Hello everyone. I have been using Adwords for the past 2 years managing my own Adwords campaigns. More recently, I have been managing the Adwords campaign on behalf of a few clients. My interest now is to turn this into a proper business, setting up and managing Adwords campaigns for small to medium businesses. I was wondering if anyone has any experience in managing Adwords on behalf of clients or running their own Adwords business? I would very much like to hear about your thoughts/tips/advice on this! How to get started, resources online, problems you've encountered etc. Thank you in advance DP! anyone? or anyone with experience using my client centre?
Get yourself on MCC a.s.a.p. Secondly, maybe look to become Google Certified/Accredited so it gives customers some piece of mind?
I have ran my own campaigns at Adwords for a few years and marketed at the smaller ppcs before that. I have found a couple of clients over the years and was able to get work brokered out to me in the past. When I tried to start my own campaign management business my main problem was trying to compete with some of the well branded companies. You have the high end guys who are really well known and you have another company that charges very reasonable rates and they guarantee a 48 hour turn around. they used to anyway. If you can get around this go for it! I would agree with Louis and become Adwords Qualified.
I agree with louis, get a MCC account and take the exam. You may also want to try get some good testimonials from current and previous clients
First of all I would like to say that it is very profitable. Second of all, with most profitable business, the competition is FIERCE. Try experimenting with different pricing models. Performance based works VERY well for us and removes a lot of the initial risk from our clients end. Finally, read "web analytics, an hour a day" by Avinash Kaushik.
thanks for the input guys! i'm thinking about approaching some small-medium businesses with websites but no PPC campaigns. cianuro, could you please elaborate on the "performance based" pricing model? thank you! what are your thoughts on charging an initial set up fee, and then a small monthly management fee?
btw, Avinash Kaushik's book is highly recommended over at SEOmoz.org, so I guess I'll have to go and buy it.
Believe me, small companies are a VERY tough sell. The AdWords pro centre has some presentations you can use to pitch to them though. RE: pricing, basically, most of our biggest clients we took on had established adwords accounts already. We looked at their current ROI from PPC and set out a contract that we would get say 10% of their ad spend if we increase their ROI by 100% or 20% if we increase it by 20%. There are usually multiple tiers, but you get the idea. In most cases, our fee is MORE than covered by the $ value profit increase which makes it practically risk free for the client. In some cases, when dealing with BIG companies, a set fee is more appropriate. Our biggest client is the equivalent to a US fortune 500 company here in Europe. Even thinking of asking them to work on a performance model is crazy as they are well stuck in set budgets and 20th century bureaucracy. Finally, about Avinash's book, its a VERY tough read but will improve your analytics knowledge a thousand fold. Hope that helped.