sure that your PPC management agency sends you regular campaign updates and you agree on some sort of structure when it comes to this. The degree of the reporting may depend on what budget you are paying but you still need to be close to the action. The best way of updating you on the progress of your account is through a telephone conversation every two weeks and a monthly report emailed directly from Adwords, even if you have access to your account, ensuring that your dedicated account manager communicates results through to you is very important.
Revenue Generation
Your website is there to make you money and nothing else. Why else would you go through the trouble of bothering with Adwords? From this it is important that you know how many visitors your website is getting, how they are finding you and what keywords are being entered when visitors are coming through to your website. There is a great way to ensure that you can track this information in a simply yet informative way, hooking up your Google Adwords account with your Google Analytics. I highly recommend setting up Google Analytic s if you have not done so already before you start to embark on a PPC campaign as this will allow you to track all of the information previously mentioned.
Summary
I hope you have picked up several points in reading through this article. The main points to take away from this are ensuring that your PPC management company tracks your progress, they talk about budgets and targets with you, ensuring they write good ads, give you up to date information on your performance either through reports or phone conversations and that they are also clued up on revenue generation. If you would like to know any more about how transparent we are at Essential Marketer then please get in touch.
