Paying Someone to Optimise Adwords ... worth it?

[max99]

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Im considering paying someone to optimise my campaigns on google adwords.

I want to reduce my CPC and get a better CTR.

I currently spend between £100-200 a day on adwords and dont want to be paying more than i need to.


I just wandered if anyone has used the people who charge to optimise your account, and if they were any good.

Anyone got any recommendations of people to use ?

Anyone had it done and saved loads ? etc


Any help will be appreciated

[DavidCartlidge]

I have done it for clients before - but - why not just do it yourself?

Very simply (apologies if you know and do this already..) set up targetted landing page for each advert. Set up 2 adverts and track which one generates most ROI (not CTR) - discard the second one and add a new advert. Which ones performs the best? Discard the second one and add a new advert. Repeat.

Ok, so you need some structure to your adverts, rather than randomly creating variations, but essentially do the above.

When you think you have the best performing advert start the process all over, this time rather than having 2 versions of your advert, have two versions of your landing page. Repeat until you have the best landing page / advert combination

[tbp]

I want to reduce my CPC and get a better CTR.

Be careful with this one, increasing the CTR doesn't always mean sales and you could actually end up losing money!

When I first started with adwords, I took googles advice and went for the best CTR, and got some really good rates, such as 20% - 30%.

However, once I started tracking which ad was performing best, it was actually one with a much lower CTR, and although the CPC was higher than the other one, the ROI was much better!

If you have a high CTR, you can actually get worse results! Yes the CPC goes down, but the number of clicks increases, so the bill can increase by a lot!

Having an ad with a lower CTR can convert much better! This is usually because the ad is so specific it only interests a few people, but the ones that do click through tend to buy, as you are taking them to exactly what they are looking for! The CPC will be a bit higher, but you`ll make more profit.

Ads with a high CTR are usually worse, because it usually means they attract a lot of browsers. Lots of people click the ad to have a look, but they aren't really interested in buying.

Obviously, the idea is to get an ad with a high CTR and high conversions, but this can be really difficult and requires a lot of practice, tweaking and monitoring.

[Shane]

all valid points, a high ctr isn't the be all and end all, but it's a good starting place from which to optimise further.

two main bits of advice I'd give are

1) DO NOT let google do it for you, some of the work from them is ok, some is dire (ie every keyword broad matched at 50p with no negatives !!) so whilst I have the utmost respect for some google adwords staff, there are some others who frankly have no clue what they are talking about.

2) a PPC/google adwords specialist who works directly for clients will have spent a good while learning what works and what doesn't, he/she will have spent or had control of thousands of pounds if not tens of thousands on campaigns that DIDN'T WORK as well as probably hundreds of thousands if not millions on those that did work so they can take one look at an adgroup or campaign and spot potential improvement points in a few seconds.

best thing to work out if it's worth it is to think if they can improve your account by say 10% on spend by optimising how much would it save or earn you extra per week, month or year at your current spend and how many times would it cover what a specialist would want to charge you to optimise it ?

If there's nothing they can do for you then they shouldn't charge you for taking a look if they are a reputable outfit, after all it isn't even an hours job to scan the average account and see if there potential optimisation oppotuinities in there and if there are then they'll say what they can do and how much it will cost to do it.

but having said that, nothing better than learning it yourself the hard way so I'd get tweaking it yourself, read as many ppc blogs, ebooks, etc. as you can, test and trial your own theories etc. and you'll have a valuable skill in what is getting to be an environment where specialist knowledge is required to play successfully.

[tbp]

DO NOT let google do it for you, some of the work from them is ok, some is dire

I agree with this totally!

Due to the amount of our adword spend, we got a dedicated google account manager, and they insisted that their adwords optimization experts could help us, despite me saying I was quite happy as things were. My old boss insisted that we let them have a go, and in short they totally ruined the success of the campaign! Results were cut by half!

It was odd, as their ad's had a number of mistakes often made by beginners. As soon as I saw it I knew it wasn't going to work, but gave it a weeks trial, and it performed really badly. Switched back to my own original campaigns, and got an instant and large improvement in results.

Did feel a bit embarassed though when they phoned up to ask how their campaign went, and had to nicely tell them that it was absolutely terrible, and I had to ditch it all!

[Azam.net]

Great tips.

Max, I would recommend you use Shane. Not only is the guy a PPC Maradona, but he is in the same city as you. So you can always go knock on his door if there's a problem and sort it out Yorkshireman to Yorkshireman

[moredial]

One of the tricks with getting your cost down is to improve the relevance of your landing page.

I know that PPC campaigns are usually seen as an alternative to doing SEO on the site but this is one case were using a specially created and highly relevant landing page will bring down the CPC rate.

Use the Google reports and work on the landing pages until you start seeing a good Quality Score - the better the score, the lower your CPC. If you have a low score, cut the campaign until you have had a chance to increase the page's relevance.