I seem to be spending huge sums of money each year on Adwords. I make a profit at the end of the year from them, which is fine but just cannot help thinking I could tune the campaigns better. There seems to be loads of people who can 'help me' but at a cost of course.....I dont have a problem with that, but how do I know if they are good at what they do and not just taking me for a ride ?
Optimizing your campaign, testing testing testing new things out constantly, finding long tail keywords, and writing better ads that have get a higher CTR and better score from Google are all great ways to reduce your spending cost and maximize profit. I agree with the whole PPC coaching thing. I do believe that alot of those people are amazing at PPC, and I am a firm believer that you should know how to do PPC before handing over the campaign to someone else to manage for you. After being in this industry for a while, you then begin to build friendships via networking and these friendships produce trust. With this trust you're recommended people who do have the skills to get the job done or dont have the skills (which then you'll have to let that person go). What you need to do is to try and get someone who can do PPC via CPA (a percentage of each sale or overall sales for the week/month/etc) and then create a 3rd party tracking system both parties wouldn't be able to manipulate and go from there. If he or she knows what they're doing your sales will go up and your expenses will lower. Not to mention, since you're on a CPA plan with them this makes them work efficiently because if you make money they make money. get it?
4little1s, I know exactly how you feel, especially if you are paying dollars per click. D: The best thing to do is find someone who has proof that they can lower your cost(which will be hard in this case) or find someone who has reviews and recommendations. Lots of Itrader +'s works well too. Personally, I wasn't able to do much about this. I'm just happy with the little profit I make off it.
Ask questions. You've been doing it for a while so you should be familiar with the system and that's an advantage to you in separating the chaff. My number one question is "explain how Adwords works, how QS fits into the equation". General questions like "can you bring down my costs" will get mostly answers of "of course I can". You need to hear them say they understand QS, that they split test. But even if they are good, they may not help much. Maybe you are doing almost everything right and bringing down your costs significantly will be very hard even for the best of them. Download my Adwords FAQ for potential questions to ask and answers you want to hear. Or if you still want to do it yourself, educate yourself more with books (check my link below) and/or join sites like PPC Coach and PPC Classroom. Both methods - outsourcing or doing it yourself - have upsides and downsides.
What is the best way to create a good campaigns which catch the visitors? If i have a website which post free local ads so what is the best campaigns i can create for it?