Should You Run Your Own Google Adwords Campaigns?
Should You Run Your Own Google Adwords Campaigns?
Pay-Per-Click advertising (PPC) such as Google Adwords and Microsoft Bing, the 2 main platforms, can do wonders for a business and draw a lot of clients to its website fast.
If your company’s marketing budget is limited, the temptation will be great to do as much as you can yourself, including your PPC campaigns. After all, it takes only a few minutes to set up an account and choose a few keywords. Why would you need someone to do that? What could possibly go wrong? Well, a lot actually, and there are many tales of DIY campaigns that burnt a lot of money with no sales in return:
Choosing the right keywords is crucial, but it isn’t as easy as it seems. Big search numbers look attractive, but other key indicators to consider are the competition index and whether the keyword is specific enough. Too generic, and you may attract visitors who are actually looking for something different and leave as soon as they reach your website – but you will still have to pay!
A PPC professional will also know where to look for these slightly less competitive terms that will cost you less per click but will bring visitors ready to buy, increasing your conversion rate.
PPC managers do this job every day, all year long. They collect data for each campaign, analyse it, fine-tune strategies constantly. Not only will your company get an expert who can manage your campaign on a daily basis, but it will also benefit from years of data you don’t have access to yourself.
A PPC campaign is an incredibly flexible and reactive form of advertising, but because it is almost instantaneous, it also means that it can cost you a fortune very quickly. It is very easy to set too high a budget limit, or too low, and even with the right amount, maximum spends can only be set for a whole campaign, not individual keywords, so if you choose the wrong mix, you could end up having all your budget wasted on a keyword that didn’t do much for you, while the ads for more relevant keywords, which could bring real business in, don’t get displayed because you have run out of money.
PPC advertising can, and should be, focused using negative keywords. If you sell expensive designer kitchens for example, you would want to exclude people looking for cheap kitchens. This is an obvious example, but most cases are more complex and not using negative keywords appropriately will result in many useless clicks.
Don’t be fooled by its apparent simplicity: Pay-Per-Click is actually an incredibly subtle and tricky beast to tame. It takes time, to learn it, adapt with it as it changes, and stay on top of it to make it work for you. Outsourcing its management to someone whose time is dedicated to studying it is one of the best business decisions you will ever make, as PPC advertising can bring monumental traffic and sales increases at a minimal cost.