3 Signs That You Need a PPC Agency. Is it time to outsource your PPC management? A WordStream Guide

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1 3 Signs That You Need a PPC Agency Is it time to outsource your PPC management? A WordStream Guide

2 3 Signs That You Need a PPC Agency Is it time to outsource your PPC management? WordStream Customer Success Many companies especially smaller businesses try to manage their paid search marketing efforts in house. And some of them are able to succeed, usually because they have dedicated resources for AdWords campaign management, meaning at least one full-time pay-per-click (PPC) expert on staff. In most cases, a business will also need to invest in PPC management software to help them along. Are your AdWords campaigns in good shape? Could you benefit from managed services? Find out now! Get a free, instant Adwords report with the AdWords Performance Grader and see how your PPC campaigns stack up against your competitors. If you ve been braving the rocky waters of PPC campaign management on your own, we commend your efforts! Unfortunately, many beginner AdWords advertisers quickly discover that the DIY approach has its pitfalls. Namely: PPC is complicated. Even if the basic principles of pay-per-click marketing are fairly straightforward, the AdWords system itself is extremely complex, taking months or even years to master, and Google adds new features or changes the interface on a near-weekly basis. This is why so many businesses outsource PPC or give up on it altogether. PPC is time-consuming. The complexity of AdWords means that creating, managing and optimizing PPC campaigns is easily a full-time job, but a great many businesses that engage in PPC don t make a full-time hire for this role. PPC is expensive. There s only one reason to implement PPC as a marketing channel: if it delivers ROI. Without an expert on hand to attain and maintain profitability for your campaigns, you can very quickly blow thousands of dollars with no appreciable return. Have you found that in-house PPC management isn t as easy as Google makes it sound? Then read on to learn if it s time to seek out a PPC agency. What follows are three signs that the right PPC agency could make a big impact on your results. Even if all three signs don t apply to you, but one or two of them strike a chord, it s worth talking to a few agencies to see if outsourcing PPC makes sense for your company. Sign #1: You Don t Have the Expertise to Manage Your PPC Campaigns If you currently manage your company s AdWords account, you know that AdWords is a complex system. When you re not getting the results you want, there are a lot of different levers you might need to pull to see a positive change. For example, you might need to:

3 Alter your bids Are you bidding too low and therefore losing impression share? Or, conversely, are your bids higher than they need to be, reducing ROI? Increase relevance If your keywords, ads and landing pages aren t relevant to your offerings and potential customers, your Quality Scores will suffer, hurting performance and raising costs. Write better ads Poorly written text ads that don t stand out could be the reason for low click volume and a lack of leads. Refine your ad groups Too many keywords stuffed into overlarge ad groups can hurt relevance and performance. Play with match types You may be using the wrong match types for your goals, or overusing broad match (Google interprets broad pretty aggressively). Set negative keywords If you re using broad match without extensive negative keywords, you re probably wasting a lot of your budget on worthless clicks that don t convert. Unsurprisingly, the default settings in AdWords don t always favor the advertiser! This is just a handful of the options at your disposal, and you may need to employ several of these strategies in concert, while adjusting more granular settings to ensure that Google isn t taking a bigger piece of the pie than necessary. (Unsurprisingly, the default settings in AdWords don t always favor the advertiser!) Many marketers and small business owners find that they don t have the knowledge or experience to effectively manage their company s PPC campaigns. It s just too big and too complicated a job when you re juggling other duties as well. If logging into AdWords makes you nervous or you avoid logging in because you don t want to deal with it it may be time to outsource your pay-per-click campaign management to an agency. By leaving that work up to the experts at an agency, you can spend more of your energy on what you know best. Step #2: You Don t Have the Time to Manage Your PPC Campaigns Most PPC managers find that they need to log into their accounts and make active changes at least once per week if not once per day. Otherwise, results remain static at best, and fall of a cliff at worst. However, a recent survey found that over 40% of marketers only log in to work on their accounts twice, once or less than once per month!

4 Are you one of those people who is neglecting their paid search account? At most SMBs, every employee wears a number of hats, and often, it s hard to find time to put your PPC hat on. It s not enough to know what you re doing you have to actually do the work. Even if you have plenty of AdWords experience and knowledge, that expertise is wasted if you can t find time to get under the hood and make changes. When you outsource your PPC management to an agency, you re not just investing in their superior knowledge you re also buying time. And this investment benefits you in two ways: More time spent on your account At a PPC agency, an expert will be looking at your account checking to see what s working and what isn t, and performing optimizations at every level on a near daily basis. When someone else is taking care of the PPC work, you have time to work on everything else, without worrying that your AdWords account is on fire. More time to focus on the rest of your job When someone else is taking care of the PPC work, you have time to work on everything else, without worrying that your AdWords account is on fire. If time is of the essence for you, you may find that managing PPC in-house is no longer the best option. Step #3: You re Not Meeting Your Marketing Goals and You re Out of Ideas Even if you have both a rudimentary knowledge of PPC, and some time to work on your campaigns every week, you might have run into a common problem with pay-per-click marketing: not knowing what to do next. It s one thing to be able to set up and maintain a working PPC campaign; it s another to know what it takes to really move the needle. Going beyond the basics requires constant analysis, optimization and expansion. Do you know how to address the problem and get back in the black as quickly as possible when issues like these arise?

5 Are you paying out the nose every time someone clicks your ad? Is it worth the amount you have to spend to acquire a new customer? Are you laying out more in advertising costs than you re getting back? Cost per click (CPC) is too high Are you paying out the nose every time someone clicks your ad? Cost per conversion is too high Is it worth the amount you have to spend to acquire a new customer? ROI is too low Are you laying out more in advertising costs than you re getting back? Before you even get to these questions, of course, you ll have to figure out which metrics to pay attention to in the first place what exactly are your goals as a business? And in order for AdWords to help get you there, should you be optimizing for clicks? Or conversions? Are your click-through rates better or worse than average? Are your Quality Scores where they need to be? Can you increase ROI by shaving down wasteful spending? What about impression share? Do you have enough keywords? There are so many moving parts in any pay-per-click account, and each of these parts can seem like a looming question. And AdWords doesn t exactly spell out your workflow for you. Outsourcing to a PPC agency can bring much-needed clarity to your paid search efforts. Because the reps at a PPC agency work with AdWords day in and day out, they have proven strategies and systems in place to get from Point A to Point B. They ve gotten past the guesswork stage, and they know when to stick to best practices and when to try something new. To review, if you feel short on knowledge or experience, short on time, or frustrated and confused about what to do next to improve your campaigns, it might be time to outsource PPC. What Are the Next Steps? Do the above signs apply to your business? If so, what s the next step? If you ve decided that an agency could improve the results you re getting from PPC, we recommend reading our free guide, Choosing a PPC Agency: How to Determine the Right Pay-Per-Click Marketing Agency for You. This guide will tell you: How a PPC agency can help you meet your goals What to look for in a PPC agency Questions to ask a potential PPC agency before taking the plunge Download this free guide to get started.

6 About WordStream WordStream Inc. is a provider of software and services that help search marketers maximize the performance of their PPC and SEO campaigns, driving traffic, leads, and sales for lower costs. The company s easy-to-use PPC management software facilitates more effective paid search campaigns by increasing relevance and Quality Scores in Google AdWords, automating proven best practices, and delivering expert-level results in a fraction of the time. WordStream also offers a best-in-class Keyword Research Suite for finding and organizing targeted, profitable keywords for use in paid and organic search initiatives. In addition, WordStream provides full-service PPC management and other value-added services to help advertisers who are new to AdWords or strapped for time get stellar results from pay-per-click marketing. Learn more at