What is AdWords?
AdWords is Google’s advertising platform that lets businesses reach new customers by providing users with your information when they search for related terms. This means that your ad is displayed to people who are already looking for similar products or services to what you offer, giving you the power to target your customers and the websites that your ads appear on. The entire process is very customizable in terms of budgeting and impact, and in the right hands can be a very powerful tool in your marketing arsenal.
Reasons to Hire an AdWords Consultant
Many companies tend to think that SEO and PPC management is relatively simple and can be done in-house with a couple of employees from marketing and IT providing the knowledge base required for a successful AdWords campaign. However, if you’re new to the PPC market, it will probably cost less to hire an expert than to start and manage your own AdWords account. The reasons for this can include:
- Tracking is a lot more complicated than it looks. Not only does a good PPC program need to track sales, it also needs to track the origin of these sales to evaluate the success of the PPE campaign. Analysis can discover which keywords and placements are generating the most conversions and revenue, and good analysis requires at least basic HTML skills, which most marketers don’t have.
- Campaign settings can be confusing, even for seasoned marketers. An experienced AdWords consultant should be able to decide if the campaign is targeted on larger or smaller scale, and if different groups need to be set up for each of these regions. Without a clear understanding of the benefits of the various AdWords settings, it’s easy to overspend to get traffic that other companies pay pennies on the dollar for.
- Click fraud can be a potential issue that is only detectable to a AdWords consultant, as it requires constant monitoring of stats and log files for suspicious activity and then reporting the activity to the search engine and requesting a refund. A novice user won’t have the gut instinct or technical expertise to address this problem correctly.
- Keeping up with all the trends and changes can be difficult if it’s not your dedicated job. All good marketers have to keep up with trends, and it can be difficult for somebody who is not a dedicated AdWords consultant to juggle their attention between traditional and online marketing. An outsourced consultant will keep abreast of all latest developments so that you don’t have to.
- Ultimately, training up somebody on AdWords in-house is a time-consuming and expensive process that may not produce guaranteed results. Hiring a AdWords consultant reduces the risk of poor results and give your other marketers time to do their job correctly without having to learn a completely new system of marketing, in addition to learning various IT skills such as HTML.
Conclusion
It is possible to find an in-house marketer that is willing to learn all the aspects of online marketing, but this will require plenty of training and will most likely still need phone calls to experts and a poor initial campaign that doesn’t generate enough revenue. If you are willing to risk a very poor ROI for the opportunity to have your own AdWords consultant, then you can do so. However, hiring a reputable PPC management firm can save you from a lot of the learning curve, and provide you with the benefits of a good AdWords campaign immediately, meaning you can reap the rewards much sooner than if you’d gone with the in-house route.
