I'm a personal injury attorney, a semi-competitive field for adwords, probably 25 per click for first listing. i'm paying a guy to run my adwords campaign 500, is this in line with most SEM?
Depends on how much time he puts in and how good he is. If he's creating a custom site, multiple landing pages, writing all the ad copy, custom analytics and all that it can be a decent amount. You'll really find out how good of a job he's doing as you watch your cost per click drop while the lead volume increases. I mean that would be way, way too low for me, but it depends on performance.
I agree with 'DanAbbamont'. I'd like to add that roughly speaking it also depends on your Advertising budget. If you want to spend USD 500 on advertising per month, you wont want to pay someone more than that I guess.
One other possibility is some sort of commission-based structure rather than a flat fee. Identify your goal metric (usually gross margin, or something similar) and base your payment on that. That way, your goals will be aligned with that of the person you have hired and you can be assured that you're getting what you're paying for.
I think a fair price is 25% of the total cost for the customer. The customer gets 1000$ on Google and company gets 250$
It depends on what type of service your provider is offering. If he's just managing the PPC campaign day to day, then I would not recommend paying him more than 15% of the media budget. On the other hand if he's constantly analyzing the campaign, split-testing ads and landing pages, scrutinizing over leads and cost-per-acquisitions and providing you with detailed weekly reports then I would say 25% would be very reasonable.
Thanks for the replies, but 25% of the amount i spend? My campaign is about $5,000.00 per month. At 25%, that would be $1,250.00, of which i could spend on more ad words, less efficient, but can a SEM make me 25% more efficient than the free google reps?
Not all managers charge a percentage of spend but it seems that most do. I don't depending instead on size and complexity of a campaign, regardless of spend. A campaign like yours would surely be much less than $1250 a month. I've seen a few campaigns created by Google reps. None impressed me. The last one I saw, I agreed with the keyword selection (although the end client didn't) but they were all broad matches and the ads were not that great. He didn't even name his groups and misspelled the campaign's name. So to answer your second question, just because it's a Google rep, doesn't mean they will do a good job. A really good SEM person that does this for a living will more than likely do a lot better.
25% of the spend sounds crazy high. I think the industry average is more like 10% to 15%. It is easier if you already have a campaign running before you hire them, then you can see if they are adding any benefit. They should at a minimum be testing multiple ads, landing pages and keywords to optimize your campaign. $500 may be too much of they just set it and forget it, or or too little if they are spending a ton of time trying to optimize the campaign.
One thing is for certain, the fact that Adwords results - either good or bad, are so quick means that you will be able to tell if they are worth the spent 500 fairly quickly.