Hi all, I have a short question concerning our Adwords campaign with a 80K $ monthly budget. Due to a dissapointing experience with a Global Media agency I am contemplation dealing directly with a Google account manager instead and cut the service fee etc. For me personally it sounds better to deal with Google directly, but I would like to hear some other experiences. What do you prefer and why? Is there an advantage using a specialized agency over delaing with Google directly? Thanks! Hannes
Better you did with Google yourself,You will be able to maximize your expenditures that way,But If you feel the extra buck mean nothing to you then go ahead and give managers. I was able to save hundred of dollars sticky it myself.
It sounds like you may not have hired the right person or company. Note that hiring someone from Google does not guarantee better results. I've had a few clients in the past where Google had set up their campaigns and the results were not good. Poor choice of keywords, poor ads, poor campaign organization. It's only two examples but you'd think that Google would train these people, which doesn't look like it's the case. So in my opinion, there may not be an advantage and you could end up with a great manager as much as with a poor one. If you spend $80k a month on Adwords, I hope they'll assign you the best they have. Remember that Google is there to make money. These people probably don't get paid much more than minimum wage and probably have to do this job as fast as possible. No a good combination for something that requires much training and experience. Also, just because a company is an advertising agency, it doesn't mean they know about PPC which is not quite the same thing. My advice: hire someone who does only PPC or at least is very familiar with it. And don't listen to an SEO person saying "they're similar, I can do this". They are not. You want PPC knowledge and experience. SEO is a bonus but rarely is it the other way around.
Thank you for your reply. I do have experience with Adwords and I have set up a few accounts. I think I can make a good setup as I am fimiliar with the business and its industry as well. After setting it up I don't that it needs that much maintanance that it justifies a 10% service fee for the media company. I believe that with the help of Google optimizers and an hour a day to monitor the results yourself should be sufficient. My main doubt if there is any e.g. bid management software or other advantages that these companies have over doing it in-house in the way i described?. Anybody?
There's more to managing a campaign than manage the bids. I've had many clients saying they were not happy with their previous manager. Like you, they were apprehensive about hiring me. Seems a lot simply do nothing and let some software change bids according to some rule. That is totally the wrong approach. You need someone to create and test ads and get that CTR up. If you think you can do that, then do it yourself. Or hire someone like me (wink) to analyze your account and give you some new ad ideas. Won't cost as much and could save you long term with an improved campaign. To justify a 10% of spend fee, the company has to save you at least that much. That's relatively easy to do without doing much. You need a real manager to do some real work doing keyword research, properly organize your campaign and creating ads, not a computer program which can't do any of those well.