As a Google Partner agency, we work closely with many types of businesses ranging from established large brands to small start up local businesses.
We’re very proud of the fact we’re completely transparent with our clients:
- We don’t make promises we can’t keep.
- Our fee’s are based on giving us enough time every monthly to improve your PPC campaigns.
- We provide realistic expectations – PPC advertising takes time.
- We help clients set up conversion tracking so we can optimise around making you more sales or providing more enquiries – we don’t just aim for “clicks” as customers are what pay the bills. (What’s the point of lots of traffic that doesn’t buy?)
- We won’t give you a hard sell and you’ll always speak to the person managing your account.
Unfortunately, according to many of our customers, the same can’t be said for other agencies.
We regularly help small firms with their AdWords campaigns who previously saw little progress from their previous agency.
Often tempted by low PPC Management prices, slick salesmen, on site visits and promises of overnight success, many of the companies we’ve spoken too found that once contracts are signed, they never see a return on the investment they’ve made.
3 key things to watch out for:
1. It’s cheap – You simply won’t get the same service for £50 as you would for £100 (or more).
What might seem cheap in the first place may result in you wasting lots of money later on as cheap firms can’t devote the time they need to make your account profitable because they’re not charging you enough.
AdWords management agencies are not all created equal. Whilst there are some great agencies with low prices out there, be very careful.
You may be tempted by low costs but if the agency makes savings by not working on your account weekly or not monitoring and optimising around conversions then you could be throwing your money in the bin.
A £50 monthly fee may sound cheap, but if it brings no results and wastes £100’s or even £1000’s of ad budget then it’s INCREDIBLY expensive.
Example: What’s more cost effective?
Example 1: PPC Management for £50 managing your budget of £500 per month. No conversion tracking and optimised around clicks to maximise traffic resulting in you not knowing what keywords make the phone ring and no prospect of increasing your enquiries. Work on your account once per month with a basic report showing number of clicks and cost per click.
Example 2: PPC Management for £100 managing your budget of £500 per month, conversion tracking installed, keywords optimised around which make the phone ring and/or result in sales resulting in conversion increasing. Regular, weekly work on the account with monthly reports showing ad spend vs returns.
Example 1 is INCREDIBLY common. We hear the horror stories daily – it’s a flawed model design to give clients an incredibly basic service for the minimum possible monthly fee.
Example 2 is how it should be done. It’s based around growing your business with regular work on your account all focused on maximising conversions (Sales and/or enquiries). It takes longer, costs a bit more generally, but results in more returns for you (Which makes it much cheaper in the long run as you’re making more money).
Think about it, you want the very best people managing your advertising to give you the greatest possible returns. Furthermore, you want the RIGHT amount of time spent on advertising your account to keep it improving.
This comes at a price and whilst low fees seem attractive on the face of it, in practice, they’re making savings somewhere and that’s potentially going to hurt you.
You might need to spend more on a good agency, but the benefits they’ll give you will more than cover this cost.
2. You don’t get access to your AdWords account and you pay the agency for both ad spend and management fee.
It might sound convenient to pay just one company but there are huge risks involved: How much of your payment goes to your ads and how much goes to the agency?
If you can’t access your AdWords account, you don’t know what’s happening or where your costs are going.
In other words, you could be getting ripped off and you’d have no idea.
Google provides all agencies with what’s called a “My Client Centre” (MCC). This allows agencies to connect to YOUR AdWords account whilst giving you full control of who has access. If Google intended for agencies not to give you access then they wouldn’t have created the MCC.
This is a sure sign, your agency is either hiding something or not being entirely transparent.
3. What’s conversion tracking?
AdWords allows us to track every sale, enquiry and telephone call made from visitors finding you via your ads. This means we know which keywords and adverts make you money and which don’t. This information helps us optimise the advertising campaign to make you MORE money and cut down on wasted spend.
It requires a bit of a set up (it’s not that complicated) but if your agency is only charging you £75 for example they may be making savings elsewhere by not optimising around traffic that actually converts.
